Avrie Marsolek 00:00
It was definitely one of those moments where everything kind of aligned and it all made sense.
Carrie Welsh 00:05
This is Avrie.
Avrie Marsolek 00:06
I was in my apartment, in my bedroom, at my desk, and I remember getting to that rural section, and my eyes kind of opened wide, and I sat back, and I put my pen down, and I was like, That is me to a T.
Carrie Welsh 00:22
Avrie grew up a few hours north of Madison, Wisconsin, in a rural town. She came to Madison for college here at UW–Madison, and not to brag too much here, but UW–Madison has a solid academic reputation. It’s selective and sometimes described as a public ivy. So for Avrie, getting in was a big deal.
Avrie Marsolek 00:44
At first, when you’re accepted, everyone’s really excited for you, and they think it’s a really good opportunity.
Carrie Welsh 00:50
But once Avery left to attend UW–Madison, her return visits to her hometown, felt off.
Avrie Marsolek 00:57
If I would talk about this class I really liked I would get some eye rolls, or there would be some people who would drop out of conversations quick. It’s almost like they want you to just stay there and not come back, type thing. Or if it’s so great, then why do you come back?
Carrie Welsh 01:12
This was tough on Avrie, and made her feel tense about going home. Made her feel disconnected. Which was all the harder because she also felt lonely and out of place at school.
Avrie Marsolek 01:23
I felt separated from high school, but then when I got here, I also felt separated. I felt like I was in this third category that didn’t really match up.
Carrie Welsh 01:32
There’s one way to look at this and say it’s about geography, about adjusting between rural and urban environments. Or you could write it off as personal. Maybe Avrie’s friends from home felt jealous or excluded from her life away at college. But there’s actually something underneath both of those explanations that was why Avrie’s relationships were strained, why she felt adrift from her peers, both back home and at school in Madison. And that’s what hit Avery when she was doing the reading for her philosophy class, a reading about trust.
Carrie Welsh 02:08
This is Ethics and Education. I’m Carrie Welsh. On today’s show, why do we trust what we trust? and what does it cost our relationships when what we trust changes? This is a special crossover episode with the L&S Exchange podcast here at UW–Madison. So at the end of the episode, we’ll drop in on a conversation between philosophy professor Harry Brighouse and Molly Harris and Jonathan Klein from the UW Instructional Design Collaborative about what trust actually looks like in the classroom, whether it’s a small class or a large lecture.
Carrie Welsh 02:49
First, to understand exactly what clicked into place for Avrie, we’re going to go back to that philosophy reading. She mentioned the paper she was reading at her desk that night. It was written by a philosopher named Tony Laden. Tony is a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and he’s the Associate Director of our Center for Ethics and Education. He’s been thinking about trust for almost a decade.
Tony Laden 03:14
how people talk to each other, how they talk across differences and disagreements. In some sense, that’s the question at the heart of pretty much my entire philosophical career.
Carrie Welsh 03:23
back in 2020, Tony was teaching a graduate seminar in philosophy. And this was a time of mounting criticisms of political bias against colleges and universities, criticisms like:
Tony Laden 03:35
Left-wing professors are indoctrinating their right-wing students with terrible left wing ideas.
Carrie Welsh 03:41
That seminar helped him think differently about these accusations.
Tony Laden 03:44
I got interested in the question of what exactly gave that criticism legs.
Carrie Welsh 03:49
Tony noticed that it wasn’t just outspoken extremists who were worried about University’s influence on students.
Tony Laden 03:56
I assumed that there were a widespread sense amongst many people that college was doing this terrible thing to their students.
Carrie Welsh 04:03
He saw this concern from parents, from all kinds of people across the political spectrum.
Tony Laden 04:09
And it’s weird, because if you talk to people inside higher education, it’s baffling that that charge would stick, because it’s like, that’s not what we’re doing.
