WEBVTT 00:00:30.780 --> 00:00:32.780 Hello, this is Caroline Livingston and Matthew Stockmall interviewing 00:00:34.289 --> 00:00:40.417 Doctor Joseph Foy on February 27th in his office. This interview is a part 00:00:40.450 --> 00:00:43.856 of the Bear Oral History Project. Our goal is to preserve a record of 00:00:43.889 --> 00:00:47.536 Barrett's history and honor of our 30th anniversary. Thank you so much for 00:00:47.569 --> 00:00:50.856 taking the time to sit down with us and share your experience. You're most 00:00:50.889 --> 00:00:53.976 welcome. 00:00:54.009 --> 00:00:57.606 Oh yeah, I was, uh, we were just talking before the interview started 00:00:57.639 --> 00:01:02.487 recording about why you say water like water, you know, um, Vice Dean 00:01:02.520 --> 00:01:06.846 Nelson, who just retired, was so amused by the way I said water and Dean 00:01:06.879 --> 00:01:11.855 Jacobs, who uh was a professor at Swarthmore. Uh, for about 30 years or 23 00:01:11.888 --> 00:01:15.376 years I think before I became Dean of Barrett, we try to explain to Piggy 00:01:15.409 --> 00:01:19.467 that I was a Philadelphian by birth. My father was from Philadelphia, not 00:01:19.500 --> 00:01:21.576 Swarthmore, 00:01:21.609 --> 00:01:25.096 and, um, I picked up my father's accent, although my mother, like my wife 00:01:25.129 --> 00:01:29.775 , is from Alabama, from Huntsville. My parents met at the Redstone Arsenal 00:01:29.808 --> 00:01:33.855 in the early 60s during the space race and all of that. So my mom worked 00:01:33.888 --> 00:01:39.647 for one of von Braun's assistants, so that's, yeah. So to get started, 00:01:39.680 --> 00:01:42.727 tell me a little bit about your undergraduate experience at the University 00:01:42.760 --> 00:01:47.367 of Alabama at Huntsville. OK, so I arrived there having attended two other 00:01:47.400 --> 00:01:51.206 universities. I attended University in the early 80s. I thought I was 00:01:51.239 --> 00:01:57.165 going to be a diplomat and I decided. Not to be and I transferred to, uh, 00:01:57.198 --> 00:02:00.947 the University of Iowa where I did, uh, much of my undergraduate work. And 00:02:00.980 --> 00:02:05.227 then I finished up at the University of Alabama in Huntsville because I 00:02:05.260 --> 00:02:09.025 got an opportunity to do research at the Redstone Arsenal at the Space 00:02:09.058 --> 00:02:14.436 Sciences lab, and I did, uh, research on, um, space physics, um, so. 00:02:14.469 --> 00:02:18.866 That's kind of what I did there, and I helped to model, build a model of 00:02:18.899 --> 00:02:22.717 the Earth's magnetosphere, and it was a paper I helped work on a paper 00:02:22.750 --> 00:02:26.876 that made the cover of the Journal of Geophysical Geophysical Review 00:02:26.909 --> 00:02:30.116 Letters. Yeah, that's a pretty famous paper. So that's kind of cool. That 00:02:30.149 --> 00:02:34.077 was kind of what I did there and finished up my undergraduate degree and 00:02:34.110 --> 00:02:37.717 thought I would stay in Huntsville and continue working on gamma ray 00:02:37.750 --> 00:02:42.116 astronomy and something called the Batsy BATSE 00:02:42.149 --> 00:02:45.827 instrument. Um, but circumstances eventually brought me out to Arizona, 00:02:45.860 --> 00:02:50.596 and that's when I decided, you know, I should finish up and get my PhD. So 00:02:50.629 --> 00:02:53.436 that's kind of what I did there. Anything else you want to know about 00:02:53.469 --> 00:02:57.797 Alabama? Uh, not right now, but how did you decide to go to ASU for your 00:02:57.830 --> 00:03:02.036 doctorate? Well, I moved out to Arizona because my parents were here. My 00:03:02.069 --> 00:03:05.245 father was an engineer working for Honeywell. We had moved around the 00:03:05.278 --> 00:03:09.585 country growing up because that was an aerospace engineer. And after 1980 00:03:09.618 --> 00:03:13.146 , he became a contract engineer, which meant he would work one or two 00:03:13.179 --> 00:03:16.745 years and they said to me, well, uh, why don't you come out here, you know 00:03:16.778 --> 00:03:19.745 , the family is moving out here and you know, maybe you can teach or do 00:03:19.778 --> 00:03:23.346 something, so I taught for a while and. But I thought, well, you know, I'd 00:03:23.379 --> 00:03:30.186 like to go back and get my PhD and ASU was here, and I took a few physics 00:03:30.219 --> 00:03:34.217 courses without being unofficially accepted student. You could matriculate 00:03:34.250 --> 00:03:37.827 and just sign up if you had your bachelor's. I had my bachelor's and I 00:03:37.860 --> 00:03:42.146 took a course in quantum physics and did well in that. I decided to apply 00:03:42.179 --> 00:03:46.427 and I got accepted. And so in 2000, I became a grad student here at the 00:03:46.460 --> 00:03:49.975 university. What did you think of Barrett students when you were a 00:03:50.008 --> 00:03:53.856 graduate student at ASU? It's interesting because I would have been 00:03:53.889 --> 00:03:57.297 totally unaware of Barrett, except for my sister, my youngest sister, 00:03:57.330 --> 00:04:02.376 Rebecca was a Barrett student in the 90s, so I knew about Barrett through 00:04:02.409 --> 00:04:05.827 that and also my best friend, one of my best friends who was much younger 00:04:05.860 --> 00:04:12.017 than I, Peter Doran. Um, graduated Barrett in 1999, so I knew about the 00:04:12.050 --> 00:04:15.577 honors college through them and through their experiences at the Honors 00:04:15.610 --> 00:04:20.697 College. Peter has since gone on to graduate from Georgetown, and he's now 00:04:20.730 --> 00:04:25.846 president of the Center of European Policy Analysis. Um, he's a big player 00:04:25.879 --> 00:04:30.015 and he's kind of right of center, and anti-Trump Republican who 00:04:30.048 --> 00:04:33.817 specializes in Putin and Eastern Europe and Russian studies, and I 00:04:33.850 --> 00:04:37.645 actually have a copy of his senior thesis that I helped, um, proofread for 00:04:37.678 --> 00:04:42.495 him. on Solzhenitsy's defection to the West as part of his senior thesis 00:04:42.528 --> 00:04:47.015 for Barrett, he translated a telegram uh that Andropo, who had been the 00:04:47.048 --> 00:04:50.536 head of the KGB at the time, wrote in the early 70s about what to do with 00:04:50.569 --> 00:04:55.046 Solzhenitsy, to the effect of we can't kill him, why don't we send him to 00:04:55.079 --> 00:05:00.377 charity? So anyways, so I was familiar with the honors college that way 00:05:00.410 --> 00:05:03.455 and then I got to know Doctor Tom Martin. He and I were teaching 00:05:03.488 --> 00:05:06.637 assistants in the physics department together, and that was right before 00:05:06.670 --> 00:05:11.026 Doctor Martin. Um, was to to go into Barrett, and he was telling me, you 00:05:11.059 --> 00:05:14.825 know, Barrett's great, and I'm like, yeah, I know of Barrett. And he said 00:05:14.858 --> 00:05:17.947 , you know, they're looking for more scientists who can teach humanities. 00:05:17.980 --> 00:05:22.075 If you're ever interested, Joe, you should apply, and I kept it in mind. 00:05:22.108 --> 00:05:26.705 So I had a very positive image of Barrett when I was a grad student, but 00:05:26.738 --> 00:05:30.546 only because I knew my sister has attended Barrett, my friend Peter 00:05:30.579 --> 00:05:34.387 graduated from Barrett, and of course Doctor Martin telling me about it. 00:05:34.420 --> 00:05:41.575 Did your peers seem to have any idea about Barrett 00:05:41.608 --> 00:05:43.265 or was it just out of physics and astronomy and astrophysics, so they were 00:05:43.298 --> 00:05:47.092 worried about NASA and whether they could get a gig. In their 20s, I was 00:05:47.125 --> 00:05:51.851 in my 40s. So I was a student over the traditional age, and I knew then 00:05:51.884 --> 00:05:56.491 that my career wouldn't take a traditional research path, uh, tenure track 00:05:56.524 --> 00:06:00.572 , uh, the way it would for peers amount of friends of mine who are in 00:06:00.605 --> 00:06:04.051 their 20s, right, because they were just eager to get to the next, get 00:06:04.084 --> 00:06:08.450 their doctorate, and then go do something else, go to work for NASA or go 00:06:08.483 --> 00:06:14.627 start a tenure track position. Mhm. So you do have a very heavy science 00:06:14.660 --> 00:06:18.356 background and tends to focus more on the liberal arts side of education. 00:06:18.389 --> 00:06:22.346 So how does your background impact the way you teach the human event? It's 00:06:22.379 --> 00:06:26.705 a great question because as you say, um, much of what, especially when I'm 00:06:26.738 --> 00:06:32.245 teaching the event we're reading would be considered liberal arts works. 00:06:32.278 --> 00:06:37.336 Think it influences it in a couple ways in the spring and honors 272. 00:06:37.369 --> 00:06:40.926 I do have students read works that I would consider scientific works, so 00:06:40.959 --> 00:06:45.606 works that I believe are necessary for basic science literacy. So they 00:06:45.639 --> 00:06:50.606 will include excerpts from Copernicus's on the Revolution where Copernicus 00:06:50.639 --> 00:06:57.276 proposes the heliocentric hypothesis for the solar system. Um, Galileo, uh 00:06:57.309 --> 00:07:01.995 , including his early experiments in physics, his astronomy, the starry 00:07:02.028 --> 00:07:06.995 messenger, but I also have an excerpts from Isaac Newton, but I also 00:07:07.028 --> 00:07:10.467 include things like Galileo's letter to the Grand Duchess Cristina, where 00:07:10.500 --> 00:07:15.156 he argues that there's no conflict between his being uh a scientist and 00:07:15.189 --> 00:07:18.666 being a religious person or or a devout Christian. Which I think is 00:07:18.699 --> 00:07:21.226 interesting we see that argument again we have the Templeton Prize and I 00:07:21.259 --> 00:07:25.026 think we have the Institute for Society for the school for the study of 00:07:25.059 --> 00:07:28.866 religion and conflict, right? So many of the arguments that you see in 00:07:28.899 --> 00:07:34.145 Galileo's letter are with us today, right, um, so it doesn't. Impact how I 00:07:34.178 --> 00:07:38.426 teach 272 because I think scientific literacy and an understanding of how 00:07:38.459 --> 00:07:42.947 the rise of science changed our view of our place in the cosmos, if you 00:07:42.980 --> 00:07:46.866 will, is absolutely important, although that doesn't mean that I'd