Hello, this is Caroline Livingston and Matthew Stockmall interviewing
Doctor Joseph Foy on February 27th in his office. This interview is a part
of the Bear Oral History Project. Our goal is to preserve a record of
Barrett's history and honor of our 30th anniversary. Thank you so much for
taking the time to sit down with us and share your experience. You're most
welcome.
Oh yeah, I was, uh, we were just talking before the interview started
recording about why you say water like water, you know, um, Vice Dean
Nelson, who just retired, was so amused by the way I said water and Dean
Jacobs, who uh was a professor at Swarthmore. Uh, for about 30 years or 23
years I think before I became Dean of Barrett, we try to explain to Piggy
that I was a Philadelphian by birth. My father was from Philadelphia, not
Swarthmore,
and, um, I picked up my father's accent, although my mother, like my wife
, is from Alabama, from Huntsville. My parents met at the Redstone Arsenal
in the early 60s during the space race and all of that. So my mom worked
for one of von Braun's assistants, so that's, yeah. So to get started,
tell me a little bit about your undergraduate experience at the University
of Alabama at Huntsville. OK, so I arrived there having attended two other
universities. I attended University in the early 80s. I thought I was
going to be a diplomat and I decided. Not to be and I transferred to, uh,
the University of Iowa where I did, uh, much of my undergraduate work. And
then I finished up at the University of Alabama in Huntsville because I
got an opportunity to do research at the Redstone Arsenal at the Space
Sciences lab, and I did, uh, research on, um, space physics, um, so.
That's kind of what I did there, and I helped to model, build a model of
the Earth's magnetosphere, and it was a paper I helped work on a paper
that made the cover of the Journal of Geophysical Geophysical Review
Letters. Yeah, that's a pretty famous paper. So that's kind of cool. That
was kind of what I did there and finished up my undergraduate degree and
thought I would stay in Huntsville and continue working on gamma ray
astronomy and something called the Batsy BATSE
instrument. Um, but circumstances eventually brought me out to Arizona,
and that's when I decided, you know, I should finish up and get my PhD. So
that's kind of what I did there. Anything else you want to know about
Alabama? Uh, not right now, but how did you decide to go to ASU for your
doctorate? Well, I moved out to Arizona because my parents were here. My
father was an engineer working for Honeywell. We had moved around the
country growing up because that was an aerospace engineer. And after 1980
, he became a contract engineer, which meant he would work one or two
years and they said to me, well, uh, why don't you come out here, you know
, the family is moving out here and you know, maybe you can teach or do
something, so I taught for a while and. But I thought, well, you know, I'd
like to go back and get my PhD and ASU was here, and I took a few physics
courses without being unofficially accepted student. You could matriculate
and just sign up if you had your bachelor's. I had my bachelor's and I
took a course in quantum physics and did well in that. I decided to apply
and I got accepted. And so in 2000, I became a grad student here at the
university. What did you think of Barrett students when you were a
graduate student at ASU? It's interesting because I would have been
totally unaware of Barrett, except for my sister, my youngest sister,
Rebecca was a Barrett student in the 90s, so I knew about Barrett through
that and also my best friend, one of my best friends who was much younger
than I, Peter Doran. Um, graduated Barrett in 1999, so I knew about the
honors college through them and through their experiences at the Honors
College. Peter has since gone on to graduate from Georgetown, and he's now
president of the Center of European Policy Analysis. Um, he's a big player
and he's kind of right of center, and anti-Trump Republican who
specializes in Putin and Eastern Europe and Russian studies, and I
actually have a copy of his senior thesis that I helped, um, proofread for
him. on Solzhenitsy's defection to the West as part of his senior thesis
for Barrett, he translated a telegram uh that Andropo, who had been the
head of the KGB at the time, wrote in the early 70s about what to do with
Solzhenitsy, to the effect of we can't kill him, why don't we send him to
charity? So anyways, so I was familiar with the honors college that way
and then I got to know Doctor Tom Martin. He and I were teaching
assistants in the physics department together, and that was right before
Doctor Martin. Um, was to to go into Barrett, and he was telling me, you
know, Barrett's great, and I'm like, yeah, I know of Barrett. And he said
, you know, they're looking for more scientists who can teach humanities.
If you're ever interested, Joe, you should apply, and I kept it in mind.
So I had a very positive image of Barrett when I was a grad student, but
only because I knew my sister has attended Barrett, my friend Peter
graduated from Barrett, and of course Doctor Martin telling me about it.
Did your peers seem to have any idea about Barrett
or was it just out of physics and astronomy and astrophysics, so they were
worried about NASA and whether they could get a gig. In their 20s, I was
in my 40s. So I was a student over the traditional age, and I knew then
that my career wouldn't take a traditional research path, uh, tenure track
, uh, the way it would for peers amount of friends of mine who are in
their 20s, right, because they were just eager to get to the next, get
their doctorate, and then go do something else, go to work for NASA or go
start a tenure track position. Mhm. So you do have a very heavy science
background and tends to focus more on the liberal arts side of education.
So how does your background impact the way you teach the human event? It's
a great question because as you say, um, much of what, especially when I'm
teaching the event we're reading would be considered liberal arts works.
Think it influences it in a couple ways in the spring and honors 272.