Carrie Welsh 04:16
Those baffled academics then try to defend their position. Tony says there’s this common defense that comes up where people parse out the difference between education and indoctrination. Explain that they’re separate things, and that’s technically correct, but–
Tony Laden 04:32
That’s not where the battle is joined. Like, that’s not where the conflict is. That’s not, I think, what the parents and kids are seeing. And so I was trying to think of like, why do people find that charge reasonable? Why does it speak to them? And I happened to be teaching this seminar on trust, so I had trust on the mind. And it just occurred to me that that was a way in.
Carrie Welsh 04:55
Once Tony had trust as a lens to look through, he felt like he could see what was really going on with these concerned parents, which was:
Tony Laden 05:03
First, that these parents don’t trust people in higher education. And then secondly, and this was really the sort of, you know, aha moment, was that the reason they don’t trust higher education is because what we are doing in the classroom is changing who students trust and what they trust.
Carrie Welsh 05:23
Basically the parents who are worried that college is changing their kids–they’re right.
Carrie Welsh 05:37
In order to understand how colleges change what students trust, we’re going to zoom out a bit. Tony says what we trust starts with how we think. And for Tony, thinking is kind of like cooking.
Tony Laden 05:50
We need ingredients to think about anything. So in order to think about something, we need stuff to think with. The stuff we think with is information, and that information comes from a variety of sources.
Carrie Welsh 06:02
Sources like from our senses, from our memory, from what we read, from what podcasts we listen to. Some of that source material we discard, we filter out, and some of that source material we use, we think with it.
Tony Laden 06:16
And so there’s then a question, I think, of like, why that material becomes information for us, why do I treat it as information? Why do I use it as an ingredient for thinking? And the very short answer to that for me is that I trust it, that I trust its sources.
Carrie Welsh 06:33
We all use different criteria to judge whether a source is trustworthy. Tony calls this an informational ideology–basically, a filter on the ingredients that you think with and the types of sources that tend to pass that filter. That is what Tony calls an informational trust network. And this is why this matters for colleges and universities: because every student comes to collegewith their own general type of informational trust network. For example, for a student who comes to college from a rural background:
Tony Laden 07:04
you develop ways of speaking about that space that are rooted in lived experience and common experience with that space. So they’re very localized. People will refer to, you know, the old Harris place, which you know, hasn’t been known by somebody named Harris for several generations, but it’s always been the old Harris place, because we all know, you know old man Harris who used to live there, as opposed to calling it 1725 Cherry Road, which is a kind of generic description of it that’s accessible to anybody, but like, you have to have lived in that space to know what is the old Harris place.
Carrie Welsh 07:37
And that’s different from how colleges and universities reference information.
Tony Laden 07:41
And I think that one of the ways you can understand how a college education shapes what a student trusts is not only that we give them new sources of information and teach them how to use them, but we also train up their informational ideology. We train up their way of thinking about what makes sources trustworthy.
Carrie Welsh 08:02
This is what’s underneath those political claims that colleges are changing how students think. This is also what was underneath the eye rolls Avrie was getting when she went back home at college. Her informational ideology–and her trust network–had shifted.
Tony Laden 08:18
We don’t occupy the same trust network. I don’t understand your ingredients, like, you’re cooking with ingredients I don’t regard as food, and I’m cooking with ingredients you don’t regard as food. And so we can’t cook together, and we can’t eat together, because I’m going to look at what you make and think that’s not food, and you’re going to look at what I make and think that’s not food.
Carrie Welsh 08:41
Avrie and her people back home were cooking with different ingredients.
Carrie Welsh 08:48
So far, we’ve been talking a lot about Avrie’s rural trust network and what Tony terms as the broadly scientific trust network of academia. But of course, there aren’t just two kinds, and it’s important to note here that no one trust network is quote, unquote, better than another. Tony says this is true both in terms of morality and in terms of effectiveness. Each set of information might be better or worse, depending on the context. Maybe that’s hard to believe, to really internalize if you’re here listening to this podcast that’s hosted and produced by a research center at a major university, chances are you’re no stranger to the academic trust network, and if you put in the work to go to college, it can be hard to unlearn the idea that the academic way is the right way. But there’s a philosophical tactic that can help us here, and it comes up in the story Tony tells at the start of his book.