make 00:07:46.899 --> 00:07:51.866 272 a science only of course. I do look at things like Frankenstein, which 00:07:51.899 --> 00:07:54.825 I think is the first science fiction novel, and of course we know ASU has 00:07:54.858 --> 00:08:01.616 been involved in the 200th anniversary of the novel. Beyond that, um. It's 00:08:01.649 --> 00:08:04.416 interesting because my real struggle is, although I studied a lot of 00:08:04.449 --> 00:08:08.015 liberal arts, I took a lot of liberal arts courses as an undergraduate, 00:08:08.048 --> 00:08:12.137 and I took a graduate course in the French Revolution. May I ask why? Well 00:08:12.170 --> 00:08:15.447 , first of all, I started out as a liberal arts person. I was gonna be a, 00:08:15.480 --> 00:08:19.336 a diplomat. So when I was at American University, most of the courses I 00:08:19.369 --> 00:08:23.416 had to take were either political science, political history courses in 00:08:23.449 --> 00:08:28.406 English, the courses. I grew up in a very. But I grew up among the book 00:08:28.439 --> 00:08:30.926 people. It's the only way I can put it if you've ever read or seen the 00:08:30.959 --> 00:08:35.287 film version of Fahrenheit 451 at the end of that. Remember the book 00:08:35.320 --> 00:08:38.326 people that memorized all the books? That would have been my parents, 00:08:38.359 --> 00:08:42.206 right? So I grew up in a house of books. My parents, my father was the 00:08:42.239 --> 00:08:45.645 first in his family to go to college. He was a first generation, uh, 00:08:45.678 --> 00:08:49.677 college student. He went on the GI Bill. My mother grew up in an educated. 00:08:49.710 --> 00:08:53.826 Southern family and she went to college. So they were big on, although my 00:08:53.859 --> 00:08:57.106 dad was an engineer, they were big on literature and the arts, and that 00:08:57.139 --> 00:09:00.427 was just part of my childhood. So first of all, by the time I left high 00:09:00.460 --> 00:09:04.226 school, I probably read more liberal arts stuff than most liberal arts 00:09:04.259 --> 00:09:08.057 majors nowadays read when they leave college. That's not to boast, that's 00:09:08.090 --> 00:09:12.255 just the way my world was. So taking liberal arts courses was as natural 00:09:12.288 --> 00:09:16.005 as. Breathing, even when I was a physics major, I took a graduate course 00:09:16.038 --> 00:09:19.407 in the French Revolution, which was one of my favorite classes, and I took 00:09:19.440 --> 00:09:25.326 a great course in in American literature and courses in philosophy. Um, I 00:09:25.359 --> 00:09:28.807 just felt I needed both. I needed to know about physics and I needed to 00:09:28.840 --> 00:09:32.686 know about philosophy and law and art, and I just can't imagine divorcing 00:09:32.719 --> 00:09:36.196 the two, which I think was great preparation for coming here. Those 00:09:36.229 --> 00:09:40.076 discussions or the one mentioning Galileo's readings or Copernicus's 00:09:40.109 --> 00:09:43.996 readings, how do those discussions flow in comparison with like just a 00:09:44.029 --> 00:09:48.436 great question because the danger in, in the more scientist stuff like the 00:09:48.469 --> 00:09:51.956 readings from Isaac Newton or from Galileo and Copernicus that are more 00:09:51.989 --> 00:09:55.717 science focused is that the temptation is to fall into election mode and 00:09:55.750 --> 00:09:58.956 tell the citizens, this is what he needs and this is what that's not what 00:09:58.989 --> 00:10:02.811 we do instead. We actually discuss it first of all, I select readings that 00:10:02.844 --> 00:10:06.691 are accessible to students that they don't have integral signs or 00:10:06.724 --> 00:10:10.451 derivatives in them, um, and what the students will find is that 00:10:10.484 --> 00:10:14.932 frequently what Copernicus, Galileo and Newton are doing in these texts 00:10:14.965 --> 00:10:18.010 are changing our conceptual understanding. So what they're doing is 00:10:18.043 --> 00:10:21.811 they're challenging what had passed for common sense and saying here's why 00:10:21.844 --> 00:10:26.135 we shouldn't accept that. And guess what? Just like people in the liberal 00:10:26.168 --> 00:10:30.157 arts, scientists have to use words. They have to write arguments just like 00:10:30.190 --> 00:10:34.037 you do write argumentative papers. So many of the selections I'm using, in 00:10:34.070 --> 00:10:38.316 fact, all of the science selections I'm using are basically arguments like 00:10:38.349 --> 00:10:43.076 this is why we should think differently than we thought before about 00:10:43.109 --> 00:10:47.336 motion Galileo's whole thing about how. Old ideas that Aristotle and 00:10:47.369 --> 00:10:51.336 others had about dynamics and motion are wrong. The whole argument is in 00:10:51.369 --> 00:10:54.816 words. There's a diagram or two to illustrate his point, but it's mostly 00:10:54.849 --> 00:10:58.537 an argument, something like a human event paper. So I have the students go 00:10:58.570 --> 00:11:01.816 through and pick the argument apart and put the terms on the board, and if 00:11:01.849 --> 00:11:04.976 there's confusion, they have to figure it out. I'll help a little bit, but 00:11:05.009 --> 00:11:08.616 I won't give them the answer. And you know what? My art majors are often 00:11:08.649 --> 00:11:13.275 the best at these discussions. And my science majors are often surprised 00:11:13.308 --> 00:11:16.356 that they didn't really understand these issues. They had taken them for 00:11:16.389 --> 00:11:20.076 granted. They're acing their calc based physics course, right? But they 00:11:20.109 --> 00:11:25.717 had to stop to think conceptually about what was really going on. So, but 00:11:25.750 --> 00:11:29.787 it's always discussion-based, even the science stuff, and I resist. I 00:11:29.820 --> 00:11:32.996 actually write down a note to myself all the time, don't watch it because 00:11:33.029 --> 00:11:36.395 the great temptation is I will stand up and I will just take over the 00:11:36.428 --> 00:11:41.157 conversation, but I don't. So why do you teach for Barrett Do you prefer 00:11:41.190 --> 00:11:45.476 the more discussion based stuff to the astronom to just teaching like 00:11:45.509 --> 00:11:49.557 astronomy or physics in that lecture style to teach physics and astronomy 00:11:49.590 --> 00:11:54.505 love to I love to hear the sound of my voice, I lecturing, 00:11:54.538 --> 00:11:57.875 but first of all, the the job just suits me. A friend of mine, Lady 00:11:57.908 --> 00:12:02.275 Wilkinson, who was a fellow student when I was in Huntsville, and we and 00:12:02.308 --> 00:12:06.255 she and I worked at NASA together. Um, she said when I told her about the 00:12:06.288 --> 00:12:10.015 job and she and her husband were here temporarily working for Intel, and 00:12:10.048 --> 00:12:15.566 she said, wait. There's a job where they pay you to be Joe Foy, so part of 00:12:15.599 --> 00:12:18.907 it is I found a job where they pay me to do what I would do anyway, which 00:12:18.940 --> 00:12:22.547 is read a lot of books and sit around and talk about them, um, except I do 00:12:22.580 --> 00:12:28.145 have to grade papers, right? So I think it suits me, it suits my interest. 00:12:28.178 --> 00:12:30.635 I'm certainly there's a part of me that loves to teach astronomy and 00:12:30.668 --> 00:12:33.456 physics, and I've done that, you know, I, I've gotten a chance to do that 00:12:33.489 --> 00:12:39.265 , uh. But ultimately I find this work so satisfying. I teach an upper 00:12:39.298 --> 00:12:43.625 division course, which is a popular general-based course in the history of 00:12:43.658 --> 00:12:47.427 quantum physics and the philosophy of quantum physics. That too is a 00:12:47.460 --> 00:12:51.287 seminar style discussion, and that's probably my most challenging course 00:12:51.320 --> 00:12:55.486 because there I have to pick texts carefully that aren't filled with 00:12:55.519 --> 00:12:59.956 mathematics and I have to pick texts so that students can. Have a 00:12:59.989 --> 00:13:04.635 discussion and lead the discussion and so that I'm not lecturing at them 00:13:04.668 --> 00:13:08.275 that makes sense, but I do, I, I don't know, the job just fits me the way 00:13:08.308 --> 00:13:12.917 I don't know 00:13:12.950 --> 00:13:19.057 fits a fish, I suppose. I've been here since the fall of 2008, 00:13:19.090 --> 00:13:24.005 1 year. Um, wow, I have to say it's, it's the longest job I've ever held, 00:13:24.038 --> 00:13:28.446 and, um, it is the best job I've held. Uh, it's just been a terrific job. 00:13:28.479 --> 00:13:32.525 I work with great students. The deans are fantastic. Mark Jacobs and I 00:13:32.558 --> 00:13:36.885 have a connection. He was a professor at Swarthmore. After I came to work 00:13:36.918 --> 00:13:41.005 here, I found out that he was best friends with someone my parents rented 00:13:41.038 --> 00:13:45.375 a house from in Swarthmore, Beamman's. Yeah, um, Todd Beaman is a history 00:13:45.408 --> 00:13:49.066 professor at UPenn, and it turned out. My parents had rented their old 00:13:49.099 --> 00:13:53.346 house, Todd Beaman's old house, and it turned out that Todd Beaman's he's 00:13:53.379 --> 00:13:57.186 with Mark. So anyways, Mark and I joke about Swarthmo all the time, but 00:13:57.219 --> 00:14:01.427 it's a great bosses. Peggy Nelson was a terrific dean. Nicola Foote, who 00:14:01.460 --> 00:14:05.696 just hired, who's the, the new associate dean, is also fantastic. So there 00:14:05.729 --> 00:14:10.106 aren't many chances you get where the your bosses are fantastic, your 00:14:10.139 --> 00:14:13.385 colleagues are great, and then the people you work with, your students are 00:14:13.418 --> 00:14:17.096 pleasure. So that's the other thing. I have friends of mine who are. 00:14:17.129 --> 00:14:21.297 Research physicists who are in, you know, universities back east or over 00:14:21.330 --> 00:14:24.217 in Berkeley or something, and they always have these stories about these 00:14:24.250 --> 00:14:27.417 terrific fights they're having with their colleagues and doors slamming 00:14:27.450 --> 00:14:32.967 and uh and it just sounds like a nightmare and I have that. 00:14:33.000 --> 00:14:41.000 Yeah So 00:14:55.099 --> 00:14:56.667 how's that? That was very good. Um, I heard of like connections, I actually heard you have some connections to President Crow. Yes, I do, yes. So, is that it? I think that's how we put it. He's the father of 00:14:56.700 --> 00:15:00.946 President Crow's wife Sybil Sybil. 