I do have students read works that I would consider scientific works, so
works that I believe are necessary for basic science literacy. So they
will include excerpts from Copernicus's on the Revolution where Copernicus
proposes the heliocentric hypothesis for the solar system. Um, Galileo, uh
, including his early experiments in physics, his astronomy, the starry
messenger, but I also have an excerpts from Isaac Newton, but I also
include things like Galileo's letter to the Grand Duchess Cristina, where
he argues that there's no conflict between his being uh a scientist and
being a religious person or or a devout Christian. Which I think is
interesting we see that argument again we have the Templeton Prize and I
think we have the Institute for Society for the school for the study of
religion and conflict, right? So many of the arguments that you see in
Galileo's letter are with us today, right, um, so it doesn't. Impact how I
teach 272 because I think scientific literacy and an understanding of how
the rise of science changed our view of our place in the cosmos, if you
will, is absolutely important, although that doesn't mean that I'd make
272 a science only of course. I do look at things like Frankenstein, which
I think is the first science fiction novel, and of course we know ASU has
been involved in the 200th anniversary of the novel. Beyond that, um. It's
interesting because my real struggle is, although I studied a lot of
liberal arts, I took a lot of liberal arts courses as an undergraduate,
and I took a graduate course in the French Revolution. May I ask why? Well
, first of all, I started out as a liberal arts person. I was gonna be a,
a diplomat. So when I was at American University, most of the courses I
had to take were either political science, political history courses in
English, the courses. I grew up in a very. But I grew up among the book
people. It's the only way I can put it if you've ever read or seen the
film version of Fahrenheit 451 at the end of that. Remember the book
people that memorized all the books? That would have been my parents,
right? So I grew up in a house of books. My parents, my father was the
first in his family to go to college. He was a first generation, uh,
college student. He went on the GI Bill. My mother grew up in an educated.
Southern family and she went to college. So they were big on, although my
dad was an engineer, they were big on literature and the arts, and that
was just part of my childhood. So first of all, by the time I left high
school, I probably read more liberal arts stuff than most liberal arts
majors nowadays read when they leave college. That's not to boast, that's
just the way my world was. So taking liberal arts courses was as natural
as. Breathing, even when I was a physics major, I took a graduate course
in the French Revolution, which was one of my favorite classes, and I took
a great course in in American literature and courses in philosophy. Um, I
just felt I needed both. I needed to know about physics and I needed to
know about philosophy and law and art, and I just can't imagine divorcing
the two, which I think was great preparation for coming here. Those
discussions or the one mentioning Galileo's readings or Copernicus's
readings, how do those discussions flow in comparison with like just a
great question because the danger in, in the more scientist stuff like the
readings from Isaac Newton or from Galileo and Copernicus that are more
science focused is that the temptation is to fall into election mode and
tell the citizens, this is what he needs and this is what that's not what
we do instead. We actually discuss it first of all, I select readings that
are accessible to students that they don't have integral signs or
derivatives in them, um, and what the students will find is that
frequently what Copernicus, Galileo and Newton are doing in these texts
are changing our conceptual understanding. So what they're doing is
they're challenging what had passed for common sense and saying here's why
we shouldn't accept that. And guess what? Just like people in the liberal
arts, scientists have to use words. They have to write arguments just like
you do write argumentative papers. So many of the selections I'm using, in
fact, all of the science selections I'm using are basically arguments like
this is why we should think differently than we thought before about
motion Galileo's whole thing about how. Old ideas that Aristotle and
others had about dynamics and motion are wrong. The whole argument is in
words. There's a diagram or two to illustrate his point, but it's mostly
an argument, something like a human event paper. So I have the students go
through and pick the argument apart and put the terms on the board, and if
there's confusion, they have to figure it out. I'll help a little bit, but
I won't give them the answer. And you know what? My art majors are often
the best at these discussions. And my science majors are often surprised
that they didn't really understand these issues. They had taken them for
granted. They're acing their calc based physics course, right? But they
had to stop to think conceptually about what was really going on. So, but
it's always discussion-based, even the science stuff, and I resist. I
actually write down a note to myself all the time, don't watch it because
the great temptation is I will stand up and I will just take over the
conversation, but I don't. So why do you teach for Barrett Do you prefer
the more discussion based stuff to the astronom to just teaching like
astronomy or physics in that lecture style to teach physics and astronomy
love to I love to hear the sound of my voice, I lecturing,
but first of all, the the job just suits me. A friend of mine, Lady
Wilkinson, who was a fellow student when I was in Huntsville, and we and
she and I worked at NASA together. Um, she said when I told her about the
job and she and her husband were here temporarily working for Intel, and
she said, wait. There's a job where they pay you to be Joe Foy, so part of
it is I found a job where they pay me to do what I would do anyway, which
is read a lot of books and sit around and talk about them, um, except I do
have to grade papers, right? So I think it suits me, it suits my interest.
I'm certainly there's a part of me that loves to teach astronomy and
physics, and I've done that, you know, I, I've gotten a chance to do that
, uh. But ultimately I find this work so satisfying. I teach an upper
division course, which is a popular general-based course in the history of
quantum physics and the philosophy of quantum physics. That too is a
seminar style discussion, and that's probably my most challenging course
because there I have to pick texts carefully that aren't filled with
mathematics and I have to pick texts so that students can. Have a
discussion and lead the discussion and so that I'm not lecturing at them
that makes sense, but I do, I, I don't know, the job just fits me the way
I don't know
fits a fish, I suppose. I've been here since the fall of 2008,
1 year. Um, wow, I have to say it's, it's the longest job I've ever held,
and, um, it is the best job I've held. Uh, it's just been a terrific job.
I work with great students. The deans are fantastic. Mark Jacobs and I
have a connection. He was a professor at Swarthmore. After I came to work
here, I found out that he was best friends with someone my parents rented
a house from in Swarthmore, Beamman's. Yeah, um, Todd Beaman is a history
professor at UPenn, and it turned out. My parents had rented their old
house, Todd Beaman's old house, and it turned out that Todd Beaman's he's
with Mark. So anyways, Mark and I joke about Swarthmo all the time, but
it's a great bosses. Peggy Nelson was a terrific dean. Nicola Foote, who
just hired, who's the, the new associate dean, is also fantastic. So there
aren't many chances you get where the your bosses are fantastic, your
colleagues are great, and then the people you work with, your students are
pleasure. So that's the other thing. I have friends of mine who are.
Research physicists who are in, you know, universities back east or over
in Berkeley or something, and they always have these stories about these
terrific fights they're having with their colleagues and doors slamming
and uh and it just sounds like a nightmare and I have that.
Yeah So
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
President Crow's wife Sybil Sybil.
