CLA's Special Edition Campaign Magazine

best for the world • celebrating campaign success • meeting the moment

Contents

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Campaign by the Numbers We shattered expectations

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Classroom to Career CLA is helping students turn learning into lifelong success

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The Pillsbury Dream Realized A new home for English and the Liberal Arts Engagement Hub

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Preserving Culture in Times of Crisis and Change Through Healing Roots, Riverside community stories “bloom”

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No Going Back CLA faculty are confronting the toughest problems we face

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Public Life Starts Here Preparing for public life in polarized times

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Donor Voices Donors reflect on why they give to CLA

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How to Move Mountains Understand the past, meet the moment, embrace the future

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The Unifying Power of the Arts Inviting us to step closer, not away

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Dandelions: Poetry and Art A professor’s words, a fine art graduate’s illustration — together for you

COVER ILLUSTRATION: MAYA KUVAJA

As the home of the humanities, arts, and social sciences, CLA is uniquely suited to tackle the most pressing problems facing individuals and societies today.

You did it.

In 2017, CLA publicly launched the Shattering Expectations fundraising campaign, the largest in the college’s history. Our goal was to raise $150 million and transform CLA into a destination college, a college dedicated to being best for the world.

With your help, and the help of over 21,000 of our friends, alumni, and supporters, we have exceeded our campaign goal. You invested over $182 million in CLA, allowing us to increase opportunities for students and to launch key initiatives.

Among these innovations are the Career Readiness Initiative, which has become a national model over the past five years in preparing undergraduate students for successful careers by leveraging their liberal arts education. This fall we launched the Public Life Project, which will provide students with the skills necessary to grapple with polarizing divisions and prepare for active, meaningful public lives.

Your gifts have led to emergency aid funds for students, which have helped many students stay in school and persevere to reach their degree. The internship scholarships you have created and supported have helped students learn on-the-job skills, test possible career paths, and brought the knowledge and energy of talented CLA students into businesses and organizations across Minnesota and around the world.

As the home of the humanities, arts, and social sciences, CLA is uniquely suited to tackle the most pressing problems facing individuals and societies today. With your help, the college has recruited and retained world-class faculty and graduate students and enhanced highly ranked programs and first-rate research centers and institutes.

The Interdisciplinary Collaborative Workshop program spurs new collaborations among scholars in CLA and beyond. The Liberal Arts Engagement Hub engages scholars in reciprocal research and study with community partners to respond to important social challenges.

JOHN COLEMAN Dean, College of Liberal Arts

Put simply, your investments have elevated the college’s level of excellence now and for decades to come. And that matters, not just so we can pat ourselves on the back. The better we are at our work, the better our research, the more ready our graduates, then the greater good we can do. That’s the purpose of a college determined to be best for the world.

From all of us in CLA, thank you for elevating opportunity, boosting excellence, and making us a stronger college. We are deeply grateful for your support and investment.

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How Your Giving Transformed the Here and Beyond Ten years ago we set the largest campaign goal in CLA’s history. Because of your generosity and vision to enrich every aspect of the CLA experience, we exceeded that $150 million mark. That’s Shattering Expectations. Here are just some of the ways donors are helping prepare a new generation to be their best for the world.

53%

MORE STUDENTS RECEIVING SCHOLARSHIPS

more than doubled

83%

fy12 $83,876,343

INCREASE IN FACULTY FUNDING

fy21 $178,980,325

GROWTH IN THE VALUE OF ENDOWMENTS

more than doubled 2

113%

INCREASE IN STUDENT SUPPORT FUNDS

fy12 $159,812,154 fy21 $322,881,128

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA

102%

9,827

new donors

% 85

$ 182.4

million raised

122% OF OUR $150 MILLION GOAL

OF GIFTS UNDER

$ 1,000

NEED-BASED scholarship funds fy12 $20,319,926

% 179 INCREASE

fy21 $56,600,004

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Classroom to Career How CLA is helping students turn learning into lifelong success

BY TIM GIHRING (BA ’95, JOURNALISM)

ILLUSTRATION: TIM BOWER

WHEN CLA LAUNCHED its Career Readiness Initiative in 2015, it emphasized something that was there all along — in the classrooms, in the coursework, in the track record of its graduates. “We call it the liberal arts advantage,” says Ascan Koerner, CLA’s associate dean for undergraduate education.

“We wanted to make a very explicit claim about the value of a liberal arts education.”

The claim is backed up by data showing that, as their careers progress, liberal arts graduates eventually earn more on average than STEM graduates (science, technology, engineering, math). “Technical skills get you through the door,” says Koerner, “but they don’t

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advance your career.” Indeed, liberal arts majors are more likely to become the people in charge.

The Career Readiness Initiative was designed to ensure CLA graduates are endowed with this advantage. At its heart is a set of core competencies, essential both to professional success and a liberal arts education: analytical and critical thinking, applied problem solving, ethical reasoning and decision making, innovation and creativity, oral and written communication, teamwork and leadership, engaging diversity, active citizenship and community engagement, digital literacy, and career management.

If these competencies have long been inherent to CLA courses, their connection to life after graduation has not always been explicit, says Koerner. As a result, students sometimes struggled to explain the value of their own education.

Now, CLA professors are asked to be more intentional about connecting the dots. Since 2017, more than a hundred instructors have taken part in the Career Readiness Teaching Fellows program, where they create coursework — sometimes entirely new courses — around one or more competencies.

Students, for their part, connect the dots using the RATE process, which stands for reflect, articulate, translate, and evaluate.

Lauren Foley BA ’21, ENGLISH AND SPANISH EDITORIAL INTERN AT LERNER PUBLISHING

It helps them understand not just what they’ve learned but how it’s useful, well beyond the classroom. To date, some 43,000 RATE assignments have been completed.

“It provides a language for talking about what they’re doing,” says Wendy Rahn, a professor of political science. Maggie Bergeron, who teaches dance, calls it “naming the unnameable, trying to find some sort of concreteness to the ineffable quality of a liberal arts education.… And I think that’s really important, because the world is not quantifiable or concrete.”