00:15:00.979 --> 00:15:05.145 But, but Leonard Maximon is a wonderful man, he's a physicist and 00:15:05.178 --> 00:15:09.866 mathematician, as you might know, Leonard Maximon got his PhD at Cornell 00:15:09.899 --> 00:15:15.336 under Hans Bada, one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century. 00:15:15.369 --> 00:15:19.167 Doctor Maximon and I just kind of became friends and he started hanging 00:15:19.200 --> 00:15:23.967 out in my quantum course and uh we are lunch partners. I actually 00:15:24.000 --> 00:15:27.976 encouraged him because I've written uh an undergraduate textbook on 00:15:28.009 --> 00:15:32.936 electricity and magnetism, a physics textbook. And he had been shopping 00:15:32.969 --> 00:15:37.255 around, uh, a monograph, a book on differential and different equations 00:15:37.288 --> 00:15:42.736 for some years, um, and I said, Well, why don't you, why don't you find 00:15:42.769 --> 00:15:46.316 some publishing companies and, and kind of write a letter and he said, 00:15:46.349 --> 00:15:48.696 Well, we helped me with the process and I helped him with the letter and 00:15:48.729 --> 00:15:53.576 so forth. And he eventually did and Springer Verlag published his book, 00:15:53.609 --> 00:15:56.736 and he has a nice little acknowledgment of me and on the front. It's 00:15:56.769 --> 00:16:01.525 lovely and it's a lovely book. Um, Leonard I, Leonard not only has helped 00:16:01.558 --> 00:16:05.125 me with my quantum class, he would help me with ideas. He'd sit in on the 00:16:05.158 --> 00:16:09.726 discussions and listen and give me advice, um, and we would just talk 00:16:09.759 --> 00:16:14.836 about he he was so, so fantastic, um, but then he is also involved with 00:16:14.869 --> 00:16:18.736 the, the Herberer and the students out there, and he and I would talk 00:16:18.769 --> 00:16:23.145 about, uh, different ideas and how to teach and, and, and stuff like that. 00:16:23.178 --> 00:16:28.467 Um, so he's just a terrific guy and it's funny, I didn't realize until we 00:16:28.500 --> 00:16:32.066 were hanging out for some time that he was related to Michael Grove, um, 00:16:32.099 --> 00:16:36.667 because we just talk physics and math and history. He, by the way, um, he 00:16:36.700 --> 00:16:40.265 worked for the National Bureau of Standards in the 50s and if you've seen 00:16:40.298 --> 00:16:44.265 the movie Hidden Figures, he worked in an office that was across the river. 00:16:44.298 --> 00:16:48.576 Yeah, and he had his own stories to tell about racial segregation in that 00:16:48.609 --> 00:16:52.255 time because it was an African American scientist, a physicist in his 00:16:52.288 --> 00:16:55.736 group, and they, they, where they were at, they could find one damn 00:16:55.769 --> 00:16:58.895 restaurant that they could go to together as a group, and that's the only 00:16:58.928 --> 00:17:02.177 restaurant they would go to because all the other restaurants at that time 00:17:02.210 --> 00:17:08.107 were segregated. So, how's that? That that conversation you just mentioned 00:17:08.140 --> 00:17:12.666 about art students and like how to teach, what how did that conversation 00:17:12.699 --> 00:17:17.026 go down and what or what did he tell you? You mean how to teach the 00:17:17.059 --> 00:17:21.107 quantum class, you mean you you mentioned that he hung out with Herberger 00:17:21.140 --> 00:17:24.345 students and students. 00:17:24.378 --> 00:17:28.105 Right, so he was teaching and he still does. I haven't spoken to him since 00:17:28.138 --> 00:17:31.466 around Christmas time, so I don't know what's up with Leonard, but he 00:17:31.499 --> 00:17:34.665 would teach a science course for very gifted students. These Herberger 00:17:34.698 --> 00:17:37.585 students weren't only art students. They're, you know, they're just these 00:17:37.618 --> 00:17:42.717 incredibly gifted students. So he would frequently have students like 00:17:42.750 --> 00:17:46.236 there was this one young woman, she was 13, she wanted to know about black 00:17:46.269 --> 00:17:50.085 holes and she wanted to know about women physicists and you know for 00:17:50.118 --> 00:17:53.315 Leonard he's like, well, I kind of know and we would kind of go through 00:17:53.348 --> 00:17:56.785 things like who could we tell her about it? How do you explain black holes 00:17:56.818 --> 00:17:59.916 to very bright 13 year old students who are smart enough to get some of 00:17:59.949 --> 00:18:02.956 the concepts, but of course it's always when you're teaching something 00:18:02.989 --> 00:18:06.906 like black holes. Those pretty pictures like the embedding diagrams and 00:18:06.939 --> 00:18:10.426 all that stuff that we use to kind of explain it in a Neil deGrasse Tyson 00:18:10.459 --> 00:18:14.217 kind of way can also be misleading and, and Leonard wants to be quite 00:18:14.250 --> 00:18:18.946 scrupulous not to give misleading analogies or to at least be able to 00:18:18.979 --> 00:18:22.545 explain all that here's the limit of this analogy. So we would just have 00:18:22.578 --> 00:18:26.186 conversations about, well, will this work? Oh, would that work? or Leonard 00:18:26.219 --> 00:18:30.467 would ask me, well, I'm thinking about teaching it this way, right? And so 00:18:30.500 --> 00:18:35.276 , um, we, uh. 00:18:35.309 --> 00:18:38.236 We just talk back and forth, so I didn't have like a prescriptive list 00:18:38.269 --> 00:18:42.186 like aha, Leonard, do this, right? It would be more of a conversation that 00:18:42.219 --> 00:18:46.877 we would have back and forth as colleagues and we same thing with my 00:18:46.910 --> 00:18:50.045 quantum class when he would come to my quantum class and he would. 00:18:50.078 --> 00:18:53.506 Suggesting he even gave me a few lovely write-ups of, you know, he says, 00:18:53.539 --> 00:18:56.946 you know, I've been thinking about the boar Adam and here's how I might 00:18:56.979 --> 00:18:59.426 explain it. And I'm like, OK, and he would send me this write up he would 00:18:59.459 --> 00:19:03.815 do, and it was always so fresh and interesting. He's a first grade teacher 00:19:03.848 --> 00:19:11.848 , a great guy. Yeah, so that's, that's kind of my indirect connection. 00:19:12.140 --> 00:19:16.585 I would not claim that I'm close friends with or anything like that, 00:19:16.618 --> 00:19:22.976 but, but certainly there is that connection to the president through 00:19:23.009 --> 00:19:26.325 Dr. Maximum, I should say. 00:19:26.358 --> 00:19:29.196 So in your own experience, liberal arts and science have been very much 00:19:29.229 --> 00:19:34.367 connected, but how do you think Barrett as a whole does um for providing 00:19:34.400 --> 00:19:39.075 for students and science majors? Good question because I, I know that 00:19:39.108 --> 00:19:42.887 science students frequently ask, they never ask me, right? They just 00:19:42.920 --> 00:19:46.476 assume since I'm an astrophysicist that whatever I tell them or whatever I 00:19:46.509 --> 00:19:49.436 had them read will somehow be useful to their careers. I never have an 00:19:49.469 --> 00:19:53.075 engineering student going, how will this help me take Laplace transforms 00:19:53.108 --> 00:19:57.717 better, um, but I think for many of my humanities colleagues or even 00:19:57.750 --> 00:20:02.295 social science colleagues, oftentimes the, the. Engineering, physics, 00:20:02.328 --> 00:20:07.006 biology majors will be more assertive and even aggressive, like, why am I 00:20:07.039 --> 00:20:11.666 reading this, why am I writing argumentative essays? I put the first 00:20:11.699 --> 00:20:15.377 answer to something I hinted at earlier, which is Copernicus and Newton 00:20:15.410 --> 00:20:19.226 and Galileo and Einstein, and I have my students read some Einstein. 00:20:19.259 --> 00:20:23.666 They're writing arguments. If you read the first couple of paragraphs to 00:20:23.699 --> 00:20:28.347 Albert Einstein's paper on relativity, uh, which is called the the the 00:20:28.380 --> 00:20:32.867 electrodynamics of moving bodies, or the first couple of paragraphs to his 00:20:32.900 --> 00:20:36.976 famous paper in which he introduces the idea of light particles or photons. 00:20:37.009 --> 00:20:40.055 They're arguments. There are no equations, they're conceptual, and he's 00:20:40.088 --> 00:20:44.456 making an argument. He has a thesis, right? It sounds like a standard 00:20:44.489 --> 00:20:47.656 thesis he would write in a human event essay. Guess what? If you're a 00:20:47.689 --> 00:20:50.137 scientist and an engineer, you know what a large part of your life is 00:20:50.170 --> 00:20:54.666 gonna be. Writing arguments you may not think it's an argument, but when 00:20:54.699 --> 00:20:58.585 you write a paper to your boss or to your group saying this is what we 00:20:58.618 --> 00:21:02.627 found, this is my research report, it's an argument you've got a thesis 00:21:02.660 --> 00:21:06.656 like yes we should build this rocket. No, we should not build this rocket 00:21:06.689 --> 00:21:10.305 yes we should launch because there's no problem with the O-ring. No we 00:21:10.338 --> 00:21:14.611 shouldn't because everything is and I know this. My father was an 00:21:14.644 --> 00:21:18.361 aerospace engineer who also had a background in technical writing. So he 00:21:18.394 --> 00:21:22.003 was a twofer. So when they would hire my dad and they usually would hire 00:21:22.036 --> 00:21:25.162 him and pay him pretty good coin because they knew not only would they get 00:21:25.195 --> 00:21:28.642 first-rate engineering, but he could write technical reports as well as 00:21:28.675 --> 00:21:32.361 any of their professional technical writers. And my dad always said, it's 00:21:32.394 --> 00:21:35.232 an argument, even if you don't think it's an argument. You've got a thesis 00:21:35.265 --> 00:21:39.737 , you've got evidence. You, you're, you're convincing someone either to do 00:21:39.770 --> 00:21:42.659 something or not do something. There is no such thing as a neutral 00:21:42.692 --> 00:21:47.418 technical report. All reports are basically, oh say do this, don't do this 00:21:47.451 --> 00:21:51.098 , here's, you know, the, the path to go. So if you're an engineer or a 00:21:51.131 --> 00:21:54.299 science student, much of your writing is gonna to be argumentative writing. 