But, but Leonard Maximon is a wonderful man, he's a physicist and
mathematician, as you might know, Leonard Maximon got his PhD at Cornell
under Hans Bada, one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century.
Doctor Maximon and I just kind of became friends and he started hanging
out in my quantum course and uh we are lunch partners. I actually
encouraged him because I've written uh an undergraduate textbook on
electricity and magnetism, a physics textbook. And he had been shopping
around, uh, a monograph, a book on differential and different equations
for some years, um, and I said, Well, why don't you, why don't you find
some publishing companies and, and kind of write a letter and he said,
Well, we helped me with the process and I helped him with the letter and
so forth. And he eventually did and Springer Verlag published his book,
and he has a nice little acknowledgment of me and on the front. It's
lovely and it's a lovely book. Um, Leonard I, Leonard not only has helped
me with my quantum class, he would help me with ideas. He'd sit in on the
discussions and listen and give me advice, um, and we would just talk
about he he was so, so fantastic, um, but then he is also involved with
the, the Herberer and the students out there, and he and I would talk
about, uh, different ideas and how to teach and, and, and stuff like that.
Um, so he's just a terrific guy and it's funny, I didn't realize until we
were hanging out for some time that he was related to Michael Grove, um,
because we just talk physics and math and history. He, by the way, um, he
worked for the National Bureau of Standards in the 50s and if you've seen
the movie Hidden Figures, he worked in an office that was across the river.
Yeah, and he had his own stories to tell about racial segregation in that
time because it was an African American scientist, a physicist in his
group, and they, they, where they were at, they could find one damn
restaurant that they could go to together as a group, and that's the only
restaurant they would go to because all the other restaurants at that time
were segregated. So, how's that? That that conversation you just mentioned
about art students and like how to teach, what how did that conversation
go down and what or what did he tell you? You mean how to teach the
quantum class, you mean you you mentioned that he hung out with Herberger
students and students.
Right, so he was teaching and he still does. I haven't spoken to him since
around Christmas time, so I don't know what's up with Leonard, but he
would teach a science course for very gifted students. These Herberger
students weren't only art students. They're, you know, they're just these
incredibly gifted students. So he would frequently have students like
there was this one young woman, she was 13, she wanted to know about black
holes and she wanted to know about women physicists and you know for
Leonard he's like, well, I kind of know and we would kind of go through
things like who could we tell her about it? How do you explain black holes
to very bright 13 year old students who are smart enough to get some of
the concepts, but of course it's always when you're teaching something
like black holes. Those pretty pictures like the embedding diagrams and
all that stuff that we use to kind of explain it in a Neil deGrasse Tyson
kind of way can also be misleading and, and Leonard wants to be quite
scrupulous not to give misleading analogies or to at least be able to
explain all that here's the limit of this analogy. So we would just have
conversations about, well, will this work? Oh, would that work? or Leonard
would ask me, well, I'm thinking about teaching it this way, right? And so
, um, we, uh.
We just talk back and forth, so I didn't have like a prescriptive list
like aha, Leonard, do this, right? It would be more of a conversation that
we would have back and forth as colleagues and we same thing with my
quantum class when he would come to my quantum class and he would.
Suggesting he even gave me a few lovely write-ups of, you know, he says,
you know, I've been thinking about the boar Adam and here's how I might
explain it. And I'm like, OK, and he would send me this write up he would
do, and it was always so fresh and interesting. He's a first grade teacher
, a great guy. Yeah, so that's, that's kind of my indirect connection.
I would not claim that I'm close friends with or anything like that,
but, but certainly there is that connection to the president through
Dr. Maximum, I should say.
So in your own experience, liberal arts and science have been very much
connected, but how do you think Barrett as a whole does um for providing
for students and science majors? Good question because I, I know that
science students frequently ask, they never ask me, right? They just
assume since I'm an astrophysicist that whatever I tell them or whatever I
had them read will somehow be useful to their careers. I never have an
engineering student going, how will this help me take Laplace transforms
better, um, but I think for many of my humanities colleagues or even
social science colleagues, oftentimes the, the. Engineering, physics,
biology majors will be more assertive and even aggressive, like, why am I
reading this, why am I writing argumentative essays? I put the first
answer to something I hinted at earlier, which is Copernicus and Newton
and Galileo and Einstein, and I have my students read some Einstein.
They're writing arguments. If you read the first couple of paragraphs to
Albert Einstein's paper on relativity, uh, which is called the the the
electrodynamics of moving bodies, or the first couple of paragraphs to his
famous paper in which he introduces the idea of light particles or photons.
They're arguments. There are no equations, they're conceptual, and he's
making an argument. He has a thesis, right? It sounds like a standard
thesis he would write in a human event essay. Guess what? If you're a
scientist and an engineer, you know what a large part of your life is
gonna be. Writing arguments you may not think it's an argument, but when
you write a paper to your boss or to your group saying this is what we
found, this is my research report, it's an argument you've got a thesis
like yes we should build this rocket. No, we should not build this rocket
yes we should launch because there's no problem with the O-ring. No we
shouldn't because everything is and I know this. My father was an
aerospace engineer who also had a background in technical writing. So he
was a twofer. So when they would hire my dad and they usually would hire
him and pay him pretty good coin because they knew not only would they get
first-rate engineering, but he could write technical reports as well as
any of their professional technical writers. And my dad always said, it's
an argument, even if you don't think it's an argument. You've got a thesis
, you've got evidence. You, you're, you're convincing someone either to do
something or not do something. There is no such thing as a neutral
technical report. All reports are basically, oh say do this, don't do this
, here's, you know, the, the path to go. So if you're an engineer or a
science student, much of your writing is gonna to be argumentative writing.
You have to think critically. You have to sift evidence and you have to
persuade a reader. Right. First of all, you have to persuade them that
it's even worth their time to read what you've written. If you write a
scientific paper, I don't know if you guys are science majors, right? So
let me, do you wanna know how you read a scientific paper? I'm about to
tell you the eH Hollywood true story. How do you read a scientific paper.