Carrie Welsh 09:47
About 25 years ago, Tony was teaching an introduction to ethics class that focused on racism and sexism, and a student in his class, young man, held more traditional conservative views on. Gender, and he challenged a lot of the ideas that came up in the readings. So early on in the semester, the student turned in a paper, the TA graded it, and when the student got his paper back, he didn’t like his grade. So the student set up a meeting with Tony.
Tony Laden 10:15
And at the appointed time, he showed up, and he was with his father,
Carrie Welsh 10:19
And this student’s dad had some concerns. He asked Tony why he wasn’t presenting all sides of the issue.
Tony Laden 10:26
And so I said things about how what was important was that over the course of his son’s education, he’d be exposed to lots of different views, and why this view was a kind of minority view that he was likely unexposed to elsewhere, and that I wasn’t trying to indoctrinate him, and that I was trying to teach him to think about heart issues carefully, and that was what mattered to me.
Carrie Welsh 10:46
As Tony remembers it, none of that seemed to help. So he took a beat and gathered his thoughts for a moment.
Tony Laden 10:53
I had small kids at the time, and I was thinking about what it’s like to send your kid to this institution, which is both somewhat opaque and not one you control, and not one that maybe aligns with all your values. And I thought to myself, I’m not sure I would send my kid to to spend all this time at an institution like that.
Carrie Welsh 11:14
To be clear, though, the last thing Tony wanted was for families like this to not send their kids to this public university. Tony knows it’s important for any school to support a diverse range of views and for the students who hold different views to encounter each other.
Tony Laden 11:28
So I was thinking about I was thinking like, Oh, wow. You know, he’s really trusting us to educate his son, and that’s a really important thing, and I need to recognize that fact. And so I said that to him. I said, I think what you’re doing is really brave, and I want to just thank you for that, because, you know, as I said, it’s really important, I think that we don’t end up in these kind of ideological and religious enclaves, and that, you know, to send your student here is a really important thing to do. So I thanked him for that, and said, You know, I have kids, and I’m not sure I would be that brave to risk their being changed by the experience of college.
Carrie Welsh 12:04
This made a difference. The turn that happened in this conversation, the shift Tony made so that he and this dad could start to really communicate with each other and not talk past each other. It’s a great example of a core practice of philosophy.
Tony Laden 12:24
You take seriously that the person you are talking to and who is disagreeing with you, especially, is an intelligent, thoughtful person who has reasons for their beliefs and you want to sort of get inside their way of seeing the world.
Carrie Welsh 12:39
This practice is called charitable thinking.
Tony Laden 12:41
I mean, it’s an idea that gets invoked a lot in philosophy, because it’s often the case that philosophical positions look crazy at first glance. And so a skill like we need to develop as philosophers is to read texts on the sort of assumption that they’re really, really intelligent. And have thought about this issue a lot more than I have. And so, you know, if Hegel or Descartes or Plato or someone is saying something that sounds sort of foolish, then I’m misunderstanding what it is they’re saying, right? And I have to figure out the way to see what it is that they are up to.
Carrie Welsh 13:15
Charitable thinking also paves the way for trust.
Tony Laden 13:18
But I think that general attitude and skill is really valuable in in a democracy and democratic conversation, in figuring out how to understand people who disagree with us.
Carrie Welsh 13:28
And trust paves the way for learning.
Tony Laden 13:31
The other thing I’ve come to realize is, you know, learning is a process of being vulnerable, because it’s a process of being changed by what other people say, and you’re not going to be vulnerable in the way that’s necessary for learning if you don’t trust the people who are talking to you.
Carrie Welsh 13:48
Which means that as institutions of learning, it’s actually part of colleges and universities’ responsibility to foster trust, to be trustworthy, even beyond their commitment to learning. Colleges and universities also owe it to students to be trustworthy and to get better at talking about trust and vulnerability, because changing students’ trust networks has a cost.