00:21:54.332 --> 00:21:58.217 You have to think critically. You have to sift evidence and you have to 00:21:58.250 --> 00:22:02.476 persuade a reader. Right. First of all, you have to persuade them that 00:22:02.509 --> 00:22:06.367 it's even worth their time to read what you've written. If you write a 00:22:06.400 --> 00:22:10.206 scientific paper, I don't know if you guys are science majors, right? So 00:22:10.239 --> 00:22:13.246 let me, do you wanna know how you read a scientific paper? I'm about to 00:22:13.279 --> 00:22:16.367 tell you the eH Hollywood true story. How do you read a scientific paper. 00:22:16.400 --> 00:22:22.335 You look at the abstract. Is it good? If it's not good, do not, you don't 00:22:22.368 --> 00:22:26.815 read. It's like a flow chart, right? No, no more. If it's good, what do 00:22:26.848 --> 00:22:31.617 you do next? You read the conclusion. If those are good, then if it's 00:22:31.650 --> 00:22:34.575 physics paper or an astronomy paper, the next thing I do is I look at all 00:22:34.608 --> 00:22:38.097 the pretty pictures, pretty pictures. And I also look for equations. Are 00:22:38.130 --> 00:22:42.496 there pretty equations? OK. Then and only then do I begin to read the body 00:22:42.529 --> 00:22:45.575 of the paper. Well, it's the same thing with the human event essay. How 00:22:45.608 --> 00:22:49.686 does your, you guys have both taken the human, OK. So I'll tell you how I 00:22:49.719 --> 00:22:52.805 grade the human event. This is more e-H Hollywood true story than you 00:22:52.838 --> 00:22:56.426 bargained for. I look at that first paragraph with the thesis statement, 00:22:56.459 --> 00:23:00.065 the thesis and the roadmap, and I say, is this compelling and interesting 00:23:00.098 --> 00:23:05.217 ? Now, I do read the student's paper, do you know why? 00:23:05.250 --> 00:23:08.246 I read the whole paper no matter how bad the thesis statement is. So 00:23:08.279 --> 00:23:12.246 people don't hide just filler text because I get paid to, and that's what 00:23:12.279 --> 00:23:16.486 I remind my students. The difference between your human event instructor 00:23:16.519 --> 00:23:20.847 and the guy or the gal you're going to work for in an engineering firm is 00:23:20.880 --> 00:23:24.166 I get paid to read your stuff no matter how poorly written it is, no 00:23:24.199 --> 00:23:28.706 matter how badly argued, because that's my job, right? So you give me a 00:23:28.739 --> 00:23:32.776 crappy thesis with a terrible roadmap. I still got to read the whole paper. 00:23:32.809 --> 00:23:36.016 You know what? Your boss doesn't have to do that. If she reads your 00:23:36.049 --> 00:23:39.617 report and you have a crappy abstract and a crappy conclusion, you know 00:23:39.650 --> 00:23:44.217 what she does? She files it in her, her cylindrical filing cabinet. It 00:23:44.250 --> 00:23:48.867 would be like that. And then she gets somebody else to write the report. 00:23:48.900 --> 00:23:54.506 Mhm. That's why learning to write is fundamental and learning how to write 00:23:54.539 --> 00:23:58.897 , and good scientific writing is the same kind of writing you do in the 00:23:58.930 --> 00:24:02.377 human event. So that's the first thing you get. Secondly, you get the 00:24:02.410 --> 00:24:06.847 ability to think critically. You need that, and I'm telling you. These 00:24:06.880 --> 00:24:10.325 science texts, when it comes to the critical stuff, it's not too different 00:24:10.358 --> 00:24:15.045 from reading a text from philosophy or even poetry and beginning to look 00:24:15.078 --> 00:24:18.835 at it critically. What is the author trying to say? What's going on here? 00:24:18.868 --> 00:24:21.967 What should I be getting from this? What's the evidence? How do I weigh 00:24:22.000 --> 00:24:27.226 this? Right? Marks and Smith can't both be right, can they? Right? But 00:24:27.259 --> 00:24:30.887 they're, they're making an argument, right, each in its own way. How do I 00:24:30.920 --> 00:24:36.276 weigh that? So there's that. Then finally, last but not least, if you're a 00:24:36.309 --> 00:24:40.476 human being, you need calculus and poetry. You need them both. If you 00:24:40.509 --> 00:24:43.676 don't have them both, it's like, I don't know, like those weightlifters 00:24:43.709 --> 00:24:47.706 who never work out with their legs. It's like you press some upper bodies 00:24:47.739 --> 00:24:51.075 that they have these two thick legs and they can really stand up, right? 00:24:51.108 --> 00:24:54.597 You don't want to be like that, right? So you need it as a human being. To 00:24:54.630 --> 00:24:58.315 me, having grown up with parents who read books or poetry and literature 00:24:58.348 --> 00:25:03.647 and art was a part of my childhood and a part of my life. I can't imagine 00:25:03.680 --> 00:25:06.647 like why you wouldn't be doing this, right? That's why it always appalls 00:25:06.680 --> 00:25:09.956 me when I see students with those rent me or those rent, those books with 00:25:09.989 --> 00:25:15.526 the rent sticker on it. I just like buy the book, it's only 8 bucks. I go 00:25:15.559 --> 00:25:19.516 without a Slurpee or whatever it is, uh, you know, a venti mochiata, right 00:25:19.549 --> 00:25:27.549 , for a couple of weeks and buy the book. How's that? That was good. Good. 00:25:29.769 --> 00:25:34.276 I'm gonna take a water here. Oh, absolutely. 00:25:34.309 --> 00:25:38.156 Oh, I had another friend who graduated from Barrett. Sarah Bush, fantastic. 00:25:38.189 --> 00:25:42.236 She was a Flynn scholar and she graduated in '99 or 2000, and she studied 00:25:42.269 --> 00:25:45.996 in Harbin in China. And at one time, I'm breaking confidence, she had been 00:25:46.029 --> 00:25:50.617 a Senate aide um back in the 90s for Deacon Seeney, you know, those, the. 00:25:50.650 --> 00:25:53.805 Programs, the intern programs anyway, she told me a story about Senator 00:25:53.838 --> 00:25:56.887 Byrd from West Virginia. Apparently he had a picture of water that was 00:25:56.920 --> 00:26:01.206 marked Senator Byrd's water, and you were not to touch it or drink from it 00:26:01.239 --> 00:26:04.835 , and it was a clear substance that looked like water, but the rumor was 00:26:04.868 --> 00:26:08.246 that it wasn't. 00:26:08.279 --> 00:26:14.055 So we're gonna trust that 00:26:14.088 --> 00:26:16.496 that's just I'm not. I don't have that. 00:26:16.529 --> 00:26:21.285 for an interesting interview. 00:26:21.318 --> 00:26:25.315 Bart's version of drunk. 00:26:25.348 --> 00:26:30.776 I don't actually. I'm sick in a sense. 00:26:30.809 --> 00:26:38.809 Is is good, sick is good. We have to keep you on your toes. 00:26:40.868 --> 00:26:44.717 So human event is the main class you teach here. Um, tell me about some of 00:26:44.750 --> 00:26:47.825 the other classes you've taught, and I believe you've done some study 00:26:47.858 --> 00:26:54.736 abroad classes as well. Well, um, I'll tell you about study abroad. 00:26:54.769 --> 00:26:59.565 I did was with Doctor Don Fetty, and it was to Germany and Switzerland. It 00:26:59.598 --> 00:27:03.246 was uh the 200th. It was to commemorate the 200th anniversary of 00:27:03.279 --> 00:27:08.325 Frankenstein, which I had the students read. Doctor Fetty brought his 00:27:08.358 --> 00:27:12.726 expertise in romantic literature and romanticism. He knows Shelly, Keats, 00:27:12.759 --> 00:27:18.045 all those guys, and, um, he studied the novel very closely. So he brought 00:27:18.078 --> 00:27:21.486 his perspective. I with my science background and history of science 00:27:21.519 --> 00:27:24.325 background could bringing my perspective. I've lived with the novel 00:27:24.358 --> 00:27:27.926 Frankenstein since I was 10 when I first read it, so it's, it's been a 00:27:27.959 --> 00:27:33.285 lifelong love of mine. Um, we not only of course had heavy academic work 00:27:33.318 --> 00:27:37.535 that the students had to do, but we. The visits were all set by the novel 00:27:37.568 --> 00:27:41.877 , so we are in Ingolstadt for a week. That's where Victor Frankenstein is 00:27:41.910 --> 00:27:45.217 a student. It's where he's an undergraduate, where he brings the creature 00:27:45.250 --> 00:27:49.016 to life. I always warn my students that the novel Frankenstein is an 00:27:49.049 --> 00:27:54.315 excellent warning. Against unsupervised research, um, and also against 00:27:54.348 --> 00:27:59.877 doing research without getting your IRB training, so you must get, do get 00:27:59.910 --> 00:28:05.196 IRB don't do what Victor did. Um, Inglehot's a fantastic, a small town. I 00:28:05.229 --> 00:28:08.335 wouldn't have thought of it, but Doctor Fetty knew it. And we went to 00:28:08.368 --> 00:28:12.897 Ingolstadt and um they were very conscious of the fact that Ingolstadt is 00:28:12.930 --> 00:28:17.535 the setting for where Victor is a student. They had a great uh art exhibit 00:28:17.568 --> 00:28:20.976 with two well-known artists whose names escape me at the moment called 00:28:21.009 --> 00:28:26.156 Artificial Intelligence. Uh, and artificial stupidity and it was tied into 00:28:26.189 --> 00:28:29.555 the novel and this whole idea of creating life but also creating 00:28:29.588 --> 00:28:34.117 intelligence and technology out of control. Um, this was the sort of thing 00:28:34.150 --> 00:28:37.756 we took students on a tour there. The state museum had a whole thing that 00:28:37.789 --> 00:28:41.436 they were celebrating the anniversary of the novel with some of the themes 00:28:41.469 --> 00:28:46.217 from the novel and had an original copy, one of the first, um, German 00:28:46.250 --> 00:28:50.637 translations of the novel there at the museum for the students to see. So 00:28:50.670 --> 00:28:54.637 this was a great trip. So we stayed in Ingolstadt, Darmstadt, uh, where 00:28:54.670 --> 00:28:57.766 they actually have a castle Frankenstein. We found out that Castle 00:28:57.799 --> 00:29:00.867 Frankenstein is kind of like Washington slept here. There are a whole 00:29:00.900 --> 00:29:04.835 bunch of castle Frankenstein's all over that part of Europe. It's like 00:29:04.868 --> 00:29:09.597 Captain Smith. This one probably has the closest claim to being the castle 00:29:09.630 --> 00:29:13.276 Frankenstein that may have inspired Mary Shelley from the title of the 00:29:13.309 --> 00:29:18.555 novel. It's near, um, the Rhine and, and it kind of looks like, oh yeah, 00:29:18.588 --> 00:29:22.815 maybe, maybe that could be it. Um, we stayed in Geneva, Victor 00:29:22.848 --> 00:29:27.736 Frankenstein, the character is from Geneva, and the history of that city 00:29:27.769 --> 00:29:31.696 finds its way into many of the major themes of the novel. So that's one 00:29:31.729 --> 00:29:34.815 study abroad that that's the most recent one that I've done, and Feddi was 00:29:34.848 --> 00:29:38.722 fantastic. First of all, he speaks German and he's a. 00:29:38.755 --> 00:29:42.410 and then the other ones you want to hear about. But first, how do you 00:29:42.443 --> 00:29:47.811 think this trips that went on it too? Well, they seem to have like, wow, 00:29:47.844 --> 00:29:51.891 how did it affect them in ways and I were talking about we were talking 00:29:51.924 --> 00:29:56.256 about we were on the trip. First of all, the kids were open to having new 00:29:56.289 --> 00:29:59.006 experiences and open to learning things, and one of the things that we 00:29:59.039 --> 00:30:03.647 found interesting was that one of the things the students really, really 00:30:03.680 --> 00:30:08.766 found inspiring, moving was to be in the UN, you know, the UN, uh, 00:30:08.799 --> 00:30:12.766 headquarters, especially for refugees and human rights, is there in Geneva. 