BY JENNIFER RUTH
If you haven’t seen it, you might want to read Colleen Flaherty’s excellent piece “Recentering the Bright Sheng Debate” in Inside Higher Ed today. Last Friday, I wrote about the vast libertarian network researched in the new book Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War. This funding, much of which comes from the Koch foundations but from other sources as well, has succeeded in packaging various tensions and incidents on campuses, usually around racial and gender issues, as a “war on free speech.” Flaherty takes a look at the efforts of University of Michigan faculty to reframe the recent incident involving Professor Bright Sheng and his screening in class of Lawrence Olivier’s Othello without providing context. The article cites an open letter these faculty wrote. With permission from a signatory of the letter, I am reprinting their letter here (shorn of its footnotes, for simplicity’s sake; if you want the footnotes, follow the link in the IHE article). I find this open letter to be a wonderful model for how we should be thinking about, and working through, incidents that too often get simplified in both the mainstream and, sadly, also in the higher ed press.
To: Dean David Gier, Provost Susan Collins, President Mark Schlissel, Vice Provost Rob Sellers
Subject: anti-racist practice is fundamental to pedagogical excellence & consistent with academic free speech
Date: 2021-11-04
We are writing to express concern over Professor Bright Sheng’s screening of the 1965 film Othello and subsequent fallout. The present situation reflects a failure of university and departmental leadership to develop a protocol for handling racist representations in the classroom and to ensure that faculty have adequate resources and training to develop appropriate pedagogy in relation to race and racist content. Similarly, it is the responsibility of faculty to engage with such resources and rigorously incorporate them into their teaching.
None of the news reports claim that students objected to the screening of a film featuring a lead actor in blackface, nor have the students voiced such an objection in the Michigan Daily or the recent Medium post. As students are not objecting to the content of Professor Sheng’s lecture, this is not a free speech issue. What the students have objected to is the manner in which the content was presented—lacking any context for the history and harmful nature of blackface. Although the university does not regulate faculty speech in the classroom, it does have a responsibility to evaluate and improve pedagogy.
In our experiences, when students ask for content warnings or pedagogical care in classrooms, they do not expect a lack of challenging material. Rather, they are asking that we respect the experiences of our students, many of whom encounter racism and sexual violence in their daily lives. More broadly, presenting racist content without context does more than create a hostile learning environment. It normalizes racism, rendering it invisible and closing the door on critical engagement. By contrast, giving students tools to engage racist content can be empowering, and many faculty have taught on these issues for years without incident.
In mistakenly framing safe spaces as infringing on free speech, media coverage characterized students’ requests as anti-intellectual. On the contrary, the ability to contextualize racism is a prerequisite for sound pedagogy and practice in all disciplines. The role of racism in theater and opera is the subject of a rich body of academic literature; the issue has also received coverage in the press as opera and classical music continue to grapple with racist practices, including the use of blackface and yellowface. These moves address the historically entrenched whiteness of opera and classical music, where performers of color have been excluded from training and casting. Similar issues exist in all disciplines. In asking us to engage with scholarship on race and racism, we believe that Michigan students are not advocating censorship. Rather, they demand the responsible, up-to-date instruction they deserve from a premier public university.
Faculty at the University of Michigan also deserve the resources to develop inclusive pedagogy. Because of the systemic nature of racism in higher education, many of us did not receive that education ourselves. We support student advocacy and engagement, but whereas some students called for individual accountability, we see this as an institutional failure with responsibility shared by both leadership and faculty at large. An act can be racist without intent, and personal bias is not the issue here.
Faculty require a clear protocol that allows us to de-escalate situations and work toward mutual understanding. To this end, we make the following requests, which are consistent with and echo many of the recommendations from Section 8 of the 2021 report from LS&A’s Anti-Racism Task Force. These speak to the restorative approach advocated by the Faculty Senate, but go further toward transformational justice.
- Faculty and students need to be aware of resources before an incident occurs in the classroom. What resources are available through the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion? Who can faculty members contact so that they can receive feedback on an apology or request a moderator to help facilitate discussion in the class?
- Department chairs need clear protocols in the event that a student reports a racist incident. Given the imbalance of power between faculty and students, it is not appropriate to request that students work the issue out directly and solely with the same person who grades their assignments and from whom the students may seek necessary letters of recommendation.