You look at the abstract. Is it good? If it's not good, do not, you don't
read. It's like a flow chart, right? No, no more. If it's good, what do
you do next? You read the conclusion. If those are good, then if it's
physics paper or an astronomy paper, the next thing I do is I look at all
the pretty pictures, pretty pictures. And I also look for equations. Are
there pretty equations? OK. Then and only then do I begin to read the body
of the paper. Well, it's the same thing with the human event essay. How
does your, you guys have both taken the human, OK. So I'll tell you how I
grade the human event. This is more e-H Hollywood true story than you
bargained for. I look at that first paragraph with the thesis statement,
the thesis and the roadmap, and I say, is this compelling and interesting
? Now, I do read the student's paper, do you know why?
I read the whole paper no matter how bad the thesis statement is. So
people don't hide just filler text because I get paid to, and that's what
I remind my students. The difference between your human event instructor
and the guy or the gal you're going to work for in an engineering firm is
I get paid to read your stuff no matter how poorly written it is, no
matter how badly argued, because that's my job, right? So you give me a
crappy thesis with a terrible roadmap. I still got to read the whole paper.
You know what? Your boss doesn't have to do that. If she reads your
report and you have a crappy abstract and a crappy conclusion, you know
what she does? She files it in her, her cylindrical filing cabinet. It
would be like that. And then she gets somebody else to write the report.
Mhm. That's why learning to write is fundamental and learning how to write
, and good scientific writing is the same kind of writing you do in the
human event. So that's the first thing you get. Secondly, you get the
ability to think critically. You need that, and I'm telling you. These
science texts, when it comes to the critical stuff, it's not too different
from reading a text from philosophy or even poetry and beginning to look
at it critically. What is the author trying to say? What's going on here?
What should I be getting from this? What's the evidence? How do I weigh
this? Right? Marks and Smith can't both be right, can they? Right? But
they're, they're making an argument, right, each in its own way. How do I
weigh that? So there's that. Then finally, last but not least, if you're a
human being, you need calculus and poetry. You need them both. If you
don't have them both, it's like, I don't know, like those weightlifters
who never work out with their legs. It's like you press some upper bodies
that they have these two thick legs and they can really stand up, right?
You don't want to be like that, right? So you need it as a human being. To
me, having grown up with parents who read books or poetry and literature
and art was a part of my childhood and a part of my life. I can't imagine
like why you wouldn't be doing this, right? That's why it always appalls
me when I see students with those rent me or those rent, those books with
the rent sticker on it. I just like buy the book, it's only 8 bucks. I go
without a Slurpee or whatever it is, uh, you know, a venti mochiata, right
, for a couple of weeks and buy the book. How's that? That was good. Good.
I'm gonna take a water here. Oh, absolutely.
Oh, I had another friend who graduated from Barrett. Sarah Bush, fantastic.
She was a Flynn scholar and she graduated in '99 or 2000, and she studied
in Harbin in China. And at one time, I'm breaking confidence, she had been
a Senate aide um back in the 90s for Deacon Seeney, you know, those, the.
Programs, the intern programs anyway, she told me a story about Senator
Byrd from West Virginia. Apparently he had a picture of water that was
marked Senator Byrd's water, and you were not to touch it or drink from it
, and it was a clear substance that looked like water, but the rumor was
that it wasn't.
So we're gonna trust that
that's just I'm not. I don't have that.
for an interesting interview.
Bart's version of drunk.
I don't actually. I'm sick in a sense.
Is is good, sick is good. We have to keep you on your toes.
So human event is the main class you teach here. Um, tell me about some of
the other classes you've taught, and I believe you've done some study
abroad classes as well. Well, um, I'll tell you about study abroad.
I did was with Doctor Don Fetty, and it was to Germany and Switzerland. It
was uh the 200th. It was to commemorate the 200th anniversary of
Frankenstein, which I had the students read. Doctor Fetty brought his
expertise in romantic literature and romanticism. He knows Shelly, Keats,
all those guys, and, um, he studied the novel very closely. So he brought
his perspective. I with my science background and history of science
background could bringing my perspective. I've lived with the novel
Frankenstein since I was 10 when I first read it, so it's, it's been a
lifelong love of mine. Um, we not only of course had heavy academic work
that the students had to do, but we. The visits were all set by the novel
, so we are in Ingolstadt for a week. That's where Victor Frankenstein is
a student. It's where he's an undergraduate, where he brings the creature
to life. I always warn my students that the novel Frankenstein is an
excellent warning. Against unsupervised research, um, and also against
doing research without getting your IRB training, so you must get, do get
IRB don't do what Victor did. Um, Inglehot's a fantastic, a small town. I
wouldn't have thought of it, but Doctor Fetty knew it. And we went to
Ingolstadt and um they were very conscious of the fact that Ingolstadt is
the setting for where Victor is a student. They had a great uh art exhibit
with two well-known artists whose names escape me at the moment called
Artificial Intelligence. Uh, and artificial stupidity and it was tied into
the novel and this whole idea of creating life but also creating
intelligence and technology out of control. Um, this was the sort of thing
we took students on a tour there. The state museum had a whole thing that
they were celebrating the anniversary of the novel with some of the themes
from the novel and had an original copy, one of the first, um, German
translations of the novel there at the museum for the students to see. So
this was a great trip. So we stayed in Ingolstadt, Darmstadt, uh, where
they actually have a castle Frankenstein. We found out that Castle
Frankenstein is kind of like Washington slept here. There are a whole
bunch of castle Frankenstein's all over that part of Europe. It's like
Captain Smith. This one probably has the closest claim to being the castle
Frankenstein that may have inspired Mary Shelley from the title of the
novel. It's near, um, the Rhine and, and it kind of looks like, oh yeah,
maybe, maybe that could be it. Um, we stayed in Geneva, Victor
Frankenstein, the character is from Geneva, and the history of that city
finds its way into many of the major themes of the novel. So that's one
study abroad that that's the most recent one that I've done, and Feddi was
fantastic. First of all, he speaks German and he's a.
and then the other ones you want to hear about. But first, how do you
think this trips that went on it too? Well, they seem to have like, wow,
how did it affect them in ways and I were talking about we were talking
about we were on the trip. First of all, the kids were open to having new
experiences and open to learning things, and one of the things that we
found interesting was that one of the things the students really, really
found inspiring, moving was to be in the UN, you know, the UN, uh,
headquarters, especially for refugees and human rights, is there in Geneva.