00:30:12.799 --> 00:30:15.976 So it's kind of the non-political like the political parts in New York 00:30:16.009 --> 00:30:19.446 where there's the Security Council and all that, but in Geneva it's like 00:30:19.479 --> 00:30:24.416 the Council on Human Rights, the council on on refugees. Well we got this 00:30:24.449 --> 00:30:27.976 fantastic tour and the history going back to The Hague and the history of 00:30:28.009 --> 00:30:31.535 the Red Cross. We got a tour of the Red Cross and this history of like Red 00:30:31.568 --> 00:30:35.575 Cross volunteers and people in The Hague getting letters and forwarding 00:30:35.608 --> 00:30:39.446 care packages to prisoners of war all across Europe at the height of World 00:30:39.479 --> 00:30:43.416 War I and there's this photograph of these people, these men and women in 00:30:43.449 --> 00:30:47.506 these starch shirts and very formal attire going through reams of index 00:30:47.539 --> 00:30:51.137 cards to make sure that letters get to the right prisoner of war in the 00:30:51.170 --> 00:30:56.897 right camp in Germany and France and. And we were just so stunned and 00:30:56.930 --> 00:31:01.656 gobsmacked. These men and women who looked like they could've kind of not 00:31:01.689 --> 00:31:04.956 had done this. They could've just gone on with their lives, chose to, to, 00:31:04.989 --> 00:31:08.535 to volunteer and do all of this. And of course this happened right at the 00:31:08.568 --> 00:31:12.335 very moment that here in Arizona, the policy of the current administration 00:31:12.368 --> 00:31:15.936 was hitting where they had that zero tolerance policy that led to 00:31:15.969 --> 00:31:20.456 separation of children from their mothers and um we were there that week 00:31:20.489 --> 00:31:25.881 we were in the Hotel Ibis and there were. Delegates to the commission on 00:31:25.914 --> 00:31:30.361 refugees. There was a big meeting on the status of refugees that very week 00:31:30.394 --> 00:31:34.561 and the students were there overhearing conversations from, uh, delegates 00:31:34.594 --> 00:31:37.842 and some of our students even talked to delegates, particularly delegates 00:31:37.875 --> 00:31:42.137 from Africa. It was really. So it was, it's interesting. It wasn't 00:31:42.170 --> 00:31:46.256 directly related to Frankenstein, and yet here was this aspect of the trip 00:31:46.289 --> 00:31:49.377 that the students all commented on. Two of our students are going to do 00:31:49.410 --> 00:31:53.936 their senior thesis on the UN and refugees and, and this issue, which was 00:31:53.969 --> 00:31:57.055 one of those unexpected things. Of course there was the Frankenstein stuff 00:31:57.088 --> 00:32:01.416 , um, which was great, but. That was one of the things that were just so 00:32:01.449 --> 00:32:06.026 moved and so fascinated to see that our students were open to it. What 00:32:06.059 --> 00:32:09.535 what was the academic work like on the trip or or what did you want the 00:32:09.568 --> 00:32:13.377 students to take out of it through the, through the coursework what I 00:32:13.410 --> 00:32:19.456 wanted to do was to tie the novel to them and and 00:32:19.489 --> 00:32:24.097 that came from the locations we were at, for example, in Geneva. There are 00:32:24.130 --> 00:32:28.815 plenty of hints in the novel to political themes and to the events of the 00:32:28.848 --> 00:32:32.535 French Revolution and after the French Revolution in Switzerland's history. 00:32:32.568 --> 00:32:36.575 The character Alphonse Frankenstein, Victor's father is a syndic, and 00:32:36.608 --> 00:32:39.486 there's a republic, there's the Geneva Republic, where did that come from 00:32:39.519 --> 00:32:44.176 ? Oh, John Calvin, and there's this whole history of kind of like the 00:32:44.209 --> 00:32:48.285 Southern Reformation which was centered in Geneva and Calvin and how that. 00:32:48.318 --> 00:32:52.597 Influenced the politics, but also how it influenced Rousseau, who's one 00:32:52.630 --> 00:32:56.805 of the great writers that comes out of Geneva. Geneva has a big place in 00:32:56.838 --> 00:33:00.476 Rousseau's heart. He always says, I'm a citizen of Geneva. Remember 00:33:00.509 --> 00:33:04.956 Rousseau writes the social contract and Emil and Origin Discourse on the 00:33:04.989 --> 00:33:08.926 origin of inequality. He's constantly thinking of Geneva. When he returns 00:33:08.959 --> 00:33:13.217 to Geneva, having lived in Paris, they're shocked to find that he's a. You 00:33:13.250 --> 00:33:16.137 know, philosopher of the Enlightenment, so they expect that he'll kind of 00:33:16.170 --> 00:33:19.936 hang out with the, the kind of upper crust, you know, kind of the what we 00:33:19.969 --> 00:33:23.617 would call the liberal New Yorker reading types. And instead he identifies 00:33:23.650 --> 00:33:27.617 with the more kind of lower classes and their religious kind of what we 00:33:27.650 --> 00:33:31.656 might call religious conservatism. He says, no, republic needs virtue. He 00:33:31.689 --> 00:33:35.137 identifies with Calvin and the Reformation in many ways, and it's a kind 00:33:35.170 --> 00:33:38.795 of interesting thing. People are a little surprised by Rousseau. Um, so I 00:33:38.828 --> 00:33:43.795 , we talk about how Rousseau influences the novel and how the politics of 00:33:43.828 --> 00:33:48.555 Geneva influenced Rousseau, um, and this question of family dynamics and 00:33:48.588 --> 00:33:51.746 how do you raise a virtuous citizen, because after all, Alphonse 00:33:51.779 --> 00:33:55.706 Frankenstein is raising his son is this whole line in the novel about how 00:33:55.739 --> 00:34:01.236 he's having sons for the state, for the republic, and that's very reoian 00:34:01.269 --> 00:34:04.319 right this idea that you. You're not just going to be an educated 00:34:04.352 --> 00:34:06.448 gentleman, you have to be good for something. You have to be a good 00:34:06.481 --> 00:34:10.968 citizen and a good, you know, member of the republic. Um, so we talk about 00:34:11.001 --> 00:34:14.849 that. We talk about the Southern Reformation with John Calvin. I showed 00:34:14.882 --> 00:34:17.968 them where America comes from. We go to the Reformation Wall. There's John 00:34:18.001 --> 00:34:21.608 Calvin. It looks like something from Maoist communist statues of Mao or 00:34:21.641 --> 00:34:25.568 something, and there's John Calvin, you know, 90 ft tall, and then next to 00:34:25.601 --> 00:34:29.740 him is Roger Williams, the guy who wrote. The Rhode Island Compact, you 00:34:29.773 --> 00:34:34.539 know, and, and we talk about that and the influence of these ideas. Shelly 00:34:34.572 --> 00:34:37.901 sets her novel in Geneva. I don't think it's an accident that she does, 00:34:37.934 --> 00:34:41.570 and she does it in the wake of the French Revolution that looked to her so 00:34:41.603 --> 00:34:45.860 and in some ways looked to the revolutionaries of, of Geneva, right, as 00:34:45.893 --> 00:34:50.010 kind of heroes as like these are the guys we should, you know, model. And 00:34:50.043 --> 00:34:54.072 of course, the French Revolution didn't end so well, right? I think Shelly 00:34:54.105 --> 00:34:57.412 kind of puts her finger on the, on the kind of politics like what goes 00:34:57.445 --> 00:35:01.072 right and what goes wrong with this kind of revolutionary ideology and 00:35:01.105 --> 00:35:04.233 she's thinking about it in a in a deeper sense, not merely the French 00:35:04.266 --> 00:35:08.592 Revolution, but going back to the Reformation, going back to John. So 00:35:08.625 --> 00:35:10.992 that's among the things that we talked about. We have the printing press 00:35:11.025 --> 00:35:14.072 and the Reformation. That's the other thing, and that's the city where you 00:35:14.105 --> 00:35:16.673 have we went up to Saint Pierre's and there's the Museum of the 00:35:16.706 --> 00:35:20.717 Reformation. And so they get a whole new perspective on the political 00:35:20.750 --> 00:35:24.517 themes that that are touched on in the novel, for one thing, right? We 00:35:24.550 --> 00:35:28.276 also looked at science museums, right, especially in Darmstadt, but also 00:35:28.309 --> 00:35:33.865 in Geneva, um, and in uh. So what was the other science music? I think 00:35:33.898 --> 00:35:36.916 those were the biggies, right? And this question of science and how 00:35:36.949 --> 00:35:41.626 science is applied and what's the role of science, um, and what should be 00:35:41.659 --> 00:35:45.017 the role of science, um, 00:35:45.050 --> 00:35:48.385 I don't know that help answer your question. What are some other classes 00:35:48.418 --> 00:35:52.026 and study abroad you've taught on? So prior to that, my experience at the 00:35:52.059 --> 00:35:56.537 study abroad had been going or directing. The trip to the United Kingdom 00:35:56.570 --> 00:36:00.905 and I've, I've gone 4 times, two of those times I directed. I first went 00:36:00.938 --> 00:36:06.845 in 2011 and 2012 with Dr. Dianne Fein. Dianne Feinstein, the senator from 00:36:06.878 --> 00:36:11.155 Dr. Diane Felsin. 