- Effective anti-racism training must be better integrated into the university’s regular service and professional development offerings and expectations. It is not adequate to offer these as opt-in activities on top of regular service, which puts an additional burden on faculty and fails to reach those most in need of the training. The university can begin by requiring all incoming faculty to complete a session in anti-racist pedagogy as part of the Teaching Academy. Regular training should also be held throughout a faculty member’s tenure at the university and must be tailored by departments so that faculty develop an awareness of how systemic racism has affected and continues to propagate within their disciplines.
There will always be instances of genuine bias and deliberate racism. This is something faculty, students, and staff face, and it should be dealt with administratively. But racism can also result from a lack of knowledge, an ignorance that has often been actively cultivated by educational institutions themselves. This is the knowledge that students seek, and we as faculty need the university’s support to rise to the challenge. All faculty should be equipped to recognize racist content and should be aware that presenting it without warning, context, and purpose represents irresponsible pedagogy.
Signed,
Jessie DeGrado, Assistant Professor, Department of Middle East Studies, LSA
Sean D. Johnson, Assistant Professor, Department of Astronomy, LSA
Anonymous, Assistant Professor, Humanities Department, LSA
Tiffany Ng, Associate Professor of Music, School of Music, Theatre & Dance
Sally Oey, Professor, Department of Astronomy, LSA
Rafe Neis, Associate Professor, Department of History and Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, LSA
Ian Shin, Assistant Professor, Department of History and Department of American Culture, LSA
SaraEllen Strongman, Assistant Professor, Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, LSA
Maegan Fairchild, Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, LSA
Camille Avestruz, Assistant Professor, Department of Physics, LSA
Lia Corrales, Assistant Professor, Department of Astronomy, LSA
Naomi André, Professor, Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and the Residential College, LSA
Signed by 244 U. Michigan community members and counting. Including over 125 faculty, 47 lecturers, and 44 students
Jennifer Ruth is a professor of film studies at Portland State University. She is the author of three books, the most recent being It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022), co-authored with Michael Bérubé.
I agree with the thrust and spirit of this letter, but I am disappointed that it fails to address a critical issue. The authors write, “Although the university does not regulate faculty speech in the classroom, it does have a responsibility to evaluate and improve pedagogy.” Pedagogy, of course, just about always involves faculty speech in class, which may well need to be evaluated and improved, if not “regulated,” so the distinction made here is not as clear as the authors seem to think. That said, however, the key point absent from this letter is that in response to this incident Michigan not only did nothing to “evaluate and improve” Sheng’s teaching, it moved quickly and unilaterally to punish him. Hence, it is unfortunate that the authors fail to take a position on the key academic freedom (not “free speech”) issue in the case: the fact that, as another petition (linked to in the IHE article and signed by over 700 members of the university community) correctly noted, Sheng was “removed from his class without due process.” In short, the issue is neither “free speech” nor “pedagogy” but the appropriate application of discipline. To be sure, failures in pedagogy may properly be subject to discipline; I can think of more than a few examples. But pedagogy, while not simply “free speech,” is (or should be) protected by principles of academic freedom. If, as the authors write, this was not a matter of “individual accountability” but “an institutional failure with responsibility shared by both leadership and faculty at large,” then what justifies the disciplinary action — removal from teaching — summarily taken, with no due process, against Sheng individually? I agree that Sheng’s action was an example of poor pedagogy and, at best, insensitivity. And I agree that this experience should provide an opportunity to enact the sorts of improvements recommended in this statement. But such improvements will have little impact if the university remains free to unilaterally impose disciplinary measures on instructors for alleged pedagogical failures without providing those instructors due process protections and judgment by qualified peers.
Hank, My understanding (from the same press coverage you’re reading, I assume) is that Professor Sheng volunteered to remove himself from the class. We do not know what his conversation with the dean looked like, of course, but it seems plausible to me that it struck Professor Sheng that repairing the damage that had been done wasn’t going to happen quickly or easily and that if the students were going to be allowed to cover the course material within the term, this was more likely to happen by substituting a different instructor. If Professor Sheng had not shared in this plan and refused to be removed and/or insisted that his removal was an act of discipline, then due process would need to have happened in the form of review by a faculty panel. Given that he may have felt that the smoothest way to repair for all involved would be to remove himself and do some reflecting, as his letters suggested he wanted to do, I don’t think we can assume that any injustice or violation of academic freedom has occurred here. Perhaps, though, I am unaware of something you know about?