So it's kind of the non-political like the political parts in New York
where there's the Security Council and all that, but in Geneva it's like
the Council on Human Rights, the council on on refugees. Well we got this
fantastic tour and the history going back to The Hague and the history of
the Red Cross. We got a tour of the Red Cross and this history of like Red
Cross volunteers and people in The Hague getting letters and forwarding
care packages to prisoners of war all across Europe at the height of World
War I and there's this photograph of these people, these men and women in
these starch shirts and very formal attire going through reams of index
cards to make sure that letters get to the right prisoner of war in the
right camp in Germany and France and. And we were just so stunned and
gobsmacked. These men and women who looked like they could've kind of not
had done this. They could've just gone on with their lives, chose to, to,
to volunteer and do all of this. And of course this happened right at the
very moment that here in Arizona, the policy of the current administration
was hitting where they had that zero tolerance policy that led to
separation of children from their mothers and um we were there that week
we were in the Hotel Ibis and there were. Delegates to the commission on
refugees. There was a big meeting on the status of refugees that very week
and the students were there overhearing conversations from, uh, delegates
and some of our students even talked to delegates, particularly delegates
from Africa. It was really. So it was, it's interesting. It wasn't
directly related to Frankenstein, and yet here was this aspect of the trip
that the students all commented on. Two of our students are going to do
their senior thesis on the UN and refugees and, and this issue, which was
one of those unexpected things. Of course there was the Frankenstein stuff
, um, which was great, but. That was one of the things that were just so
moved and so fascinated to see that our students were open to it. What
what was the academic work like on the trip or or what did you want the
students to take out of it through the, through the coursework what I
wanted to do was to tie the novel to them and and
that came from the locations we were at, for example, in Geneva. There are
plenty of hints in the novel to political themes and to the events of the
French Revolution and after the French Revolution in Switzerland's history.
The character Alphonse Frankenstein, Victor's father is a syndic, and
there's a republic, there's the Geneva Republic, where did that come from
? Oh, John Calvin, and there's this whole history of kind of like the
Southern Reformation which was centered in Geneva and Calvin and how that.
Influenced the politics, but also how it influenced Rousseau, who's one
of the great writers that comes out of Geneva. Geneva has a big place in
Rousseau's heart. He always says, I'm a citizen of Geneva. Remember
Rousseau writes the social contract and Emil and Origin Discourse on the
origin of inequality. He's constantly thinking of Geneva. When he returns
to Geneva, having lived in Paris, they're shocked to find that he's a. You
know, philosopher of the Enlightenment, so they expect that he'll kind of
hang out with the, the kind of upper crust, you know, kind of the what we
would call the liberal New Yorker reading types. And instead he identifies
with the more kind of lower classes and their religious kind of what we
might call religious conservatism. He says, no, republic needs virtue. He
identifies with Calvin and the Reformation in many ways, and it's a kind
of interesting thing. People are a little surprised by Rousseau. Um, so I
, we talk about how Rousseau influences the novel and how the politics of
Geneva influenced Rousseau, um, and this question of family dynamics and
how do you raise a virtuous citizen, because after all, Alphonse
Frankenstein is raising his son is this whole line in the novel about how
he's having sons for the state, for the republic, and that's very reoian
right this idea that you. You're not just going to be an educated
gentleman, you have to be good for something. You have to be a good
citizen and a good, you know, member of the republic. Um, so we talk about
that. We talk about the Southern Reformation with John Calvin. I showed
them where America comes from. We go to the Reformation Wall. There's John
Calvin. It looks like something from Maoist communist statues of Mao or
something, and there's John Calvin, you know, 90 ft tall, and then next to
him is Roger Williams, the guy who wrote. The Rhode Island Compact, you
know, and, and we talk about that and the influence of these ideas. Shelly
sets her novel in Geneva. I don't think it's an accident that she does,
and she does it in the wake of the French Revolution that looked to her so
and in some ways looked to the revolutionaries of, of Geneva, right, as
kind of heroes as like these are the guys we should, you know, model. And
of course, the French Revolution didn't end so well, right? I think Shelly
kind of puts her finger on the, on the kind of politics like what goes
right and what goes wrong with this kind of revolutionary ideology and
she's thinking about it in a in a deeper sense, not merely the French
Revolution, but going back to the Reformation, going back to John. So
that's among the things that we talked about. We have the printing press
and the Reformation. That's the other thing, and that's the city where you
have we went up to Saint Pierre's and there's the Museum of the
Reformation. And so they get a whole new perspective on the political
themes that that are touched on in the novel, for one thing, right? We
also looked at science museums, right, especially in Darmstadt, but also
in Geneva, um, and in uh. So what was the other science music? I think
those were the biggies, right? And this question of science and how
science is applied and what's the role of science, um, and what should be
the role of science, um,
I don't know that help answer your question. What are some other classes
and study abroad you've taught on? So prior to that, my experience at the
study abroad had been going or directing. The trip to the United Kingdom
and I've, I've gone 4 times, two of those times I directed. I first went
in 2011 and 2012 with Dr. Dianne Fein. Dianne Feinstein, the senator from
Dr. Diane Felsin.