The initiative has also revamped internships, research positions, and other extracurricular work.

An internship coordinator was hired, requirements have been standardized and aligned with core competencies, and the RATE process is now part of every internship.

Scholarships to support these experiences are “absolutely essential,” Koerner says, as many internships are unpaid, research costs money, and students of modest means would otherwise need to work to make college work for them. “Those are the students whose lives we’re changing,” Koerner says.

“This makes a real difference in the trajectory of their life.”

Here, three recent grads explain how CLA’s career readiness efforts — and the scholarships that support them — have paid off in their post-college lives.

Lauren Foley was the first person in her family to embark on a four-year degree. So when she left North Dakota for the U in 2017, “it was hard to ask my family for advice because they didn’t have the experience,” she says. “I really had to lean on CLA and my peers to understand what was going on, what to expect, and how to navigate it.”

Her First Year Experience course helped. Although she already knew that she wanted to work in publishing and editing, the RATE process pushed her to reflect on what she was learning and how it could translate into a career. “The core competencies offer a really unique and concise way to talk about the skills you’re getting,” she says, “especially when you move on to interviews later. They help you build a language for them.”

My scholarships gave me that room to be able to choose career experiences where the focus could be more on building career skills than having to fully support myself.

— LAUREN FOLEY, BA ’21

She joined Backpack, a student-run brand communications agency within CLA, which serves clients inside and outside the College with storytelling and public relations campaigns. Foley stayed with it through her senior year, and by then she was the agency’s editorial director.

Foley also joined the Minnesota Youth Story Squad, working with eighth-graders at Northeast Middle School in Minneapolis on their storytelling skills, helping “curate a space” in digital and social media “where their stories are not only being heard but being told,” she says.

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It was a clarifying time, as she debated Jonathan Du whether to continue toward publishing or shift toward education.

BA ’17, POLITICAL SCIENCE “I care a lot about storytelling and CONTENT DESIGNER, FACEBOOK how language connects people,” she Jonathan Du remembers when he decided says. “Classroom teaching goes about it what to do with his life. He was in middle in a different way and turned my head school. Barack Obama was running for for a while.” Ultimately, she came back president. “I liked the idea that a minority to publishing, but says it was important could get to such high positions of power to swim in other waters for a while: and really inspire a country,” says Du, “Now I can say for sure this is it.” whose parents came from China and Foley was supported by a National raised him in Colorado. He decided to Merit Scholarship and several CLA become a lawyer and go into politics. scholarships, including the BentsonDu chose the U based on its political Niblick, Waller, Edelstein, and Stroud science program, its law school, and its Scholarships. Needing to make ends support for pre-law undergrads. But meet, she says, could have precluded freshman year was “kind of a struggle,” more valuable work. “My scholarships he says. His grades were fine, but college gave me that room to be able to choose had opened his eyes to vocations beyond career experiences like working at Backpack,” she says, “where, even if I was making money, the My scholarship had a monumental focus could be more on building career skills impact. It kick-started my career and than having to fully helped me get where I am today. support myself.”

After graduating this — JONATHAN DU, BA ’17 spring, Foley went to work as a full-time editorial intern with law school, and an interview to work in Lerner Publishing in Minneapolis, a congressman’s office that summer had developing books for the school gone “horribly,” he says. and library market. The liberal arts, He was serving on the CLA Student she says, gave her “a clearer way to Board during his sophomore year, when connect across diverse subjects.…

CLA Career Services encouraged the It kept me from getting too narrow in board members to apply for the Mulhollem my pursuits and only focusing on that Cravens Leadership Scholarship, which one thing. There are so many doors offers career counseling, mentoring, and that are open.” a reflection course along with financial support for a summer internship. Du got the scholarship and an internship with the Republican National Committee in 2016.

“I’d always wanted to work in Washington, DC,” he says, “the fabled place where all the policy gets made, all the backroom deals are made, where the smart people go to play in politics.”

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The internship paid $200 every two weeks. “There was no way I could have made it work without that scholarship,” Du says. “It had a monumental impact.

It kick-started my career and helped me get where I am today.”

The following summer, with help from a mentor at the RNC, he got an internship at CBS News in New York. And after graduating early, in 2017, he returned to CBS News and Washington, DC, as a news associate on Face the Nation.

Du recently earned his master’s in public affairs from the University of Texas at Austin, and last summer he interned with Facebook on its Civic Integrity Team, helping audit the internal tools that flag hate speech, disinformation, and misinformation.

Now he’s beginning a full-time job at Facebook, looking at ways to improve content, navigation, and user privacy across its suite of apps — “presenting complex technology in manageable ways,” he explains. At a time when work is increasingly specialized, he says, Facebook likes “bigger thinkers” who can see across disciplines and “wrap it all together” to improve processes.

Du credits CLA with helping him develop as a problem solver. Confronted with situations that aren’t black and white, he says of liberal arts grads, “we can rely on our ability to critically think and build coalitions and bring people together to solve these problems.… I think we need people who can think outside the box. Nobody does it better than someone with a liberal arts degree.”

Christine Cao BA ’15, PSYCHOLOGY DATA SCIENTIST, EVERLANE

For a long time before going to college, Christine Cao thought about what she would do afterward. She would become a therapist, perhaps, or go to law school.

She had enjoyed a psychology class in high school, in Naperville, Illinois, and figured a background in the field was compatible with either career move. So when she arrived at the U in the fall of 2012, she declared a major in psychology.

Then she began a series of internships, research positions, and other work opportunities supported by CLA scholarships. Six placements in just three years.

“When you graduate, you can get stuck in this Catch-22 of needing experience to get a job,” she says, “but how do you get experience without a job?” She was determined to avoid the conundrum.

She was matched with a professor to conduct auditory research. She ran a study of her own through the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication, analyzing whether advertising is more effective when it shows people or not. She had internships at the VA medical center in Minneapolis, the

business school of Columbia University, and the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, scrutinizing data on everything from schizophrenia to visitor feedback.