The IHE article this morning says that Sheng “agreed to take a break from teaching.” The article notes also that Sheng has “said little” in public, neither confirming this claim nor doing anything to indicate that the break was his idea. Hence, we have no idea about what is plausible to believe Sheng was thinking absent his own statement of such. (We do have his apology letter, which, no matter what other problems it may have, made no mention of agreeing to step away from teaching.)
It is therefore not surprising that it is widely thought on the Michigan campus that this agreement came under pressure, how intense and of what nature we cannot say. Indeed, the over 700 faculty members and students who signed the other letter to which I referred in my comment certainly clearly believed that his removal was, in their words, a “sanction.” Certainly “sanctions” were openly demanded by at least some of Sheng’s highly vocal critics. I have seen enough cases where faculty members are pressured to withdraw “voluntarily” to be at minimum highly skeptical of official claims that this is the case here. Moreover, there was a visible public campaign against Sheng, which the university did nothing to counter.
In effect, Sheng’s removal from teaching was a suspension, which the AAUP has repeatedly noted is “the severest of sanctions, whether resulting from dismissal or from potentially temporary suspension” (https://www.aaup.org/report/use-and-abuse-faculty-suspensions). The AAUP’s Recommended Institutional Regulations state, a “faculty member will be suspended, or assigned to other duties in lieu of suspension, only if immediate harm to the faculty member or others is threatened by continuance.” The statement to which I linked earlier in this paragraph includes an extensive discussion of “immediate harm.” It concludes, “The concept of immediate harm is inextricably bound up with the gravity of the charges, and the grounds for suspension should therefore be as stringent as those for dismissal. A perceived emergency tends too often to set the stage for a suspension, not only of the faculty member, but also of academic due process itself.”
In practical terms, Michigan could easily have suspended Sheng from teaching for a brief period, say, a week, and in the meantime convened an appropriate faculty body to adjudicate any disciplinary charges. They did nothing of the sort. “Informal” discipline in which the university unilaterally announces that a faculty member has “agreed” to accept a sanction should not be acceptable.
If there is one thing I’ve learned from accompanying faculty members to DEI investigations for three years, it’s that we need to learn how to de-escalate situations if we want to do justice to both concerns around racial and gender equity and a commitment to academic freedom. A rigid determination that any decision by a faculty member to remove themselves from a classroom constitutes a grave violation of due process does not help. If I make a poor pedagogical decision that creates such turmoil that turning the class around in a timely way does not seem realistic, I would volunteer to be removed and I wouldn’t want people telling me that I had been disciplined if that’s not the understanding that I had with my administration.
I’m glad that the AAUP takes a strong stand on instructor removals from the classroom because I can certainly think of many situations in which it was done for bad reasons and without the participation of the instructor in the decision, but improving higher education’s accountability to racial justice can’t be put in opposition to either academic freedom or free speech over and over in every situation that arises. To do this is to play right into the hands of the “free speech crisis” which serves anti-regulation and libertarian interests not only in higher ed, but in relation to vaccinations, climate change, and a host of other issues.
I don’t disagree. But if Sheng did indeed volunteer to step away from the classroom, why have we not heard that directly from him? It’s definitely a possibility, of course, but I’ve learned to be suspicious. Also, as far as I know Sheng did not have the benefit of being accompanied at his meeting by someone like you. He does not have a union and I suspect it was too short notice (and probably too costly) to hire an attorney.
They say that when Black lives matter, all lives matter. I suppose another way of reading this open letter is to say that when Black scholarship matters, all scholars matter.
In other words, I don’t read the sentence “[a]lthough the university does not regulate faculty speech in the classroom, it does have a responsibility to evaluate and improve pedagogy” as justification for what happened to Dr. Sheng after he showed Olivier’s Othello without the necessary context. It is instead to suggest practical steps that would prevent situations like this from happening in the first place. As the letter puts it, “[t]he present situation reflects a failure of university and departmental leadership to develop a protocol for handling racist representations in the classroom and to ensure that faculty have adequate resources and training to develop appropriate pedagogy in relation to race and racist content.” Basically, what happened is that Dr. Sheng was caught in the embarrassing position of being less informed on how to read Olivier’s performance of Othello than his students and things have blown out of proportion from there. There is a mountain of scholarship on the topic available to Dr. Sheng with a few keystrokes and the click of a mouse. It’s an institutional failure that he had not been encouraged to consult any of it to keep his pedagogy and his scholarship up to date. As you yourself have argued many times, academic freedom includes the obligation to remain competent in one’s area of study.