00:36:11.188 --> 00:36:14.646 That would have been interesting to go with Doctor Senator Feinstein and I 00:36:14.679 --> 00:36:19.356 went to, so Fassinelli, and she would emphasize kind of medieval history, 00:36:19.389 --> 00:36:23.845 the Roman the, uh, the romantics, and more importantly, like, uh, Mallory 00:36:23.878 --> 00:36:28.146 and kind of that of Sir Gain and the Green Knight. I would do, since I'm 00:36:28.179 --> 00:36:32.626 my background in science, what I did with the UK trip is I would talk 00:36:32.659 --> 00:36:37.916 about the. The scientific revolution, which frankly, the British Isles was 00:36:37.949 --> 00:36:41.467 the epicenter, that's where Newton and so many of the scientists that kind 00:36:41.500 --> 00:36:47.356 of Darwin, Faraday, Boyle, you name it. So I would tie science texts to 00:36:47.389 --> 00:36:52.126 the location. But I would also look at the reaction to science, and I do 00:36:52.159 --> 00:36:56.635 the same thing in my 2172 course. So William Blake, the, the great English 00:36:56.668 --> 00:37:00.506 poet, really has a problem with Newton. He does not like Newton. He does 00:37:00.539 --> 00:37:03.865 not like Francis Bacon, and he sure as hell doesn't like John Locke, right 00:37:03.898 --> 00:37:07.787 he sees these guys, I don't know if you've ever read the, uh, the poem or 00:37:07.820 --> 00:37:12.267 an excerpt from Jerusalem where he compares Bacon and Newton's philosophy 00:37:12.300 --> 00:37:17.445 to serpents that are going to constrict you. Um, he compares. John Locke's 00:37:17.478 --> 00:37:21.845 philosophy to a loom, and he talks about the water wheels of Newton that 00:37:21.878 --> 00:37:26.445 wash Lock's cloth black and then spreads it over the universities of 00:37:26.478 --> 00:37:29.675 Europe, basically turning all these students into widgets where you have 00:37:29.708 --> 00:37:33.287 the same ideas and he says, this is terrible, right? Because Blake is the 00:37:33.320 --> 00:37:37.166 party of poetry. So you see this kind of romantic reaction against the 00:37:37.199 --> 00:37:40.807 rise of science. You also see Swift. I don't know if you guys have ever 00:37:40.840 --> 00:37:45.267 read Gulliver's Travels. OK. Remember the flying island of Laputa? This is 00:37:45.300 --> 00:37:47.747 the one where the mathematicians run things and they have this flying 00:37:47.780 --> 00:37:52.026 island and they can drop stones down. The mathematicians are terrible 00:37:52.059 --> 00:37:55.566 rulers, right? They just absorbed in their calculations and they don't pay 00:37:55.599 --> 00:37:59.425 attention to their wives or their subjects. And so we look at that, you 00:37:59.458 --> 00:38:02.905 know, where Swift is from the beginning of the Enlightenment, calling 00:38:02.938 --> 00:38:06.307 parts of the Enlightenment project into question, calling into question 00:38:06.340 --> 00:38:09.267 this alliance with science and politics. And then how many of you guys 00:38:09.300 --> 00:38:13.135 have you guys seen the movie The Favor? No. Oh, you guys should see 00:38:13.168 --> 00:38:16.296 because it's about Queen Anne, and that was the woman who knighted. She 00:38:16.329 --> 00:38:20.217 was the queen who knighted Sir Isaac Newton. Isaac Newton, after he had 00:38:20.250 --> 00:38:25.856 his mental breakdown, um, um, became a member of parliament. Um, he was a 00:38:25.889 --> 00:38:29.296 whig, he became the warden of the mint. It's kind of like being secretary 00:38:29.329 --> 00:38:32.095 of the treasury. It was a pretty good position. He lives with his niece in 00:38:32.128 --> 00:38:38.717 London, um, and She was a pretty prominent figure and he was pretty well 00:38:38.750 --> 00:38:41.526 connected to the government. He was one of Queen Anne's favorites, and 00:38:41.559 --> 00:38:46.155 he's a big fan of Queen Anne. So Swift and Swift knew all these guys. He 00:38:46.188 --> 00:38:49.646 knew Haley and Newton. He was friends with these guys and he makes fun of 00:38:49.679 --> 00:38:53.566 them and he's suspicious. He sees in the rise of science something that's 00:38:53.599 --> 00:38:57.486 not apolitical, but that's something that's a political project. It's as 00:38:57.519 --> 00:39:02.791 if. Plato's ideal of a republic of real philosophers or kings can be made 00:39:02.824 --> 00:39:05.800 true instead of philosophers, they'll be natural philosophers, they'll be 00:39:05.833 --> 00:39:09.030 scientists who'll be kings. And why do you believe this is important for 00:39:09.063 --> 00:39:12.432 your students to learn? Because it's the world they live in. Let me give 00:39:12.465 --> 00:39:17.057 you an example. A floating island. These guys, these rulers who don't know 00:39:17.090 --> 00:39:20.977 much about the people over whom they rule float around, drop rocks on them 00:39:21.010 --> 00:39:23.977 , threaten them, right? Can you imagine? I just want you to try a thought 00:39:24.010 --> 00:39:28.615 experiment, a country that did things like, I don't know, send drone 00:39:28.648 --> 00:39:34.095 attacks to countries they didn't know much about, right, or bomb places 00:39:34.128 --> 00:39:37.217 whose language they couldn't speak. I mean, it sounds crazy. Or could you 00:39:37.250 --> 00:39:41.956 imagine a country. Like Laputa has the best telescopes you can imagine but 00:39:41.989 --> 00:39:46.626 has the crappiest public schools or even like problems delivering decent 00:39:46.659 --> 00:39:50.557 water to a place like Flint, Michigan. I mean this could happen, right? I 00:39:50.590 --> 00:39:53.756 , I think it's important for them to know because in many ways they're 00:39:53.789 --> 00:39:56.977 coming to the honors college. Most of my students want to become part of 00:39:57.010 --> 00:39:59.916 the technocratic elite, and I don't blame them. This is the way if you 00:39:59.949 --> 00:40:03.646 want to go to MIT or Harvard as a grad student and. Let's say you don't 00:40:03.679 --> 00:40:07.566 have the finances to go to Stanford as an undergrad. You come here, you 00:40:07.599 --> 00:40:12.526 work hard, you do great things, and then your application to MIT, Harvard 00:40:12.559 --> 00:40:16.445 and Stanford, even Oxford, which a few of my students have gone to, will 00:40:16.478 --> 00:40:21.497 be taken seriously and you have a chance, and God. Speed to you, but while 00:40:21.530 --> 00:40:25.615 you're on the way, here's some things to think about and I think Swiss 00:40:25.648 --> 00:40:30.017 critique of the technocratic elite that believes or seems to think that 00:40:30.050 --> 00:40:34.736 their expertise in the technology makes them fit to rule politically is a 00:40:34.769 --> 00:40:38.247 sobering lesson. Something I say to my students after we have the 00:40:38.280 --> 00:40:42.807 discussion, right, as an afterthought is remember that the Vietnam War 00:40:42.840 --> 00:40:47.925 wasn't given to us by Christian conservatives or Trump voters. It was John 00:40:47.958 --> 00:40:51.162 Kennedy and the best and the brightest, the best and the brightest. The 00:40:51.195 --> 00:40:54.720 technocratic elite of the early 60s, they thought they were going to solve 00:40:54.753 --> 00:40:58.800 Vietnam like a math problem. And of course, it didn't work out that way. 00:40:58.833 --> 00:41:03.760 That's one, but one important lesson of Lauda of Swift satire. Plus, I 00:41:03.793 --> 00:41:08.057 just think Swift, you should read Swift. I know I've talked at length, but 00:41:08.090 --> 00:41:16.090 Matt, 00:41:16.760 --> 00:41:19.039 how are you doing? I'm killing it. OK, that's good. If not, I'll just fly around on my foot. I think that critique, I mean, I've always find it 00:41:19.289 --> 00:41:22.566 similar. Clearly Swift is critiquing the way the British government is 00:41:22.599 --> 00:41:26.936 ruling, particularly ruling Ireland, but wow, it's, it's a. It can be 00:41:26.969 --> 00:41:30.267 applicable to today. I think we're currently thinking that Venezuela might 00:41:30.300 --> 00:41:33.816 need a change of government. Yeah, they're caught between the elections on 00:41:33.849 --> 00:41:36.936 that, yeah, right, it's kind of like the poster I saw somewhere I said, 00:41:36.969 --> 00:41:41.675 Well, the regime change didn't work out so well in Iran, Iraq, Honduras, 00:41:41.708 --> 00:41:44.425 and Chile, and it just goes on with the list, but this time it's going to 00:41:44.458 --> 00:41:50.956 work out great. I just think of the flying island of Maputo. OK. So, um, 00:41:50.989 --> 00:41:56.717 obviously this, uh, project is celebrating Barrett's 30th anniversary. So 00:41:56.750 --> 00:42:01.396 what new initiatives do you think Barrett should support for the future? 00:42:01.429 --> 00:42:07.517 That's a that's a big is a big question for um my biggest problem is I'm 00:42:07.550 --> 00:42:12.206 happy with what you're doing what are they doing now that you think is 00:42:12.239 --> 00:42:19.557 really fantastic and that they really like the initiative that Mark Jacobs 00:42:19.590 --> 00:42:24.456 and Peggy Nelson came up with and that is totally committed to it has such 00:42:24.489 --> 00:42:29.416 great experience with her background in the Americas. Because I mean it 00:42:29.449 --> 00:42:32.296 becomes a cliche like citizen of the world sometimes has this flaky 00:42:32.329 --> 00:42:35.376 connotation like I'm a citizen of the world, you know, but you don't know 00:42:35.409 --> 00:42:38.256 anything about your backyard, but I think that's not what the deans are 00:42:38.289 --> 00:42:42.376 thinking. The deans are thinking you need to know your backyard and be 00:42:42.409 --> 00:42:45.577 aware of the rest of the world and be connected back to this flying out of 00:42:45.610 --> 00:42:49.307 Laputa. These guys know calculus and they know Laplace transforms or 00:42:49.340 --> 00:42:53.706 whatever they know, right, but they don't know foreign languages. They 00:42:53.739 --> 00:42:56.586 just understand that the only thing that the fla the Putin rulers, if you 00:42:56.619 --> 00:42:59.756 remember from the episode, they esteem is mathematics and a really 00:42:59.789 --> 00:43:03.506 abstract kind of music, and they think that's all you need to know. Well, 00:43:03.539 --> 00:43:06.467 we were asking earlier about our engineering students, no knock on our 00:43:06.500 --> 00:43:09.952 engineering. Some of my best friends are engineers, but do you ever, have 00:43:09.985 --> 00:43:12.952 you ever been around someone who thinks the fact that they know how to 00:43:12.985 --> 00:43:17.550 program in, I won't say Fortran Pascal, I don't know, whatever it is, 00:43:17.583 --> 00:43:20.151 means that they should rule the world because I've been around those kind 00:43:20.184 --> 00:43:23.592 of people, uh, or physics majors who think because they're in physics, 00:43:23.625 --> 00:43:26.592 they really are smarter than everyone else in the room and people should 00:43:26.625 --> 00:43:29.831 listen to them. I don't know, Matt, have you ever run into those people? 