Major support for Cao’s endeavors came from the Daniel McFadden & Beverlee Simboli Research Scholarship. Of course,

waters,” Cao says. “It wound up being a huge shift in my career path, and made me realize what I want to do.”

After graduation, Cao went on to earn a master’s in data science from the University of Chicago, while working for JPMorgan Chase & Co. as an analyst of customer feedback.

Last year, she took a new job as a data I feel really lucky to have been able to test scientist for Everlane, a mostly online the waters [with internships]. It wound up clothing company being a huge shift in my career path, and based in San Francisco.

She focuses on made me realize what I want to do. data modeling and — CHRISTINE CAO, BA ’15 customer retention, and she loves the work. She credits her in the midst of her research, Cao learned at internships and research positions with least as much about herself. Her “become revealing a path to get there. a therapist” idea became less appealing “It really helped when I was looking after a stint as a CLA peer advisor, where for my first job out of college,” Cao says. she realized that advising wasn’t One recruiter looked at her work history — the long list of experience she had accrued a great fit for her. Instead, in school — and told her, “This is not an she began leaning toward entry-level resume.” She had avoided the research design and statistics. “I feel really Catch-22. “It really worked out for me,” she says. lucky to have been able to test the

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The Pillsbury Dream Realized Where a story can take flight IN THE SPRING of 2009, I stood in a small Lind Hall classroom crowded with undergraduates enrolled in the Department of English’s literary magazine production course. If you could dream of the perfect home for English, I asked my students, what would it look like? What would it feature?

“Air conditioning!” one student quipped, to laughter. “A space dedicated to The Tower,” said another (to cheers), of the publication created by this two-semester experiential learning course. “A computer lab.” “Places to sit in the hallway.” “More English classes in the building, not all across campus.” Students later offered more pensive written comments. “English is about more than just reading books,” noted one, “it’s about experiencing literature.” “We need spaces where English majors can hang out and feel more like a community.”

At the time, I had recently begun working as an English department staff person as well as teaching. (I am an MFA graduate of the Creative Writing Program.) The department’s tenure in Lind, home of the College of Science & Engineering, had hit its 40th year and our campaign to renovate Pillsbury Hall as a permanent home for English its 13th year. The dreaming in that classroom felt like just that: wistful clouds.

But without dreams, without visions of a better future, how does positive change occur? John S. Pillsbury (Minnesota governor 1875 to 1881) envisioned a state university “broad in its scope, powerful in its influence” and paid for the construction of a “hall of science” as part of a Minnesota legislative agreement to ensure the fledgling University’s survival.

This September, that 1889 building reopened as a home for the Department of English and the Liberal Arts Engagement Hub, showing the University’s deepening investment in the humanities after a year which, to be frank, proved the critical importance of such skills as the ability to evaluate competing discourses in terms of historical context, ideology, and public impact and to communicate clearly and effectively.

I am excited to welcome students back to campus and into Pillsbury Hall, where, yes, there is a media lab and a room just for our The Tower and Great River Review student staff. Where there are event spaces to “experience literature” and social/study spaces to build community. Where poet,

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McKnight Presidential Fellow, and Associate Professor Douglas Kearney will help students explore the intersection of entertainment and violence (especially regarding Black Americans) and “what it means to reckon with instability and discomfort” in a text. Where Associate Professor Elaine Auyoung will challenge students to think about the psychological intimacy generated in reading and the relationship of aesthetic experience to moral action. And where Professor John Watkins will teach how cultures reveal their fears and resentments in the literatures of apocalypse.

Those stories aren’t limited to a single building, no matter how beautifully envisioned. But they can take flight there.

One of the students in that 2009 Lind classroom was Jamie Millard, winner of the 2017 College of Liberal Arts Emerging Alumni Award as executive director of the media arts organization Pollen. Pollen uses storytelling to “pave new paths and new opportunities for communities to connect across lines of difference” and “to change our collective story for the better.”

And I think, as I walk these days through gleaming Pillsbury, with its iconic tower staircase: What is a dream but a story?

A stairway into the future built word by word.

BY TERRI SUTTON (MFA ’03, CREATIVE WRITING) Thank you to Minnesota’s taxpayers for your investments in Pillsbury Hall. And thank you to the 113 alumni and friends who have donated $1,145,715 for Pillsbury Hall renovations.

Preserving Culture in Times of Crisis and Change Riverside community blooms through Healing Roots SOIL, SEEDS, AND STORIES . With them, the Healing Roots team is transforming the Cedar Riverside Plaza landscape and community. And as wildlife-friendly plants and rain gardens replace traditional turf, the stories of the neighborhood’s immigrant elders are being recorded and honored, leading to new knowledge.

Riverside Towers is home to generations of East African families—including those with grandchildren who are now students at the adjacent University of Minnesota.

Part of the new Liberal Arts Engagement Hub Residency program, Healing Roots is a collaboration between Metro Blooms, the Backyard Phenology Project, and community leaders to build pathways to careers in green infrastructure.

“Some of the elders were farmers in their community of origin and this was really the first time that they were able to literally dig in,” says Rebecca Rice, executive director of Metro Blooms, which partners with communities to create resilient landscapes and foster clean watersheds.

“That’s why they’re very excited about the

project, what it is doing ecologically, and how they can participate in learning about the ecosystem and the land here.”

Cross-cultural storytelling is key. “At a community event, our landscape architect was explaining that the first inch of runoff is the most polluted, so if we can capture that first inch in a rain event, we’ll capture most of the pollution. One of the community women spoke up and said, ‘Oh, we know what that is, we know not to drink from the well after the first rain; you have to wait until the second rain.’ She already knew what we were talking about.”

“Students and community partners have a powerful voice in this collaboration.