Since the letter explicitly calls for transformational justice informed by a restorative approach, it misses the point entirely to claim that the letter “fails to address the critical issue” of Sheng’s removal from the classroom. Indeed, countering that kind of overreaction is the whole point. In the context of community policing, for example, a primary objective of the restorative approach is to address issues that arise in the community without involving law enforcement, or only involving them as a last resort. That’s because things escalate very quickly once law enforcement arrives and all too often the person accused of violating community standards (often but not always the law) ends up hurt or dead. In this case, the person accused of violating community standards of scholarship and against whom the authorities acted much too quickly is Dr. Sheng himself. Following the suggestions in this letter would ensure that blunders like Dr. Sheng’s would be addressed by the community of scholars, not the administration, and then it would have a chance to become a valuable learning experience for all.
Thanks Mark and Jennifer, you’ve summed up our letter perfectly. Hank: Professor Sheng was not suspended or subject to any administrative sanction. Based on official statements from the University, he chose to step back and was not forced to. Lying on this point would leave the university significantly exposed in any resulting civil case. To my knowledge, Prof. Sheng is receiving full pay (with temporarily reduced teaching load), and will go back to teaching a normal load next semester. Having said that, no one apart from Prof. Sheng and the department chair (and possibly the Dean) know who first floated the idea of stepping back from teaching. Personally, if I had designed an entire course on Othello and missed the racial dimension–which is central to the play–only to have it pointed out by students, I would asked to have someone else take over the course. Sometimes we have to recognize when we accidentally end up teaching outside of our domain of competency and let someone else step in to fill the gap. But to be clear, I do not know whether this is what happened.
The letter you mentioned that was signed by 700 people made several errors of fact because it was written by a group of faculty from the Department of Mathematics and Business School who have no insider information on the case and little-to-no expertise teaching on topics that involve racism. Myself and the authors of the more recent letter also do not have such inside information, and so we did not presume to take a position on whether Professor Sheng should have stepped back from teaching. It is possible that this was his own decision, and if so, we want to respect that.
Instead, we made a few recommendations that the University could have taken to keep the situation from escalating so badly in the first place. You mentioned Prof. Sheng does not have a union and did not have access to a lawyer on the matter. This is true, and a shame (its about time UMich faculty re-evaluate a faculty union!). But in our view, Prof. Sheng should not have had to hire a lawyer in this situation at all. If the University had paired him with someone with expertise in apologies and de-escalation, the overwhelming majority of the negative fallout could have been avoided. Instead of acting pro-actively, UMich simply put out a statement that Prof. Sheng had stepped back and re-affirmed its commitment to DEI, effectively throwing both Prof. Sheng and the students under the bus. Prof. Sheng has been the subject of a great deal of negative publicity. The students have been subjected to significant right-wing harassment online. In both cases, these negative outcomes are because the university failed to provide faculty and students with the support and resources that they needed.
Sean, you just added insult to Prof. Sheng’s injury with this statement of yours: “Sometimes we have to recognize when we accidentally end up teaching outside of our domain of competency and let someone else step in to fill the gap.” Bright Sheng was not teaching outside of his domain of competency. He is a composer exploring how Shakespeare’s Othello was transformed into an opera libretto by Verdi. How, pray tell, is that outside his domain of competency?
The history of blackface and the role of race in the play are presumably outside Prof. Sheng’s expertise, yes? Prof. Sheng said as much in some of his statements. I believe Sean was referring to these types of expertise not issues related to transforming plays into operas. The disconnect here might be between those of us who recognize that you cannot put Othello at the center of a course without being prepared to thoughtfully address those topics even if your interest is primarily in techniques of adaptation and those of us who do not see this. I think the former group would argue that the latter group has not kept up with pedagogical norms and that they might want to defer to others on these topics until they have. I applaud Professor Sheng’s willingness to consider this and not react by joining the legions of people who want to twist every situation into one about free speech or academic freedom.