00:43:29.864 --> 00:43:33.956 Yes, yes, of course you have. And I think part of Swiss's message is, you 00:43:33.989 --> 00:43:37.155 know what, when it comes to political ruling, when it comes to some of the 00:43:37.188 --> 00:43:40.916 challenges we face, you need to know, it's great to know those things, no 00:43:40.949 --> 00:43:44.916 question, but you also might need to know some languages, you might need 00:43:44.949 --> 00:43:48.747 to know. Some culture you might need to know a bunch of other things. The 00:43:48.780 --> 00:43:52.727 the character in in Flying Island of Laputa episode, there's this great 00:43:52.760 --> 00:43:56.066 lord that all the other rulers disdain because he's terrible at math and 00:43:56.099 --> 00:43:59.845 he's not very good at music, but what is he good at? He's good at 00:43:59.878 --> 00:44:03.057 languages. He's good at conversation. Remember the. Putin rulers are so 00:44:03.090 --> 00:44:07.776 bad at conversation they have to have servants with a pole and a bags of 00:44:07.809 --> 00:44:11.095 beans and they have to be hit on the ear to remember to listen and then 00:44:11.128 --> 00:44:14.497 hit on the mouth to remember to speak because they're that bad at 00:44:14.530 --> 00:44:17.566 conversation. They're so self-absorbed and wrapped up in their own 00:44:17.599 --> 00:44:21.456 thoughts. And here this great lord they disdain is perfect at conversation 00:44:21.489 --> 00:44:25.296 , does all these things. We too have to be good at conversation, and that 00:44:25.329 --> 00:44:28.376 means we do have to understand the rest of the world. I think the deans 00:44:28.409 --> 00:44:32.615 are committed to that. I've led these, this study abroad programs. I would 00:44:32.648 --> 00:44:35.816 say easily half of my students have never been abroad. I've had students 00:44:35.849 --> 00:44:38.896 who've never been outside of Arizona, and the first time they're outside 00:44:38.929 --> 00:44:42.057 of Arizona, they're in London, England, or they're in Geneva, Switzerland 00:44:42.090 --> 00:44:46.456 , and they're getting this other new perspective that they wouldn't get 00:44:46.489 --> 00:44:51.416 any other way. Um, that's priceless, that is priceless. Keep doing that 00:44:51.449 --> 00:44:55.497 global initiative. It's really paying off great dividends. Yeah, that's 00:44:55.530 --> 00:44:58.736 something I can think of. There's so much going on there, I mean I was 00:44:58.769 --> 00:45:05.936 just thinking of um. Shoot. Oh, what's his last name, I wanna say Alex. 00:45:05.969 --> 00:45:08.537 Downtown professor. 00:45:08.570 --> 00:45:12.095 I had him as my professor 00:45:12.128 --> 00:45:14.336 and I love him. So like, I mean Sandoval's cool, but I'm just thinking of 00:45:14.369 --> 00:45:18.416 Alex Young. He's students to Morocco and Alex Young is one of these guys 00:45:18.449 --> 00:45:22.816 he just does, he does amazing things. Sandoval, of course, you know, works 00:45:22.849 --> 00:45:26.497 with the black theater troupe. He works with, um, well, Hamilton, he got 00:45:26.530 --> 00:45:31.916 in to see Hamilton. Yeah. Yeah, he, I mean, but I think that, I just 00:45:31.949 --> 00:45:34.997 thought of Alex Young because of all the stuff he's doing, um, and all the 00:45:35.030 --> 00:45:39.236 guys downtown campus is a great campus has a lot of fantastic. I taught 00:45:39.269 --> 00:45:42.316 there one semester. I just had a great time with it. I went there last 00:45:42.349 --> 00:45:46.631 year. OK, yeah, I mean this is the, you know. So, like Alex Young is one 00:45:46.664 --> 00:45:49.311 of these guys who really gets this global initiative and he understands 00:45:49.344 --> 00:45:51.912 that, hey, you know, Morocco is another place too, because students go to 00:45:51.945 --> 00:45:55.952 London, they go to Paris. There's a kind of dreary familiarity, right, 00:45:55.985 --> 00:45:58.631 with like, oh yeah, I'm going to Western Europe. Well, the world's a lot 00:45:58.664 --> 00:46:03.751 larger than Western Europe. And so expanding that, I keep a map up on the 00:46:03.784 --> 00:46:08.566 wall, um, which my wife got me from IKEA. Um, so, you know, students come 00:46:08.599 --> 00:46:12.526 in and say, oh yeah, Greece is over there, right, if we're reading the 00:46:12.559 --> 00:46:17.967 Iliad or something, but Troy is somewhere over there, right? So, so that's 00:46:18.000 --> 00:46:20.796 something I can think of. What other, what other initiatives do you guys 00:46:20.829 --> 00:46:23.885 think? I mean, you guys, you young people are, are more aware and more hip. 00:46:23.918 --> 00:46:30.756 What are the things is Barrett doing? I can't grading essays yeah. 00:46:30.789 --> 00:46:33.195 There's so many, because I know there are so many things, there's the 00:46:33.228 --> 00:46:37.155 community dialogues, of course, that people have done. I think that's part 00:46:37.188 --> 00:46:41.436 of this idea of being aware, bringing new voices and and things. So what 00:46:41.469 --> 00:46:44.115 do you guys think? Now I want to, I want to turn the interview on you. 00:46:44.148 --> 00:46:48.166 What do you think Barrett should do more of? 00:46:48.199 --> 00:46:52.956 More of, yeah, in terms of initiatives connections between the different 00:46:52.989 --> 00:46:56.146 university campuses 00:46:56.179 --> 00:46:59.477 because each one individually does a very good job, but sometimes there 00:46:59.510 --> 00:47:04.436 isn't that connection between the campuses just because of the distance 00:47:04.469 --> 00:47:09.477 between them. You know, it's really challenging. I was associate for Laura 00:47:09.510 --> 00:47:15.095 Popova when she was the chair. And she's awesome, she's a wonderful, 00:47:15.128 --> 00:47:18.037 wonderful form of like teaching the event. I learned from watching her I'm 00:47:18.070 --> 00:47:22.236 like, yeah, that's how I should be doing it. I mean she's also a great 00:47:22.269 --> 00:47:26.925 faculty chair and, and we struggled with this, and it's easier to bridge 00:47:26.958 --> 00:47:30.046 that gap between the downtown and Tempe camp. It's not that we always do 00:47:30.079 --> 00:47:34.967 it, but it's more the proximity is is is closer. So when I taught downtown 00:47:35.000 --> 00:47:38.936 , I could hop on the light rail or I could, you know, get on the shuttle. 00:47:38.969 --> 00:47:41.592 The shuttle only takes half an hour, although I'm. the light rail, even 00:47:41.625 --> 00:47:45.231 though it takes longer, the shuttle is amazing, the shuttle is amazing, 00:47:45.264 --> 00:47:48.392 but you, but you get on the light rail and you feel like you're in a real 00:47:48.425 --> 00:47:50.990 city and you're like on the subway, and how shall I put it delicately on 00:47:51.023 --> 00:47:54.501 the subway, I mean, on the subway on the light rail, you need an 00:47:54.534 --> 00:47:58.925 interesting cross section of the. 00:47:58.958 --> 00:48:03.106 Every day on the light rails and experience, I mean, you know, I lived in 00:48:03.139 --> 00:48:05.706 Philadelphia, New York, and you know, it's like being on the subway and 00:48:05.739 --> 00:48:08.905 meeting an interesting so it's a little fun, 00:48:08.938 --> 00:48:11.905 um, but I think it was easier, but I think the real challenge, first of 00:48:11.938 --> 00:48:15.146 all, we should do a better job, even though we're better connected with 00:48:15.179 --> 00:48:18.695 the with the downtown campus with Doctor O'Flaherty, Doctor Sandoval, 00:48:18.728 --> 00:48:22.345 Doctor Young, Doctor Fedick, right, and those guys are able to make it for 00:48:22.378 --> 00:48:26.227 faculty meetings. And when I was Flint advisor for 3 years, which was one 00:48:26.260 --> 00:48:33.217 of the great highlights of mine. Time in the past 11 years, um, when it 00:48:33.250 --> 00:48:37.385 came time to pick a new one, Catherine O'Flaherty was the obvious choice, 00:48:37.418 --> 00:48:40.186 and Doctor O'Flaherty was downtown, and people were worried, well, how can 00:48:40.219 --> 00:48:43.626 students meet with Doctor O'Flaherty, but as I pointed out, Doctor 00:48:43.659 --> 00:48:46.865 O'Flaherty is closer to the Flynn, you know, to the main office of the 00:48:46.898 --> 00:48:51.345 Flynn's than being on the downtown campus that I was at the, at the Tempe 00:48:51.378 --> 00:48:55.856 campus. So, um. I think that's been easier. I think more challenging is 00:48:55.889 --> 00:49:00.296 Polly, right, in the East, which is, you know, get on the show and west, 00:49:00.329 --> 00:49:03.905 and we call it the wild west, and I love, uh, Doctor Ramsey and, and 00:49:03.938 --> 00:49:07.896 Doctor Gruber, but it, it's almost like it's, its own thing over there, 00:49:07.929 --> 00:49:11.497 and I think particularly for students on the west campus, there's that 00:49:11.530 --> 00:49:15.217 feeling of isolation that they that they're not quite part of the family. 