When we listen to elders and people who have other cultural knowledge and ways of knowing, we are engaged in a more creative way than just standing out there with a clipboard,” says Christine Baeumler, art professor and co-founder of Backyard Phenology, a partnership in which scientists, artists, researchers, and Indigenous knowledge-keepers use a storytelling/ citizen-science approach to connect communities to the natural world.

Having young adults equitably compensated to take leadership in defining and implementing the project also indicates success. “This work builds toward communities creating green infrastructure with access to good-paying jobs in a green economy filled by a very diverse workforce,” says Rice.

“Team members are equipping themselves to become policymakers and government leaders,” adds Baeumler. “Their actions will make a difference. In the future, hopefully, we’ll be seeing more birds coming back into our neighborhoods, the water will be cleaner. I won’t be looking out my window and literally seeing smoke on the other side of the tree line.”

BY SUSAN THURSTON-HAMERSKI The Healing Roots team members are: Lilah White, engagement project manager; Fernanda Acosta, engagement support; Nadia Alsadi, GreenCorps member Community partners are: Weli Hassan, executive director, Riverside Tenants Association; Eddy Olson-Enamorado, intern, COPAL; Leslee Gutierrez, environmental justice organizer, COPAL; Brett Ramey, independent consultant Additional Backyard Phenology team members are: Professor Rebecca Montgomery, UMN Department of Forest Resources; Beth Mercer Taylor, sustainability education coordinator, UMN

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NO NO GOING GOING

KCABACK B

Expectations pushed, tested, and (im)proved

SUSAN THURSTON-HAMERSKI

John Coleman, CLA dean, often says the liberal arts are “front-page news.”

It’s hard to think of another time when this statement has been more relevant.

Through their research and teaching, CLA faculty are confronting the toughest problems we face: systemic racism, a changing workforce, healthcare inequality, misinformation, and more.

We asked six faculty members how their work is helping us make sense of our world and how campaign gifts make it possible to meet the moment and be our best for the world.

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PHOTOS: LISA MILLER

Being part of the solution KATHRYN GRACE (Beverly and Richard Fink Liberal Arts Faculty Innovation Award recipient and associate professor of geography, environment, and society) embraces alternative perspectives to issues related to women’s health and development through the use of a quantitative, mixed-disciplinary approach. She examines the ways that individual, family, or household outcomes are conditioned by place, including both the culture and the natural environment. She explores the underlying theories of development, resource use, and access, building on her own personal experiences and observations from time spent in poor countries and communities.

My research in Africa brings new understanding around how women can access healthcare, including contraception, prenatal care, and care for infants and young children. There are really important system-level barriers that poor women with young children face — especially those women who heavily rely on small-scale farming for their food and income. I’ve been focused on linking all of those things together, and I gained a different perspective on these barriers during the pandemic.

During the pandemic, there were all of these new research questions that people and organizations needed me to help them answer (like how food security

is affected by the combined impact of a pandemic and a poor agricultural season), and at the same time, I was also dealing with its impact on life at home. My youngest turned five early in the pandemic and like many others, we had no child care. And at the same time, I was still deeply committed to my scholarship and new research demands around people in the developing world who were nervous about how the pandemic was going to impact their lives.

Whether it’s things like vaccines or reproductive health care or humanitarian aid, too much of the message seems to be, “Oh, there’s a huge portion of the population that these services aren’t reaching.

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For someone like me, a first-generation college student, who didn’t ever really think they fit in, to have a place that really supports you and thinks you have great ideas, that just feels great.

– KATHRYN GRACE

What’s wrong with those people?” The questions should be: What’s wrong with our system? How do we change the system?

What I’m really driven by is how women and poor people can contribute to building a system where they can access resources. This is a real issue across settings and institutions. When people aren’t using resources designed for them, how do we fix the system?

As a research community, we learned that we can do quite a few things remotely and successfully. It is definitely a different skillset, so we do have to stretch those muscles a bit by organizing meetings differently, for example. I have also been reminded, however, of how important it is to have those physical connections, especially with people from whom I’m trying to learn. It’s less important to be traveling domestically to catch up with some of my colleagues and established research networks; we can do a lot of that over Zoom. However, building and maintaining collaborative relationships with colleagues and community members who have limited internet or prefer more in-person engagement makes this a particularly challenging time.

I do now have to discern (with my colleagues and teams) between what is required travel and what can be done remotely. In other words, I have to be more planful about how I’m going to use my time (and other people’s time) to accomplish the most important goals. At the end of the day, it’s been really hard to form the kinds of relationships that I need to with the collaborators and communities I work with in Africa and Southeast Asia.

I feel fully supported by the University. Were I to say, “I could really use this to help my research have more impact,” I feel the University’s response would be “Okay, how do we get that to you?” And for someone like me, a first-generation college student, who didn’t ever really think they fit in, to have a place that really supports you and thinks you have great ideas, that just feels great.

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Why the net is important MARIACRISTINA DE NARDI (Thomas Sargent Professor

in Economics) is a sought-after expert on her area of research that explores wealth inequality, savings after retirement, the economic impact of life expectancy and medical expenses, and the economics of health and household structure.

Formerly a senior economist and research advisor in the research department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and a professor at University College London, De Nardi came to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis in 2018 and to the University of Minnesota in 2019.

Success means better understanding the problems that we face as a society, why they are there, and what we can do to make things better. We have made a lot of progress in understanding the general principles of the trade-offs between helping people and households and providing them with the right incentives to invest in themselves, save, work, and improve their lives. But there is still much that we need to examine, for instance, about

how families (rather than individuals) lead to the outcomes that we observe, including the participation of women in the workplace, starting from their reproductive years and beyond.

Success means better understanding these decisions and designing policy reforms that better take these mechanisms into account. For example, in my research, I find that the current structure of taxes and old-age Social Security greatly discourage married women from working and households from saving. Success would be discussing these aspects more and deciding whether we are aware of these magnitudes as a society and whether we want to change these incentives and how.