On your last point, can we tamp down on the either-or thinking? The situation involved legitimate questions of racism and its role in pedagogy (and no less an authority than Editor of the Oxford edition of Othello disagrees with your perspective: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/10/22/shen-o22.html). It also involved questions of due process for faculty accused of being unduly sensitive. I’d argue that “the legions of people who want to twist every situation into one about free speech or academic freedom” is a legion of zero. Rather, there are people concerned about racist pedagogy, people concerned about academic freedom, and people concerned about both. The only one twisting anything here is… you. Can we just stick to the facts?
Jennifer, I think you’ve hit the nail on its head regarding the point about field and sub-field expertise. Because of the way we collectively structure centers, departments, and schools, studies of race/racism (or sexism and others for that matter) in a field are often partially or fully separated from the field itself. Because of these structural barriers between sub-fields (often known as sub-field bias in the sciences or epistemic exclusion in the humanities — UM’s anti-racism report mentioned this issue at length), faculty working in a discipline may not have had much opportunity to learn from this important type of scholarship. And because of this, they may be unaware of a valuable set of skills and analytic frameworks. To be clear, I view this as a structural issue, not one of individual fault.
Fred, I think the letter from Prof. Neill’s that you linked actually reinforces this point. Because he is a faculty in a department of English, he was expected, in conducting research, to learn more about the broader cultural context of Othello and its various renditions over centuries. In turn, I am guessing he was not expected to pay as much attention to the theory behind the accompanying music (though he may have). Had Prof. Sheng and others at SMTD been more exposed to the scholarship on race and Opera, he–like Prof. Neill’s–may have chosen to contextualize his course on Othello with the same sort of preface found in Neill’s Oxford Edition. He would also be free to decide not to contextualize it in class. But then the decision would be intentional and come with an awareness that students may raise the issue, allowing Prof. Sheng to prepare for the possibility. This is why I view professional development on race and racism as necessary and consistent with academic freedoms.
Incidentally, Prof. Neill’s partial defense of Olivier’s performance is an excellent example of a place where researchers on the topic might disagree. His preface in the Oxford edition presents both his arguments and some with quite different perspectives. In my view, showcasing this type of critical engagement and debate is something students can learn from.
I have one remark regarding the introduction, namely,
“Last Friday, I wrote about the vast libertarian network researched in the new book Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War. This funding, much of which comes from the Koch foundations but from other sources as well, has succeeded in packaging various tensions and incidents on campuses, usually around racial and gender issues, as a “war on free speech.”
The take that people holding views that you find objectionable must have been paid by the devil, Trotsky, or, well, Koch Foundation, has a long and unwholesome history.
Hi Herbert,
I did not intend this as an insult but I can see how it can be read as one. Prof. Sheng and you have my apology for that. Prof. Sheng is one of the most accomplished composers–likely the most accomplished–that we have here at UMich. I do not see this as a personal or professional failure on his part at all. Rather, I see this as a failure of our educational institutions to equip us with necessary tools.
Sean:
Most of your note is reasonable, but parts are quite disappointing.
I’m one of the authors of the letter that you refer to as having “several errors of fact”. Can you list what they are? We’re genuinely curious to know, since factual errors help no one. Also, I’d think it would be obvious that “because it was written by a group of faculty from the Department of Mathematics and Business School who have no insider information on the case and little-to-no expertise teaching on topics that involve racism” is not only rather unprofessional — what *else* to faculty from those departments systematically fail to know that others do? Be specific — but presumes facts that you cannot possibly know.
For the record, several of us have been in close contact with people essentially at the center of this since it started, and others work closely with DEI. Instead of continuing to cast unfounded aspersions on blogs, instead of simply checking with one of us. My email is feinf@umich.edu, if you’re curious to carry on the conversation and help us understand what we, in your opinion, don’t.
It might surprise you that we don’t bite and are rather reasonable. But that would require actually making contact with us first, instead of casting us as, for want of a better term, adversaries.