That would have been interesting to go with Doctor Senator Feinstein and I
went to, so Fassinelli, and she would emphasize kind of medieval history,
the Roman the, uh, the romantics, and more importantly, like, uh, Mallory
and kind of that of Sir Gain and the Green Knight. I would do, since I'm
my background in science, what I did with the UK trip is I would talk
about the. The scientific revolution, which frankly, the British Isles was
the epicenter, that's where Newton and so many of the scientists that kind
of Darwin, Faraday, Boyle, you name it. So I would tie science texts to
the location. But I would also look at the reaction to science, and I do
the same thing in my 2172 course. So William Blake, the, the great English
poet, really has a problem with Newton. He does not like Newton. He does
not like Francis Bacon, and he sure as hell doesn't like John Locke, right
he sees these guys, I don't know if you've ever read the, uh, the poem or
an excerpt from Jerusalem where he compares Bacon and Newton's philosophy
to serpents that are going to constrict you. Um, he compares. John Locke's
philosophy to a loom, and he talks about the water wheels of Newton that
wash Lock's cloth black and then spreads it over the universities of
Europe, basically turning all these students into widgets where you have
the same ideas and he says, this is terrible, right? Because Blake is the
party of poetry. So you see this kind of romantic reaction against the
rise of science. You also see Swift. I don't know if you guys have ever
read Gulliver's Travels. OK. Remember the flying island of Laputa? This is
the one where the mathematicians run things and they have this flying
island and they can drop stones down. The mathematicians are terrible
rulers, right? They just absorbed in their calculations and they don't pay
attention to their wives or their subjects. And so we look at that, you
know, where Swift is from the beginning of the Enlightenment, calling
parts of the Enlightenment project into question, calling into question
this alliance with science and politics. And then how many of you guys
have you guys seen the movie The Favor? No. Oh, you guys should see
because it's about Queen Anne, and that was the woman who knighted. She
was the queen who knighted Sir Isaac Newton. Isaac Newton, after he had
his mental breakdown, um, um, became a member of parliament. Um, he was a
whig, he became the warden of the mint. It's kind of like being secretary
of the treasury. It was a pretty good position. He lives with his niece in
London, um, and She was a pretty prominent figure and he was pretty well
connected to the government. He was one of Queen Anne's favorites, and
he's a big fan of Queen Anne. So Swift and Swift knew all these guys. He
knew Haley and Newton. He was friends with these guys and he makes fun of
them and he's suspicious. He sees in the rise of science something that's
not apolitical, but that's something that's a political project. It's as
if. Plato's ideal of a republic of real philosophers or kings can be made
true instead of philosophers, they'll be natural philosophers, they'll be
scientists who'll be kings. And why do you believe this is important for
your students to learn? Because it's the world they live in. Let me give
you an example. A floating island. These guys, these rulers who don't know
much about the people over whom they rule float around, drop rocks on them
, threaten them, right? Can you imagine? I just want you to try a thought
experiment, a country that did things like, I don't know, send drone
attacks to countries they didn't know much about, right, or bomb places
whose language they couldn't speak. I mean, it sounds crazy. Or could you
imagine a country. Like Laputa has the best telescopes you can imagine but
has the crappiest public schools or even like problems delivering decent
water to a place like Flint, Michigan. I mean this could happen, right? I
, I think it's important for them to know because in many ways they're
coming to the honors college. Most of my students want to become part of
the technocratic elite, and I don't blame them. This is the way if you
want to go to MIT or Harvard as a grad student and. Let's say you don't
have the finances to go to Stanford as an undergrad. You come here, you
work hard, you do great things, and then your application to MIT, Harvard
and Stanford, even Oxford, which a few of my students have gone to, will
be taken seriously and you have a chance, and God. Speed to you, but while
you're on the way, here's some things to think about and I think Swiss
critique of the technocratic elite that believes or seems to think that
their expertise in the technology makes them fit to rule politically is a
sobering lesson. Something I say to my students after we have the
discussion, right, as an afterthought is remember that the Vietnam War
wasn't given to us by Christian conservatives or Trump voters. It was John
Kennedy and the best and the brightest, the best and the brightest. The
technocratic elite of the early 60s, they thought they were going to solve
Vietnam like a math problem. And of course, it didn't work out that way.
That's one, but one important lesson of Lauda of Swift satire. Plus, I
just think Swift, you should read Swift. I know I've talked at length, but
Matt,
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
similar. Clearly Swift is critiquing the way the British government is
ruling, particularly ruling Ireland, but wow, it's, it's a. It can be
applicable to today. I think we're currently thinking that Venezuela might
need a change of government. Yeah, they're caught between the elections on
that, yeah, right, it's kind of like the poster I saw somewhere I said,
Well, the regime change didn't work out so well in Iran, Iraq, Honduras,
and Chile, and it just goes on with the list, but this time it's going to
work out great. I just think of the flying island of Maputo. OK. So, um,
obviously this, uh, project is celebrating Barrett's 30th anniversary. So
what new initiatives do you think Barrett should support for the future?
That's a that's a big is a big question for um my biggest problem is I'm
happy with what you're doing what are they doing now that you think is
really fantastic and that they really like the initiative that Mark Jacobs
and Peggy Nelson came up with and that is totally committed to it has such
great experience with her background in the Americas. Because I mean it
becomes a cliche like citizen of the world sometimes has this flaky
connotation like I'm a citizen of the world, you know, but you don't know
anything about your backyard, but I think that's not what the deans are
thinking. The deans are thinking you need to know your backyard and be
aware of the rest of the world and be connected back to this flying out of
Laputa. These guys know calculus and they know Laplace transforms or
whatever they know, right, but they don't know foreign languages. They
just understand that the only thing that the fla the Putin rulers, if you
remember from the episode, they esteem is mathematics and a really
abstract kind of music, and they think that's all you need to know. Well,
we were asking earlier about our engineering students, no knock on our
engineering. Some of my best friends are engineers, but do you ever, have
you ever been around someone who thinks the fact that they know how to
program in, I won't say Fortran Pascal, I don't know, whatever it is,
means that they should rule the world because I've been around those kind
of people, uh, or physics majors who think because they're in physics,
they really are smarter than everyone else in the room and people should
listen to them. I don't know, Matt, have you ever run into those people?