Because of funding I’ve received through the Thomas Sargent Professorship in Economics and the support of the Heller-Hurwicz Economics Institute, I have started working not only with graduate students but also with undergraduate research assistants. I already knew how good our graduate students are, but our undergraduates were a revelation for me. We have a lot of talent at all levels in CLA, including some truly stellar undergraduates who are crazy smart, incredibly hard-working, passionate, whose curiosity to learn is never sated, and who really want to improve our society. Seeing these qualities in such young people makes me very optimistic about the future.

What scares me is polarized discussions and not keeping in mind that we are all in this together. What scares me is not having a constructive attitude, not having an open and frank discussion, and focusing on labels rather than issues.

Ultimately, focusing on issues rather than labels is what makes a discussion

move on to solutions and improvement.

We need to understand what went wrong, including during the financial crisis, or the pandemic, to avoid making the same mistakes in the future.

Individually, we have to keep doing research at the highest levels, we have to keep investing in the quality of our teaching, to make an effort to share the results of research both to policy-making and social media, and, very importantly, we need to keep investing in our undergraduate and graduate students.

We have a lot of talent at all levels in CLA, including some truly stellar undergraduates…. Seeing these qualities in such young people makes me very optimistic about the future.

– MARIACRISTINA DE NARDI

Revealing the value of the essential WILLIAM P. JONES (Beverly and Richard Fink Liberal Arts Faculty Innovation Award recipient and professor of history) is a historian of the 20th-century United States, with particular interest in the relationship between race and class. Professor Jones has published books on African American industrial workers in the Jim Crow South and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. He is called upon often by the media for insights into the history of race, labor, and inequality.

The pandemic revealed longstanding truths about our economy and the workers who drive it. It made clear the true importance of what we call essential workers. They perform the work that has to be done, and this became most obvious in healthcare and the food supply chain, from production to fast food and grocery stores. When we started looking in Minnesota, that classification included 70 percent of the workforce.

It has changed how we think about work.

What keeps society running and what we traditionally thought of as the core of the economy is no longer primarily manufacturing. The pandemic made it clear that economic activity is not only about producing things but also about helping others who do things to go back to work.

In an industrial economy, it used to be more true that you could go into a factory

unskilled and receive skills that allowed you to move into management. This was always a small minority of the workforce, but it was possible. Today, it’s pretty much impossible to go in as a food service worker or a janitor in a large institution, say a hospital, and gain skills in that position that would lead to your becoming a doctor. You would have to leave work, get a degree, and come back. As a result, we see a much greater social stratification now than we did late in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Those stratifications tend to fall along racial lines, which means that access to formal education is particularly important for African Americans and other people of color.

Recognizing the structural inequalities in our society is important. Too often we assume that all Americans have the same opportunities. But in reality, it is almost

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Financial support makes three key things I need to do possible: exchange ideas, research the data, and collaborate.

impossible to move from one economic stratum to another. For the US compared to other wealthy countries, there are dramatic differences in economic mobility.

Here, if you are born into a poor family the figures are abysmal for your prospects of becoming middle class.

I’ve spent years deeply engaged in research around work and inequality and the long history of race and capitalism.

These topics are often not covered in national media and most of us are not used to seeing or hearing about them. We’ve seen intense resistance to this information that is powerful and deep-seated. The truths about inequality contradict our national myth of an egalitarian society, and to discuss structural inequality is often seen as unpatriotic. This is not surprising to most scholars, but to the broader public it is seen as dangerous.

The solutions to these conflicts are rooted in the liberal arts and, for me, through the work I am devoted to as a historian.

Financial support makes three key things I need to do possible: exchange ideas, research the data, and collaborate.

To travel for archival research and present and share ideas with colleagues. It has allowed me to hire research assistants and to share results and get feedback from graduate students, leading to the training of another generation of scholars. And this is critical to understanding when we are in a position to address long-standing inequalities. To ask what are the sources of the limitations and how do we create access to formal training and other avenues that will help everyone achieve their dreams, have meaningful work?

– WILLIAM P. JONES

What lies beneath RICHARD LANDERS (John P. Campbell Professor in Industrial & Organizational

Psychology and associate professor of psychology) directs the TNTLAB (Testing New Technologies in Learning, Assessment, and Behavior) where he and his team conduct research and work with organizations to understand the current role and the potential of the internet and related technologies to improve work. This research incorporates rigorous experimental and psychometric methods addressing how to improve organizations in relation to how they treat their employees, and they investigate the use of a range of technologies, including big data, gamification, virtual reality, video games, handheld devices (e.g., smartphones), online social networking, and web-based training.

The most immediate step we need to make things better, whether in private organizations or in society in general, is to build greater shared understanding of the challenges we face. This is one of the reasons it’s so important not to shortchange the liberal arts. A liberal arts education makes it clear how to look at subtext. What’s driving a lot of people’s

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behavior in the world today are the things they believe but don’t say or maybe even realize. The liberal arts help people say, “You’re telling me A, but I think you actually believe B. And let’s figure out why that’s happening and what it means, together.” That’s how the liberal arts support the good of society. We need more people who can go out into the world with

that appreciation. We need more people willing to question their own beliefs and the beliefs of others, to be willing to grow together, to pursue outcomes that are actually better for everyone, instead of what’s just easiest or fastest.

One of my goals in the work that I’ve done has always been to challenge preconceived notions about what psychology is in order to expand our appreciation of and impact on these real-world issues, where things are not so simple as within the silo of a single perspective. When I go into the business world, I often find myself among executives and managers, each with their own biases, expertise, and training. From there, I need to develop a mutual understanding of the organization if I hope to make a difference. I understand that they are trying to make good deci-

sions, even when they’re not successful.

Figuring out exactly who believes what and why, where past decisions came from, is critical.

Management really varies in terms of how diverse it is, not just in the demographic sense, but in terms of experiences and perspective, and a lack of diversity in a boardroom in all dimensions can really flavor the kinds of decisions they ultimately end up making. So for example, when I go into an organization and say, “The way you’re using artificial intelligence (AI) or the way you’re using games or the way you’re using social media in relation to the people you manage is harmful,” those in management don’t immediately push back. They don’t think that I’m there because of a purely quixotic reason or that it’s my personal mission to get rid of AI in an organization. My goal is to make things better for everyone, for both the organization and its employees.