Fred Feinberg
Hi Fred,
Thank you for the note and welcome to email you, I would be happy to take you up on that. And of course you are welcome to get in touch before I have a chance to mail. My address is seanjoh@umich.edu. I did try emailing the person who sent me (and nearly everyone else at UMich) your letter, who I now understand was not an author. But I received an email bounce back because the email address was somehow invalid. I only learned for sure who actually wrote your letter later when it received coverage in the Daily as first signers and authors are not necessarily the same. And by that point it had already been widely distributed of course. The errors of fact that I am referring to are a matter of public record, but I do not blame you or the other authors for them as this matter was poorly reported at the time of the your writing. Your letter states that Prof. Sheng was subject to sanction imposed by the university. The university disputes this in official statements (the university may be misleading I suppose, but this seems unlikely given the legal exposure). The other was suggesting that Olivier’s performance was considered normal at the time. While widely acclaimed, it was also controversial for bearing an unusual resemblance to the mannerisms of minstrel shows, even by the standards of the 1960s (the evidence of this is in contemporaneous reviews). I have nothing but esteem for Mathematics. Indeed, it was my major in undergrad and a strong mathematics background is largely responsible for my pursuit of astrophysics. In any case I was not trying to cast aspersions. Apologies that this is how I came off. My point is just that there are many at UMich who have experience teaching this type of content, and those of us in STEM should recognize their expertise and learn from them.
Prof. Sheng has expressed regret over not being aware of the history of race and racism in Othello in his apology. The only point that I am trying to make is that Universities could better prepare us to recognize and teach content involving race and racism.
Hi Sean,
I’ve got to applaud your response. Specifically, discussing the underlying issues and not taking offense. That’s a rare enough quality anywhere, but seems in especially short supply in this particular incident.
We did read through what the university said, and find part of it mildly disingenuous. Prof. Sheng was reported and investigated for what he said. He was removed from his class for two weeks until, by his own stated admission, he felt no choice but to step down. Those might not be long-term sanctions, but they are still highly disconcerting. He must have felt totally powerless and ruddeless. Any of us would.
Our entire motivation for writing the letter was to encourage the university not to place decisions like this in the lap of Dean Gier (who must be shocked and overwhelmed by how this all blew up), but to have specific procedures that enable everyone to be heard and guidelines protecting all parties. Students should not have to protest to teachers who grade them; but neither should professors stand in fear of Deans who, themselves quite reasonably fearing Twitter mobs, might deprive them of their literal livelihood (and I know that we continue to be paid; but any of us would be mortified at being publicly removed from a course because of accusations of racism, without anything resembling an actual process).
And thanks for the direct email. I’ve already followed up. Just about everyone I’ve encountered in this entire controversy has meant well, and it’s obvious you do, too.
Fred
Dear Sean,
I have a question. In your letter, as well as here, you suggest that it would be nice for the University to provide some tools and training. Who are the people that would provide those tools and training, what are their credentials and accomplishments, so that you would trust their judgement more than, say, you own?
Thank you.
Hi Alexander,
Apologies for the long delay in getting back to you, I missed this question when you made the post. As I understand, you are also one of the authors of the first open letter? I owe Fred a follow-up email and can add you and reply in more detail if you’d like. In short though, we can actually rely on our own hiring and tenure review process to do the evaluation in many cases. This is one of the things that I really enjoy about being at a large university like UMich.
Many of us in STEM (I am very guilty of this myself) often think of DEI work as something we do on the side and forget that research on raceism, sexism, etc represent entire fields of study with their own high standards of rigor (these standards are different from what we are used to in the sciences, but they are just as high). But since we hire excellent scholars doing research on race and racism and their work is evaluated as part of the tenure review process, we can often seek out people with relevant expertise here at UMich. In the specific case of race in opera, for example, we have Prof. Naomi André in LS&A (https://lsa.umich.edu/rc/people/faculty/nandre.html). Now we won’t always have the perfect expert to weigh in on every issue. And even if we did, placing this additional workload on these specific faculty would represent a DEI issue in-and-of itself. So in many ways what our letter is calling for is for the university to provide more connective glue so that non-experts (like myself) can learn from this work. And for departments with very different research focuses (like astronomy) to engage with it more.
The bones of this are already in place with centers like ADVANCE and NCID which often serve as a venue for approachable research presentation and also often translate research into workshops for other departments. This includes inviting outside speakers and even long-term visitors which can supplement our own local expertise. So in many ways we are calling for an expansion of scope and increase in support for this type of research and center.