Tony Laden 14:11
If we occupy different trust networks, it’s really hard to have these kind of easy conversations, but those easy conversations are really the glue of intimacy, right? They’re the glue of friendships or the glue of close relationships.
Carrie Welsh 14:23
So by changing students’ trust networks, institutions of higher ed can make it harder for students to connect with the people and communities they came from.
Tony Laden 14:31
So it’s not just that they’re going to argue at Thanksgiving about politics. That’s fine. But if at Thanksgiving they can’t talk to each other because neither of them recognizes what the other one is saying as making any sense. It’s gonna make it harder to go home at Thanksgiving the next time, it’s gonna be harder to think, Oh, I’m gonna move back to my neighborhood when I’m done with college and so forth. So I think the costs come in those strained ties and those cost notice are not only borne by the students who lose this embeddedness in a particular community, but they’re borne by the community which loses the student.
Carrie Welsh 15:06
Avrie, who you heard from at the beginning of the episode, is by no means estranged from her community, but she has noticed that the way she processes information is different from how information moves in her hometown.
Avrie Marsolek 15:18
My grandma found out that a classmate of mine had died before I did, because she talks to those people every day and is in that trust network where I am not so if I don’t know the people they’re talking about, it’s a lot harder for me to, I guess, prepare for that type of conversation or stay up to date with certain information. It was definitely like a definitely felt slip in there when that happened, even.
Carrie Welsh 15:48
Once her grandma told her about this classmate’s death, Avrie could see that how she and her grandma followed up on it was different.
Avrie Marsolek 15:55
My instinct is to look for information online, from newspapers and stuff, where theirs is to call someone to figure out what they know.
Carrie Welsh 16:03
But Avrie has also learned to adapt her communication style to the people she’s around. She said she thinks of this as almost like code switching, and some of it is literally code switching.
Avrie Marsolek 16:13
It’s like, I think my accent gets a little more crazy sometimes just being around the people.
Carrie Welsh 16:18
But she also cites her sources differently when she’s around people from where she grew up.
Avrie Marsolek 16:23
Like, I use different words, or I say different things, or I don’t say where I get my information from, or I say, like, oh, this person told me, or this person told me, because a lot more word of mouth happens in my hometown. So yeah, it’s definitely more of a filter than an exact change.
Carrie Welsh 16:43
Avery says that switching this filter was something she’d started doing instinctively, but once she learned about trust networks, she was able to do it more consciously.
Avrie Marsolek 16:52
Now I feel like since I know that dynamic’s there, it’s so much easier for me to tap into that trust network or this trust network.
Carrie Welsh 17:01
This code switching might not fully integrate Avrie’s trust network and her hometown’s, but the ability to see what’s going on through the lens of trust has helped her to not lose touch.
Carrie Welsh 17:16
Another student learned about trust networks in the same class as Avrie.
James Dempsey 17:20
My name’s James.
Carrie Welsh 17:21
After James read Tony’s paper, something clicked for him too, just not about his own experience. It was about his mom’s. James’s mom was raised by her Cuban parents who had immigrated to the US to escape Castro. She grew up in Queens, then left home as the first in her family to go to college, and James knew rationally that this was a big deal, but for most of his life, he downplayed it in his mind.
James Dempsey 17:48
I guess I sort of minimized it in my head, just sort of thinking that like, you know, sure it’s gonna be a little bit harder, but it’s hard for everyone. Before I read Leighton’s book on trust numbers, and before I really understood what his point was, I don’t really think I appreciated enough how difficult that must have been and what a sacrifice that must have been for her compared to my comparatively much easier transition after.
Carrie Welsh 18:10
Once he learned about trust networks, James felt like he had an explanation for why his mom wasn’t close with her parents, why her relationships with her siblings who had also gone to college were stronger, even beyond the fact that they shared an upbringing and a generation. James could see that part of what makes his mom and her siblings close is that they think similarly. In college, they all learned to trust the same types of sources. When we asked James if he shared this insight with his mom about being able to see her relationships and her college experience more fully, he said he hadn’t.