It’s not just about buying a product and putting it in and looking for return on investment. There are often these other dimensions, these human dimensions, that they are missing. That is really the big advantage to this kind of approach and the kind of work that I do: Crossing the bridges that others can’t. That’s what the funding from my Campbell Professorship allows me to do. I can go to a computer scientist colleague and say, “I’d like to build this.” And they say, “Do you have money?” And then I can say, “Yes, I have the support to build a prototype.” That’s the key. Then we can use that prototype to make something bigger and to apply for grants to help us do even bigger projects still, which brings more funding to Minnesota for even more graduate students to devote their time to making the world a better place. Those resources make it much easier and more practical to open those doors, to overcome the barriers that others can’t cross.

That is really the big advantage to the kind of work that I do: Crossing the bridges that others can’t. That’s what the funding allows me to do.

– RICHARD LANDERS

To make sure this just doesn’t happen again MICHAEL MINTA (Engdahl Family Faculty Award recipient and

professor of political science) is one of the country’s leading experts in the study of the political representation of African American, Latino, and women’s interests in the United States. His most recent book No Longer Outsiders: Black and Latino Interest Group Advocacy on Capitol Hill focuses on racial and ethnic politics, minority interest group advocacy, and how to elevate these voices within traditional politics. His focus on minority politics became more salient with the reality of the pandemic.

It’s easy to look at a former president and say, “Oh, he was terrible.” But it’s not just the president or the office of the presidency. I usually focus on the US Congress, and so I looked at our political institutions and what we were doing to prepare and respond to infectious diseases in general. The pandemic led me to look closely at how those policies in the past led to the polarization we’re seeing in the country. An Engdahl Family Research Award has helped me already in terms of hiring some research assistants to gather data and conduct analyses, so I can apply for even larger grants.

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For me, it’s trying to figure out what happened and what we can do to prepare. This is really a good opportunity to make some changes, especially with public health.

– MICHAEL MINTA

Part of my goal as a researcher and academic is to address these questions and we don’t have to take the approach of who’s to blame. Most of the time it’s usually everyone. It’s not just the president, not just the House Democrats or Senate Republicans. It’s usually just a failing of the system. For me, it’s trying to figure out what happened and what we can do to prepare. This is really a good opportunity to make some changes, especially with public health.

I’m trying to figure out a way to look at this issue in a nonpartisan way, to provide information and identify some solutions that Congress or maybe the executive branch can use and develop some mechanisms where politics don’t necessarily get in the way of addressing infectious diseases in general, and particularly a pandemic.

We just had the census, and now you’re going to start seeing the parties that are controlling the process try to draw favorable districts for themselves to protect their incumbents. You just don’t want Democrats drawing districts where it’s all going to be Democrats. You don’t want Republicans drawing districts where it’s just going to all be Republicans. You want to have some type of fairness and give people with different ideas and policy preferences a chance to have their voices heard, to win elections.

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You may have a belief about something.

But there’s someone else who has another belief, and then you want to see, how does it match up? So, we keep talking, asking questions, and the answer can change depending on the question. Just because it’s in a book doesn’t mean it’s the truth.

You have to interrogate it because people like to slant things all of the time. You might like to think that in a class, you’re going to get the right answer. But there may not be a right answer or maybe we don’t even know the answer at all. Maybe that’s the whole point.

The truth does set you free EMILY VRAGA (Don and Carole Larson Professorship in Health Communication

and associate professor of journalism and mass communication) asks questions about how people come to learn about issues of public importance and the ways in which communication can foster a better society. Her research focuses on how people come to understand news and information on contentious health, science, and political issues, and especially on how people navigate disagreement about these issues and misinformation on a range of health topics on social media.

I love asking (and sometimes answering) questions about how people come to learn about issues of public importance and the ways in which communication can foster a better society.

More specifically, my research focuses on how people come to understand news and information on contentious health, science, and political issues, and especially on how people navigate disagreement about these issues and misinformation on a range of health topics on social media.

How do we interpret information that does not agree with our predispositions? What can we do to ensure we are accurately distinguishing between high-quality and low-quality information online? How can we recognize and correct misinformation when we see it? How do we communicate with others who have differing viewpoints or who may be misinformed about a topic?

The digital media environment has made it even more important to understand how audiences respond to and perceive fragmented and ever-more diverse media messages. Because we have frequently seen posts from people who are different from us — the distant friends, family, and acquaintances that we friend or follow on social media, but do not often communicate with offline — there is the potential for exposure to more diverse views on social media than in other spaces.

There are so many possible uses of social media—my own work has examined how protest movements are using social media for online activism, the prevalence of health and political misinformation and correction on social media, and the norms of online expression when it comes to discussing contentious topics.

I focus on research that addresses practical problems that arise from social media use among a public that feels more divided than ever. I investigate methods to encourage more high-quality information consumption and production on social media. Although misinformation on social media is a real problem, seeing corrections of health misinformation on social media can be effective in reducing misperceptions among those seeing the interaction. These corrections can come from expert organizations, from the platforms themselves, and from ordinary unknown social media users, offering a space where the public can serve to improve the information environment.

Therefore, immediate correction offers a useful tool to react to misinformation on social media.

In addition, news literacy may offer a proactive solution that can be deployed to build a more resilient population. My work into news literacy suggests that reminding people of their own biases can help them be more fair news consumers, but it can

The digital media environment has made it even more important to understand how audiences perceive fragmented and ever-more diverse media messages.

– EMILY VRAGA

be difficult to encourage skepticism of misinformation without generating cynicism towards all information.

Additionally, news literacy messages can also sometimes reinforce partisan divides. While news literacy holds promise, more work needs to be done to consider how news literacy knowledge intersects with self-efficacy, perceptions of social norms, and attitudes to encourage people to respond to misinformation and be receptive to corrections when they see them online.