Yes, yes, of course you have. And I think part of Swiss's message is, you
know what, when it comes to political ruling, when it comes to some of the
challenges we face, you need to know, it's great to know those things, no
question, but you also might need to know some languages, you might need
to know. Some culture you might need to know a bunch of other things. The
the character in in Flying Island of Laputa episode, there's this great
lord that all the other rulers disdain because he's terrible at math and
he's not very good at music, but what is he good at? He's good at
languages. He's good at conversation. Remember the. Putin rulers are so
bad at conversation they have to have servants with a pole and a bags of
beans and they have to be hit on the ear to remember to listen and then
hit on the mouth to remember to speak because they're that bad at
conversation. They're so self-absorbed and wrapped up in their own
thoughts. And here this great lord they disdain is perfect at conversation
, does all these things. We too have to be good at conversation, and that
means we do have to understand the rest of the world. I think the deans
are committed to that. I've led these, this study abroad programs. I would
say easily half of my students have never been abroad. I've had students
who've never been outside of Arizona, and the first time they're outside
of Arizona, they're in London, England, or they're in Geneva, Switzerland
, and they're getting this other new perspective that they wouldn't get
any other way. Um, that's priceless, that is priceless. Keep doing that
global initiative. It's really paying off great dividends. Yeah, that's
something I can think of. There's so much going on there, I mean I was
just thinking of um. Shoot. Oh, what's his last name, I wanna say Alex.
Downtown professor.
I had him as my professor
and I love him. So like, I mean Sandoval's cool, but I'm just thinking of
Alex Young. He's students to Morocco and Alex Young is one of these guys
he just does, he does amazing things. Sandoval, of course, you know, works
with the black theater troupe. He works with, um, well, Hamilton, he got
in to see Hamilton. Yeah. Yeah, he, I mean, but I think that, I just
thought of Alex Young because of all the stuff he's doing, um, and all the
guys downtown campus is a great campus has a lot of fantastic. I taught
there one semester. I just had a great time with it. I went there last
year. OK, yeah, I mean this is the, you know. So, like Alex Young is one
of these guys who really gets this global initiative and he understands
that, hey, you know, Morocco is another place too, because students go to
London, they go to Paris. There's a kind of dreary familiarity, right,
with like, oh yeah, I'm going to Western Europe. Well, the world's a lot
larger than Western Europe. And so expanding that, I keep a map up on the
wall, um, which my wife got me from IKEA. Um, so, you know, students come
in and say, oh yeah, Greece is over there, right, if we're reading the
Iliad or something, but Troy is somewhere over there, right? So, so that's
something I can think of. What other, what other initiatives do you guys
think? I mean, you guys, you young people are, are more aware and more hip.
What are the things is Barrett doing? I can't grading essays yeah.
There's so many, because I know there are so many things, there's the
community dialogues, of course, that people have done. I think that's part
of this idea of being aware, bringing new voices and and things. So what
do you guys think? Now I want to, I want to turn the interview on you.
What do you think Barrett should do more of?
More of, yeah, in terms of initiatives connections between the different
university campuses
because each one individually does a very good job, but sometimes there
isn't that connection between the campuses just because of the distance
between them. You know, it's really challenging. I was associate for Laura
Popova when she was the chair. And she's awesome, she's a wonderful,
wonderful form of like teaching the event. I learned from watching her I'm
like, yeah, that's how I should be doing it. I mean she's also a great
faculty chair and, and we struggled with this, and it's easier to bridge
that gap between the downtown and Tempe camp. It's not that we always do
it, but it's more the proximity is is is closer. So when I taught downtown
, I could hop on the light rail or I could, you know, get on the shuttle.
The shuttle only takes half an hour, although I'm. the light rail, even
though it takes longer, the shuttle is amazing, the shuttle is amazing,
but you, but you get on the light rail and you feel like you're in a real
city and you're like on the subway, and how shall I put it delicately on
the subway, I mean, on the subway on the light rail, you need an
interesting cross section of the.
Every day on the light rails and experience, I mean, you know, I lived in
Philadelphia, New York, and you know, it's like being on the subway and
meeting an interesting so it's a little fun,
um, but I think it was easier, but I think the real challenge, first of
all, we should do a better job, even though we're better connected with
the with the downtown campus with Doctor O'Flaherty, Doctor Sandoval,
Doctor Young, Doctor Fedick, right, and those guys are able to make it for
faculty meetings. And when I was Flint advisor for 3 years, which was one
of the great highlights of mine. Time in the past 11 years, um, when it
came time to pick a new one, Catherine O'Flaherty was the obvious choice,
and Doctor O'Flaherty was downtown, and people were worried, well, how can
students meet with Doctor O'Flaherty, but as I pointed out, Doctor
O'Flaherty is closer to the Flynn, you know, to the main office of the
Flynn's than being on the downtown campus that I was at the, at the Tempe
campus. So, um. I think that's been easier. I think more challenging is
Polly, right, in the East, which is, you know, get on the show and west,
and we call it the wild west, and I love, uh, Doctor Ramsey and, and
Doctor Gruber, but it, it's almost like it's, its own thing over there,
and I think particularly for students on the west campus, there's that
feeling of isolation that they that they're not quite part of the family.