James Dempsey 18:45
We’re not really like a feelingsy family.
Carrie Welsh 18:49
But even if this revelation didn’t dramatically change his relationship with his mom, still,
James Dempsey 18:55
I think it impacts all of my interactions with her a little bit, if that makes sense, because I really understood her as a person differently after this.
Carrie Welsh 19:04
So sometimes learning a new trust network can shift people away from their families. But also, being able to see trust networks, having this distinction, it can build empathy, bring families even a little bit closer together.
Carrie Welsh 19:21
Tony says that regardless of whether a student’s trust network brings welcome changes or difficult ones, we should talk about the possibility of those changes way more than we do now.
Tony Laden 19:31
Like people talk all the time about how education should be transformative, and we’re so convinced that the transformation we are visiting upon students is positive that we don’t think about the flip side of it, which is true even if it is positive, which is that being transformed by something exterior to you only happens when you are vulnerable to being so transformed.
Carrie Welsh 19:56
That vulnerability isn’t a bad thing.
Tony Laden 19:59
You have to be vulnerable to fall in love. You have to be vulnerable to be struck by beauty. You have to be vulnerable to learn.
Carrie Welsh 20:07
So, again, if colleges and universities want people to learn, it’s their job to deal with that prerequisite vulnerability. Tony notes a few approaches to this.
Tony Laden 20:17
I think of strategies that are designed to eliminate vulnerability, as security strategies. So we seek security by locking our doors and putting up our shields and arming ourselves to the teeth and surveilling our enemies or the people who we think are dangerous to us. One thing about security is it tends to be a kind of individual solution.
Carrie Welsh 20:38
The other thing is that a security strategy, it blocks out the good things too, the love, the awe, the learning.
Tony Laden 20:47
So a different solution to vulnerability is to seek what I call safety. A safe environment is one where, though I am vulnerable, I’m not likely to be harmed and I’m likely to be cared for if I am harmed, and so I can accept my vulnerability because it’s not dangerous for me.
Carrie Welsh 21:08
Tony says this has two implications.
Tony Laden 21:11
One is that we can make sense of what counts as safety in terms of trust, but it also in focusing on trust, we actually are focusing on trustworthiness.
Carrie Welsh 21:20
So trust has to be a concern of educational institutions, because if you’re really committed to fostering education, then vulnerability and trust are part of that work. But simply asking for people’s trust isn’t enough.
Tony Laden 21:34
If, in fact, the reason people don’t trust the institutions is that the institutions are no longer trustworthy, then the way to fix this is not to get people to trust those institutions more; it’s to make those institutions more trustworthy.
Carrie Welsh 21:47
So how do we make colleges and universities more trustworthy? One way is to examine and adjust the kind of trust network they’re teaching.
Tony Laden 21:56
I argue that colleges build what I call a broadly scientific trust network for our students. And I suggest in the book that we might try to build this open minded network for them. And the idea of an open minded network is the criteria for the trustworthiness of sources of information is that that information is subject to criticism from all sides and anywhere, and withstands that criticism. So it’s the openness to being challenged that marks a source as trustworthy.
Carrie Welsh 22:28
Another way is to return to the idea of a safety strategy:
Tony Laden 22:32
That means things like caring for them, recognizing that some students are paying costs that other students aren’t seeing, how we can support them in that process, and recognize that students are putting themselves in our care in this way, and show gratitude for that.
Carrie Welsh 22:49
As Tony writes, different students have different needs. It’s not about eliminating challenges, but being attuned to the vulnerabilities. One way to attune to those vulnerabilities? Ask.