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BY ALLISON J. STEINKE

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The University of Minnesota’s Public Life Project engages and embraces the challenges of division, polarization, and extremism in our midst. In doing so, it provides a model to the region and the nation of how to build an engaged, informed, and empathetic citizenry on campus and beyond to preserve our democracy for generations to come.

“The issues of division, disconnection, and polarization are increasingly in need of attention on our campus and in our classrooms.”

That’s how Douglas Hartmann describes the problem at hand. Hartmann is a professor of sociology and faculty director of the Public Life Project (PLP), a new initiative of the College of Liberal Arts. He explains that “the Public Life Project speaks to a public need — the need to better understand and engage difference and polarization — as well as the misunderstanding, misinformation, and disinformation about others and public life that are involved more generally.” PLP is one way CLA is taking bold actions toward addressing the systemic gaps and injustices present in our communities and social structures to build a more productive and inclusive democracy.

PLP evolved out of conversations between Deb Hopp (BA ’75, journalism), Christopher “Kit” Dahl (BA ’65, history), Dean of the College John Coleman, and Hartmann. Hopp and Dahl had a desire for UMN to provide coursework options and a framework for students to develop knowledge and skills related to social divisions and public life. Given the fact that polarization, misinformation, and divisions in American society and culture are more prevalent than ever, it didn’t take long for the idea to take hold as the Civic Readiness Initiative — which has now been minted as the Public Life Project.

the “intensification of violent polarization and resentment” combined with “rampant misinformation and misrecognition” and the “inability to come together on important social facts in our post-truth era.”

Ho concludes, “It’s very difficult to solve social problems in that reality.”

To address these conflicts, PLP engages with and includes students, faculty, staff, alumni, and other community stakeholders by identifying and supporting a multipronged set of programs, courses, research projects, and events that speak to these interests.

“On the student side, this includes new courses and new techniques for classroom outreach and engagement,” Hartmann explains.

“On the research side, it means highlighting, promoting, and supporting research and scholarship intended to help us better understand the sources of our problems and programs that can address these challenges. It also involves public events designed to bring the knowledge and understanding that we are generating here in CLA to larger public audiences and attention.”

Preparing

for Public Life in Polarized Times

some of the largest challenges of our day

student engagement

Over the past year, rather than sinking into despair over the state of our nation, UMN students have been inspired to take part in constructive conversations as the thought leaders and changemakers of tomorrow. Brayden Roberts (BA ’21), recipient of the Jeffrey C. & Sarah M. Zutz Scholarship in Liberal Arts, was one such student committed to matters of empathy, equity, and justice.

Roberts took his first sociology course with Hartmann, and credits his CLA experience with preparing him to disagree well and to listen thoughtfully —

According to Karen Ho, a PLPaffiliated faculty member and associate professor of anthropology, some of the largest challenges of our day include

ILLUSTRATION: AESTHETIC APPARATUS / MICHAEL BYZEWSKI

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two qualities PLP seeks to instill in all participating students.

“I don’t just tolerate difference; I celebrate difference,” Roberts says. “It’s important to recognize how things can be different — not good or bad, but alternative to how you experience things. I’ve learned that everyone is going to believe something different, and everyone is going to disagree with each other to some extent. At the same time, we are entitled to believe what we’d like. Some opinions can be super far-fetched, but that’s okay, because it’s still valid to the person who believes it, and it doesn’t need to be valid to us necessarily.”

Roberts’ comments reflect a larger theme present among UMN students: They are prepared and ready to develop the knowledge and skills needed to grapple with polarizing divisions and inequalities, engage empathetically with others, and prepare for active, meaningful public lives by taking part in relevant curricular and co-curricular activities.

curriculum and research

Thanks to CLA faculty’s innovative and interdisciplinary work, the PLP team has been able to both identify pre-existing coursework and create new curriculum for students that aligns with PLP topics and themes.

Several fall 2021 CLA-wide first-year seminars address PLP priorities, including: Social Justice and the Twin Cities, taught by Assistant Professor Madelaine Cahuas, Geography, Environment & Society Homer’s Odyssey and Politics, taught by Professor S. Douglas Olson, Classical & Near Eastern Religions & Cultures Racism, Antiracism & the American Dream, taught by Associate Professor Karen Ho, Anthropology, and Professor William P. Jones, History Writing Medicine, taught by Assistant Professor Molly Kessler, Writing Studies Place Matters: Seeing the Mississippi, taught by Associate Professor Diane Willow, Art Scratched and Smashed: History of Destroying Images and Iconoclasm, taught by Assistant Professor Sinem Casale, Art Author of this article, Allison Steinke, PhD candidate in the Hubbard School of Journalism & Mass Communication, is a research assistant for the Public Life Project and recipient of numerous endowed fellowships including the Hazel Dicken-Garcia Graduate Fellowship, the Hubbard Graduate Fellowship, the Michael H. Anderson Graduate Fellowship, the Vincent Bancroft Shea Fellowship, and the Dan Wackman First-Year Graduate Student Research Award

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“One goal of our class is to have students recognize the ongoing importance of understanding the history of exclusion and racism in America, especially in the face of rampant downward mobility for most, and how these structures are ongoingly mobilized,” Ho says. “The main impetus is to unpack the layered context that people need to be able to make sense of the trials, tribulations, and alternative facts of the present moment.”

Beyond supporting PLP-oriented freshman seminars, the PLP team worked with Associate Dean for the Social Sciences Howard Lavine and Arleen C. Carlson Professor of Political Science and Psychology, to develop and introduce a PLP signature course called “Why So Polarized?: Understanding the Other Side.” This course addresses topics of political polarization and psychology, and challenges students to engage with thinking from across political and ideological spectrums.