We say it, but then they're like the distant relatives we don't, you know
, and I wish, I wish, I wish, I wish I would like to see, um. More
connection there, a closer sense of the decor. I've directed a few theses
where I've gone out to the West Campus and or helped the student or
directed a student from the West Campus, but I will say it's a challenge
because that shuttle, and I love the shuttle too, but you know, the
shuttle takes you half an hour to get to down campus, but it's almost like
an hour. It's like 45 minutes to 1 hour. To get to the west and it's, it's
challenging when you're coming from Tempe campus, of course, to go from
poly to West. I, I don't know how that how that works, um, and the shuttle
is great. I mean that helps, but what are the some of the things that we
can do, not merely to bring faculty together, but more importantly
students together, um, so are there things like I, I think of the events,
I mean, like Doctor Sandoval holds these really cool cultural events and
makes these connections. Are these the sorts of things. Something that
gets the students together where the students are kind of, I don't know,
getting together for events in the west and the downtown campus. Matthew,
what do you think? You've got that look on your face like you're thinking
, what I was thinking about the question of looking to the future, how
have you seen Barrett
change over the time you've been here? As a faculty member, it's a great
question. First of all, the obvious one is size. Um, when I came here, it
was, I don't know, 13, 6, 16 at most, so it was much smaller. It was
easily half the size, um, and The first year I was here, we were still
over in Irish. It was the last year we were in Irish Hall,
vintage old school and um I actually had Dr. McManus' old office and my
wife got me a 1940s Sam Spade kind of telephone, so I'd look like. I was,
you know, Humphrey Bogart or something, and, and talk about
environmentally incorrect, I could adjust the thermostat in my office to
whatever temperature. I can make it blasting like a cold, uh, freezer in
the middle of the summer. I mean, I could be ultimately totally
irresponsible with, you know, the environment. Um, and then, of course,
the second year that I was at Barrett was the first year we were over here
in, uh, the new buildings. Um, so there's the change in that, I think. Let
me just get meta for a moment, and we could talk about the change in the
composition or the number of faculty. I think when I arrived at Barrett,
we were still in the phase of trying to gain recognition for what we were
doing, and we were still in the phase of like convincing the provost's
office and President President Crowe was on board. I mean, kind of we were
his baby. He hired Mark Jacobs with the idea of madrick, you know, make
this honors college the Harvard of the South. West, you know, President
Crow is, and so we clearly we had the wind at the backs in in terms of
Crow believed in us, and we had to come through and we had to convince
other people, um, not so much him, but other people on campus, other
professors, other units that we were serious and also convince other
universities elsewhere that like we were the real thing. We were kind of
halfway through that and I think. The difference between when I arrived
and we were still in that phase of reaching out and trying to impress
others on the campus of ASU, but also other universities, Princeton,
Stanford, that we were for real and to be taken seriously. Well, we're
there. I mean we are taken seriously. Um, that's not the question now
becomes, now that. We have reached that. What do we need to do? What do we
not have to do to maintain that if that makes sense, right? We've gotten
this reputation. It's well deserved. We get the Frank Bruni column, what
is it we're the gold standard. I've never heard Marc Jacobs mention that
less than 3 times in any given talk. But since we've arrived, then the
question becomes how do we maintain it. The other thing is the size of the
faculty and the composition of the faculty. I would say. When I arrived
here, it was smaller. Um, we had great colleagues, Doctor Popova who came
out of the University of Chicago, who was just freaking awesome, um, you
know, and, and I really, really thought it was just the perfect place for
me. Um. But over time, we've grown. We've hired a lot more people. I
chaired, uh, in 2014, I was the chair of a faculty search that hired four
permanent new faculty, including Doctor Soars, Doctor Voorhees, Doctor
Staff. And Doctor Nieber, and then we hired 41 years at the time because
we were short of people who suddenly had to fill a gap. The following year
we hired almost a dozen, right? So suddenly we're hiring a lot of people.
We've tapered back down now. So we've, we've more than doubled in size of
the faculty, and that's because our incoming classes, our number of
students have grown, right? So when they originally built this building.
Not all of the offices in Sage South were filled, and we kept thinking, oh
, it'll be years before we have to worry about. Well, now, you know, I,
this office that I'm in, this used to be Cynthia Patino's office and
advising, and you know, we've spilled over into North Hall. If we have
more people, we gotta figure out where we've got to put them. And of
course, ever more students. Part of it was because President Crow said,
look.
He had a goal of 10%. He wanted 10% of the incoming ASU freshmen to be
embarrassed. That's kind of, that's my goal, man, Drake, you know, I can
imagine, I don't know if you guys have ever seen Doctor Strangelove. Oh,
OK. Watch it sometimes. There's a, there's a character that reminds me a
little bit of President C, but anyways, um, he kind of like, we're gonna
have this band-aid. Well, we in the faculty were kind of upset to hear
this because we thought, look, you know, our, our human event classes have
to be about 20. We can't have more than 20 or 21, and frankly, I feel it's
a little much. I'd really rather have it at like 16. That would be ideal.
Um, so we didn't know what that meant, right? And, and what President Crow
was thinking. So Mark Jacobs, and Peggy Nelson went to President Grant and
said, well, look, if you want this expansion in terms of the number of
students who are coming to Barron. And you want to maintain the quality of
what it is, we're gonna need more professors, and they kind of figured
they were kind of calling, I think this is I don't, I mean, Mark Jacobs
may disagree with this characterization, but my understanding was they
kind of thought of it as calling President Crow's bluff, like, look, do
you understand what's involved here? And Crow, without batting an eyelash
said, Yeah, we can do that. Here are the resources. Here's the money,
people. Let's get it done. So it was kind of that thing. Like, oh, OK,
then we'll hire new people. We've been really fortunate. I gotta tell you
, I have been stunned, blown away by the people we've hired, especially
the newest people we've hired. We've just hired some amazing faculty. I'm
a mentor for Doctor, uh, Taylor Hines, um, Doctor, um, Dagmaron Egan, uh,
Doctor Katie Boyce Gchino. Um, these are just terrific people and, and
finally with Taylor and Katie. I have people I can tell science, math, and
physics jokes right, because of their background. Um, but when I look at,
I'm on the personnel committee and when I look at the fact it's like, oh,
I'm not giving away like state secrets, but I, this is a good thing. I'm
looking at the stuff they're doing and I'm just blown away. I'm just like
, wow, they're doing this innovative stuff that keeps me on my game. It
makes me think, I better not sit on my laurels because these newer folks
who are younger and, and bringing in new ideas and new energy are doing
really. So
that's kind of
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
black I've got.