00:49:15.250 --> 00:49:18.057 We say it, but then they're like the distant relatives we don't, you know 00:49:18.090 --> 00:49:24.467 , and I wish, I wish, I wish, I wish I would like to see, um. More 00:49:24.500 --> 00:49:28.876 connection there, a closer sense of the decor. I've directed a few theses 00:49:28.909 --> 00:49:31.747 where I've gone out to the West Campus and or helped the student or 00:49:31.780 --> 00:49:34.787 directed a student from the West Campus, but I will say it's a challenge 00:49:34.820 --> 00:49:37.666 because that shuttle, and I love the shuttle too, but you know, the 00:49:37.699 --> 00:49:40.787 shuttle takes you half an hour to get to down campus, but it's almost like 00:49:40.820 --> 00:49:45.155 an hour. It's like 45 minutes to 1 hour. To get to the west and it's, it's 00:49:45.188 --> 00:49:49.046 challenging when you're coming from Tempe campus, of course, to go from 00:49:49.079 --> 00:49:53.497 poly to West. I, I don't know how that how that works, um, and the shuttle 00:49:53.530 --> 00:49:57.376 is great. I mean that helps, but what are the some of the things that we 00:49:57.409 --> 00:50:00.577 can do, not merely to bring faculty together, but more importantly 00:50:00.610 --> 00:50:05.885 students together, um, so are there things like I, I think of the events, 00:50:05.918 --> 00:50:09.695 I mean, like Doctor Sandoval holds these really cool cultural events and 00:50:09.728 --> 00:50:13.115 makes these connections. Are these the sorts of things. Something that 00:50:13.148 --> 00:50:17.077 gets the students together where the students are kind of, I don't know, 00:50:17.110 --> 00:50:21.675 getting together for events in the west and the downtown campus. Matthew, 00:50:21.708 --> 00:50:23.675 what do you think? You've got that look on your face like you're thinking 00:50:23.708 --> 00:50:27.307 , what I was thinking about the question of looking to the future, how 00:50:27.340 --> 00:50:32.436 have you seen Barrett 00:50:32.469 --> 00:50:37.316 change over the time you've been here? As a faculty member, it's a great 00:50:37.349 --> 00:50:41.646 question. First of all, the obvious one is size. Um, when I came here, it 00:50:41.679 --> 00:50:47.006 was, I don't know, 13, 6, 16 at most, so it was much smaller. It was 00:50:47.039 --> 00:50:53.115 easily half the size, um, and The first year I was here, we were still 00:50:53.148 --> 00:50:58.905 over in Irish. It was the last year we were in Irish Hall, 00:50:58.938 --> 00:51:04.356 vintage old school and um I actually had Dr. McManus' old office and my 00:51:04.389 --> 00:51:09.352 wife got me a 1940s Sam Spade kind of telephone, so I'd look like. I was, 00:51:09.385 --> 00:51:12.611 you know, Humphrey Bogart or something, and, and talk about 00:51:12.644 --> 00:51:16.912 environmentally incorrect, I could adjust the thermostat in my office to 00:51:16.945 --> 00:51:21.271 whatever temperature. I can make it blasting like a cold, uh, freezer in 00:51:21.304 --> 00:51:23.952 the middle of the summer. I mean, I could be ultimately totally 00:51:23.985 --> 00:51:28.271 irresponsible with, you know, the environment. Um, and then, of course, 00:51:28.304 --> 00:51:32.030 the second year that I was at Barrett was the first year we were over here 00:51:32.063 --> 00:51:37.227 in, uh, the new buildings. Um, so there's the change in that, I think. Let 00:51:37.260 --> 00:51:39.626 me just get meta for a moment, and we could talk about the change in the 00:51:39.659 --> 00:51:44.186 composition or the number of faculty. I think when I arrived at Barrett, 00:51:44.219 --> 00:51:47.747 we were still in the phase of trying to gain recognition for what we were 00:51:47.780 --> 00:51:51.865 doing, and we were still in the phase of like convincing the provost's 00:51:51.898 --> 00:51:56.106 office and President President Crowe was on board. I mean, kind of we were 00:51:56.139 --> 00:52:01.146 his baby. He hired Mark Jacobs with the idea of madrick, you know, make 00:52:01.179 --> 00:52:04.581 this honors college the Harvard of the South. West, you know, President 00:52:04.614 --> 00:52:09.550 Crow is, and so we clearly we had the wind at the backs in in terms of 00:52:09.583 --> 00:52:12.941 Crow believed in us, and we had to come through and we had to convince 00:52:12.974 --> 00:52:17.182 other people, um, not so much him, but other people on campus, other 00:52:17.215 --> 00:52:20.662 professors, other units that we were serious and also convince other 00:52:20.695 --> 00:52:24.861 universities elsewhere that like we were the real thing. We were kind of 00:52:24.894 --> 00:52:28.686 halfway through that and I think. The difference between when I arrived 00:52:28.719 --> 00:52:32.767 and we were still in that phase of reaching out and trying to impress 00:52:32.800 --> 00:52:36.807 others on the campus of ASU, but also other universities, Princeton, 00:52:36.840 --> 00:52:40.256 Stanford, that we were for real and to be taken seriously. Well, we're 00:52:40.289 --> 00:52:45.086 there. I mean we are taken seriously. Um, that's not the question now 00:52:45.119 --> 00:52:50.646 becomes, now that. We have reached that. What do we need to do? What do we 00:52:50.679 --> 00:52:55.486 not have to do to maintain that if that makes sense, right? We've gotten 00:52:55.519 --> 00:52:58.635 this reputation. It's well deserved. We get the Frank Bruni column, what 00:52:58.668 --> 00:53:02.885 is it we're the gold standard. I've never heard Marc Jacobs mention that 00:53:02.918 --> 00:53:07.256 less than 3 times in any given talk. But since we've arrived, then the 00:53:07.289 --> 00:53:10.115 question becomes how do we maintain it. The other thing is the size of the 00:53:10.148 --> 00:53:14.675 faculty and the composition of the faculty. I would say. When I arrived 00:53:14.708 --> 00:53:18.836 here, it was smaller. Um, we had great colleagues, Doctor Popova who came 00:53:18.869 --> 00:53:23.077 out of the University of Chicago, who was just freaking awesome, um, you 00:53:23.110 --> 00:53:27.195 know, and, and I really, really thought it was just the perfect place for 00:53:27.228 --> 00:53:33.126 me. Um. But over time, we've grown. We've hired a lot more people. I 00:53:33.159 --> 00:53:38.876 chaired, uh, in 2014, I was the chair of a faculty search that hired four 00:53:38.909 --> 00:53:44.416 permanent new faculty, including Doctor Soars, Doctor Voorhees, Doctor 00:53:44.449 --> 00:53:49.316 Staff. And Doctor Nieber, and then we hired 41 years at the time because 00:53:49.349 --> 00:53:52.956 we were short of people who suddenly had to fill a gap. The following year 00:53:52.989 --> 00:53:57.115 we hired almost a dozen, right? So suddenly we're hiring a lot of people. 00:53:57.148 --> 00:54:02.236 We've tapered back down now. So we've, we've more than doubled in size of 00:54:02.269 --> 00:54:05.717 the faculty, and that's because our incoming classes, our number of 00:54:05.750 --> 00:54:09.385 students have grown, right? So when they originally built this building. 00:54:09.418 --> 00:54:13.405 Not all of the offices in Sage South were filled, and we kept thinking, oh 00:54:13.438 --> 00:54:16.756 , it'll be years before we have to worry about. Well, now, you know, I, 00:54:16.789 --> 00:54:19.925 this office that I'm in, this used to be Cynthia Patino's office and 00:54:19.958 --> 00:54:23.807 advising, and you know, we've spilled over into North Hall. If we have 00:54:23.840 --> 00:54:26.646 more people, we gotta figure out where we've got to put them. And of 00:54:26.679 --> 00:54:29.916 course, ever more students. Part of it was because President Crow said, 00:54:29.949 --> 00:54:32.146 look. 00:54:32.179 --> 00:54:37.307 He had a goal of 10%. He wanted 10% of the incoming ASU freshmen to be 00:54:37.340 --> 00:54:40.316 embarrassed. That's kind of, that's my goal, man, Drake, you know, I can 00:54:40.349 --> 00:54:43.206 imagine, I don't know if you guys have ever seen Doctor Strangelove. Oh, 00:54:43.239 --> 00:54:47.376 OK. Watch it sometimes. There's a, there's a character that reminds me a 00:54:47.409 --> 00:54:50.776 little bit of President C, but anyways, um, he kind of like, we're gonna 00:54:50.809 --> 00:54:54.135 have this band-aid. Well, we in the faculty were kind of upset to hear 00:54:54.168 --> 00:54:57.296 this because we thought, look, you know, our, our human event classes have 00:54:57.329 --> 00:55:02.095 to be about 20. We can't have more than 20 or 21, and frankly, I feel it's 00:55:02.128 --> 00:55:06.217 a little much. I'd really rather have it at like 16. That would be ideal. 00:55:06.250 --> 00:55:09.736 Um, so we didn't know what that meant, right? And, and what President Crow 00:55:09.769 --> 00:55:13.885 was thinking. So Mark Jacobs, and Peggy Nelson went to President Grant and 00:55:13.918 --> 00:55:16.686 said, well, look, if you want this expansion in terms of the number of 00:55:16.719 --> 00:55:20.796 students who are coming to Barron. And you want to maintain the quality of 00:55:20.829 --> 00:55:25.115 what it is, we're gonna need more professors, and they kind of figured 00:55:25.148 --> 00:55:28.436 they were kind of calling, I think this is I don't, I mean, Mark Jacobs 00:55:28.469 --> 00:55:31.717 may disagree with this characterization, but my understanding was they 00:55:31.750 --> 00:55:35.115 kind of thought of it as calling President Crow's bluff, like, look, do 00:55:35.148 --> 00:55:38.876 you understand what's involved here? And Crow, without batting an eyelash 00:55:38.909 --> 00:55:42.606 said, Yeah, we can do that. Here are the resources. Here's the money, 00:55:42.639 --> 00:55:46.738 people. Let's get it done. So it was kind of that thing. Like, oh, OK, 00:55:46.771 --> 00:55:50.378 then we'll hire new people. We've been really fortunate. I gotta tell you 00:55:50.411 --> 00:55:55.497 , I have been stunned, blown away by the people we've hired, especially 00:55:55.530 --> 00:55:59.988 the newest people we've hired. We've just hired some amazing faculty. I'm 00:56:00.021 --> 00:56:07.238 a mentor for Doctor, uh, Taylor Hines, um, Doctor, um, Dagmaron Egan, uh, 00:56:07.271 --> 00:56:11.418 Doctor Katie Boyce Gchino. Um, these are just terrific people and, and 00:56:11.451 --> 00:56:14.959 finally with Taylor and Katie. I have people I can tell science, math, and 00:56:14.992 --> 00:56:19.320 physics jokes right, because of their background. Um, but when I look at, 00:56:19.353 --> 00:56:21.881 I'm on the personnel committee and when I look at the fact it's like, oh, 00:56:21.914 --> 00:56:25.441 I'm not giving away like state secrets, but I, this is a good thing. I'm 00:56:25.474 --> 00:56:27.640 looking at the stuff they're doing and I'm just blown away. I'm just like 00:56:27.673 --> 00:56:31.240 , wow, they're doing this innovative stuff that keeps me on my game. It 00:56:31.273 --> 00:56:35.720 makes me think, I better not sit on my laurels because these newer folks 00:56:35.753 --> 00:56:39.320 who are younger and, and bringing in new ideas and new energy are doing 00:56:39.353 --> 00:56:42.501 really. So 00:56:42.534 --> 00:56:50.534 that's kind of 00:57:06.255 --> 00:57:06.892 you. I think that's wrap it up. Thank you so much for your participation. If you have anything to share, you can reach out to, uh, you can reach out to Dean Foot. Um thank you again. Thank you guys for coming. It's anti 00:57:06.925 --> 00:57:08.965 black I've got.