Tony Laden 23:03
You know, find some way to ask your students at the beginning of the semester, like, what do you need from me? What are, you know, what are the challenges you are facing? And oftentimes, when I ask that question in a questionnaire or whatever, at the beginning of the term, I get things about, oh, I have a lot of work hours. I have family members I have to take care of I’ve struggled with anxiety, but I think like finding ways to ask them this question, not just about that, but like, What are you scared of learning? What are you scared that learning will do? What are people back home saying about you going to college would be ways to get into that space and be more attuned to what our students are are facing.
Carrie Welsh 23:40
To me, these questions feel radical –in the sense of the etymology of the word. Radical like root systems. If someone had asked me how I was worried college might change me when I was a freshman, I don’t know that I would have had a clear answer at 18, but the idea of a professor opening up that question in my mind or assigning that prompt us homework, I know that it would have made me more likely to trust that person. And more likely to notice if and when those changes got hard. For Tony, thinking about trustworthiness has led him to reimagine some deeper parts of colleges’ root systems too.
Tony Laden 24:17
What I think a lot of people in higher education who are worried about this phenomenon do and think is the solution to it is that they see themselves as occupying something like the mainland, like the cognitive mainland, right? And then there are these people out there, these poor people on these islands who don’t really understand how the world works, and the best we can do is rescue the children on those islands and bring them to the mainland, right? And if you think about that attitude and those practices from the point of view of someone living on the island, that’s not going to look so good, right? That looks predatory, right? Yeah, and so I think there are two steps to fix that. One is for those of us in academic institutions and who are college educated, not to think of ourselves as on the mainland, but as to think of ourselves on another island. And then to think that what we need to do to as it were, reconstitute the democratic society as one that can be genuinely democratic is not that we all have to get onto the same island, but that we have to build bridges between the islands, right? We have to connect the islands so that people can talk to each other across those islands. And then the thought is that college could stop being this colonial force that poached the children off various islands and brought them to its island. But college could be the institution in charge of bridge building, that what we could do for our students is equip them to be these bridges between the islands, in some sense, to be able to move between them and connect those islands. If there are students who feel that they are equipped to do that kind of work, and not just Island hop, not just code switch, but really glue the things together, then I’d be very gratified that the book had actually done something useful. It’s only impossible to bridge the islands if nobody’s trying.
Carrie Welsh 26:22
I keep thinking about this idea of teaching students to be bridge builders, and I’m so curious about how to build trust in the classroom. Like, what does that actually look like? And that’s exactly where the L&S Exchange Podcast comes in. Their podcast is about teaching and learning in the College of Letters and Science at UW–Madison, and at the end of every episode, they talk about how the ideas in the show can be practically applied to teaching. For this one, they invited philosopher Harry Brickhouse to talk about what he does to build trust in the classroom. So here’s producers Jonathan Klein and Molly Harris with Harry Brighouse.
Molly Harris 27:05
Welcome to the After Show. I’m Molly Harris, and I’m here with Jonathan Klein today. We’re joined by Harry Brighouse. Harry teaches philosophy here at UW–Madison in the College of Letters and Science. Harry has written a lot about teaching in higher ed. Welcome Harry. Jonathan, why don’t you get us started?
Jonathan Klein 27:24
Sure. Thanks, Molly. Harry, we heard from your colleague Tony Laden and several of your former philosophy students about trust, and specifically about the idea of informational trust networks and how they’re at the crux of the relationship between the university and students. So Harry, what do you do to be a trustworthy teacher?
Harry Brighouse 27:44
There are three things that I do. One is I get the students to learn each other’s names, and I make sure I learn their names. Second is I try to get them to spend time in office hours, often in groups, and I spend a lot of time listening in office hours, rather than a lot of time talking. And the third is, when I’m teaching about controversial questions, I don’t disclose my own views about those questions. And it’s particularly important in the large lecture, because in the smaller classes, I can get to know them, and they can get to me in a sort of, you know, quite deep way, fairly quickly, but in large lecture, there are lots of students who are never really going to know you and you’re not really going to know them. And so, you know, making sure that they can see that you respect them in that way is important. You know, conversations aren’t conversations. If one party is willing to be changed and the other one isn’t, they’re just, you’re just talking at people, in that case, and I do think that’s a huge problem actually, in our culture, especially around political discourse, is just a lot of people are not interested in hearing what the people they’re talking to have got to say. And so it’s, I would say, it’s modeling that, except that it’s not really, it’s just, it’s how I really feel about things. So I’m not trying to model anything. I’m just trying to, you know, learn.
Molly Harris 29:07
So we’ve been having a lot of conversations with instructors in L&S about the large lecture environment. And I think at first glance, some of the strategies that you’ve talked about, or when we think about building trust, it seems like they make more sense in a small discussion based classroom. How do you approach building trust in the large lecture hall environment?
Harry Brighouse 29:29
One thing I do is I get there early and I just spend a little bit of time not at the front of the room, but all around the room, just chatting to one or another student, trying to get to a large number of students over the course of the semester, not about class, but just about trivia, so that they are used to talking to me and they think, you know, they I was gonna say, they think I’m interested in them. They see that I’m interested in them, you know, I asked them what they did at the weekend, or I asked them where they where. They came from, or sometimes more intrusively, I’ll ask, why did you decide to come to UW–Madison? That’s, that’s a question I ask a lot of students, and I really like it the variety of answers. So those you know, those kinds of things.
Molly Harris 30:15
Yeah. And we, we know from research that if students feel like they’re valued as whole people, not just as a student performing a certain set of work in the classroom, that that actually helps them feel more like they belong and that it improves their learning in the end, too.
Harry Brighouse 30:32
Yeah, my dad, one of his things that teachers do is stealing crisps. or in America, chips. And I don’t ever dare do that, but it’s a version of stealing chips like you know you the idea is you steal a chip and you’re establishing a sort of deep connection with the person you’re stealing the chip from. Because it’s so surprising, and I don’t do that, but the conversations are sort of guided by that thought,
Molly Harris 31:04
yeah, I could see how the lecture hall is a space where you have an authority at the front of the room who is responsible for conveying information to the people who are sitting in the audience. So I think that idea of moving around the room physically and talking to people individually is a way of breaking down traditional hierarchy that exists.
Harry Brighouse 31:29
I agree with that. It doesn’t break it down completely. I’m still a professor, and I still have a responsibility to ensure that all of that time is used well. And if there are 100 students in the room and it’s 75 minutes, that’s 7500 minutes of time that I’m trying to get to be used well. It’s a lot of time, but I’m not the sole authority in the room. They have authority too.
Jonathan Klein 31:51
So I appreciate the examples of how you work on establishing trust. I’m wondering if you might give us some examples or talk a bit about instances where trust has broken down, and how you deal with repairing that or managing a situation where that’s happened.
Harry Brighouse 32:12
So I have a story from about 10 years ago. It was a freshman class. There were 20 of them, and the topic wasn’t abortion, but it was a topic where it was very natural to start talking about the morality of abortion as sort of an analogy. And one student, I could see, she was very frustrated. She knew she could tell very quickly that there was nobody else in the class except me who might agree with her about abortion, and she was not it was early on, she wasn’t articulate yet, and I could see her actually crying, which I think for her was, you know, she felt humiliated. And immediately after class, I sent her an email. It wasn’t a really long email, but it was. It said, you know, I saw that you were very upset. I understand why. You know you don’t. You don’t have to say things if you don’t want to, but understand that when you do, I’m going to back you up in class. It’s you know, we’re there together. And it was actually another student who told me that she shared that with all the other students which made them will trust me more because they were so startled that I had, you know, reached out to her, but it also made her trust me much more, and I only discovered that because the other student in a private conversation said, Yeah, Mary showed us (Mary wasn’t a real name.) Mary showed us your email, and it really made a difference.
Carrie Welsh 33:48
This episode was produced by Carrie Welsh and Jennifer McCord. Thanks to Avrie Marsolek, James Dempsey, and Tony Laden, and special thanks to the L&S Exchange for collaborating with us on this episode. And we’re grateful to merit library for the use of their recording space.