Community members were also invited to register for a one-credit fall 2021 course, “SOC 3090: Topics in Sociology: Wonderful/Wretched: Reading Minnesota’s Racial Paradoxes.” This course, taught by Hartmann, invites community members to come together with students in a common reading of Sparked: George Floyd, Racism, and the Progressive Illusion. Sparked is a volume of firstperson essays written by scholars of color with ties to the Twin Cities. This course reflects on the significance, complexity, and tragedy of race in the wake of the summer of 2020. This critical yet constructive class centers around the issues of race, racism, and structural inequality in Minnesota that coincide with several CLA core competencies.

Brayden Roberts (BA ’21, sociology of law, criminology, & deviance), recipient of the Jeffrey C. and Sarah M. Zutz Scholarship in Liberal Arts and ambassador for the Public Life Project Professor of sociology Doug Hartmann, faculty director of the Public Life Project

partnerships and collaboratives

In addition to scheduling a series of courses and public events during the 2021-22 academic year, PLP released a series of vignettes on topics including politics, religion, and media literacy in partnership with Twin Cities Public Television (TPT) in August 2021.

This series was produced to show how UMN faculty and students are committed to engaging in challenging conversations in the face of disagreement and division, which is the best way for us to move forward as a divided nation with hope for a future characterized by mutual understanding.

Looking to the future, Hartmann’s number one hope and goal for the Public Life Project is for “all of the ideas and principles we stand for to get reaffirmed and baked into the regular, day-to-day, year-to-year practices of our research, teaching, and community outreach.”

“It isn’t about building something new — it is about reclaiming and revitalizing the broad, inclusive, and radically uncompromising approach to knowledge and learning that has always been the heart and soul of a liberal arts education,” Hartmann says. “I truly believe that the University of Minnesota — with our state’s history of civic engagement, bipartisan collaboration, and commitment to public good along with our increasing diversity and all of the challenges that have come with that — can provide a model to the nation of a unique, alternative vision of how to engage with and embrace the challenges of division, polarization, and extremism in our midst.”

Learn more about events and curriculum tied to the Public Life Project at cla.umn.edu/public-life-project

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I realize that the education I received all those years ago prepared me very well for the current climate of global change.

As a member of the Marching Band, I was accepted for who and what I was and learned flexibility, persistence, determination, rigor, discipline, and stamina which have carried me through the past year, the past decade, and certainly will serve me well into old age. I have so much gratitude and appreciation for the profound life lessons I gleaned from that experience and couldn’t know that decades later, I would still be applying those learnings to my everyday life.

PATRICK SCOTT (BS ’90, MUSIC EDUCATION)

DONOR VOICES E

ach and every financial contribution from you, our alumni and donors, supports “what is essential to the best in human nature,” as stated

by Stephen Setterberg (BA ’80, philosophy, and MD ’84).

In today’s world, we are convinced more than ever that an understanding of economics can and should play a role in our political conversations and in policymaking.

Additionally, it is more important than ever to give of one’s time, talents, and treasures to support others on their journey in life. Through our relationship with CLA these past few years, we’ve been delighted to meet the students who’ve benefitted from our charitable efforts.

THOMAS (BA ’73, ECONOMICS) AND KRISTIN HOLTZ

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We are honored that out of all of the worthy giving opportunities from which you could choose, you supported CLA. Clearly, many of you, like Stephen, have “become even more convinced of the fundamental importance of critical reasoning to the future survival of democracy. Of course, what is traditionally understood as scientific knowledge is also essential — as COVID-19 has so brutally reminded us — but grounding in the core liberal arts perspectives on history, culture, the arts, moral and political constructs, and on what constitutes persuasive evidence, is arguably more important now than at any point in human history.”

Here are few more comments from our donors.

Our commitment to the University of Minnesota, CLA, and the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication has always revolved around a central, simple truth: We love libraries. When Michael was a graduate student in journalism, the Murphy Hall library was a place to relax, recharge, and research, a facility that also embodied a lot of the glowing history of the school itself.

It brings a smile to hear that our efforts have been sufficient to improve things, even a little, in the Murphy Hall library. We look forward to playing a part in its renovation.

MICHAEL HILL (MA ’79, MASS COMMUNICATIONS) AND BARBARA BINK

My time at CLA helped shape my values, initiated my career path, and provided opportunities to become active in student organizations and causes, ultimately fashioning my view of the world and how to successfully participate in it. And most importantly, CLA provided strong friendships that continue to this day.

The epidemic and social justice events of the past year and a half have only strengthened my belief that we all have to step up to support the success of our students.

Access, equity, and student success require our active participation and our financial support. And yes, we need to ask for more from the University.

But we also need to give more generously to it so it can truly succeed.

DAVID EDER (BS ’87, URBAN STUDIES)

The divide between rich and poor, educated and uneducated continues to widen in America, even though America is perceived as a place of ‘opportunity for all.’

CLA gave each of us a strong foundation in life.

PHOTOS: LISA MILLER

By supporting CLA, we can help to provide learning opportunities for students who may not have access to higher education. Generosity is a balm to the things that divide us.

SARAH (BS AND BA ’79, ECONOMICS) AND JEFF ZUTZ (BA ’78 AND MA ’81, ARCHITECTURE)

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Understand the past, meet the moment, embrace the future

How to Move Mountains The work of CLA scholars has never been more urgent or relevant. Examples of our faculty and students engaged in being their best reveal the transformative power of the liberal arts in a rapidly changing world.

BY SUSAN MAAS

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Getting Getting to know American American Indian studies The oldest of its kind, CLA’s American Indian studies department is uniquely positioned to lead on issues facing the world today, from climate change to environmental justice to white supremacy and structural racism. Since 1969, department scholars have helped preserve the Ojibwe and Dakota languages, uplift Native heritages, histories, and cultures — and challenge the colonizing ways that have created and perpetuated these urgent problems.

Yet today, the program is something of a well-kept secret, says Brendan Kishketon, associate professor of American Indian studies. Kishketon, a world-renowned Ojibwe language scholar, is determined to change that through the American Indian Summer Institute (AISI).

“Not enough Native students know about us and the programs we have to serve them. And reservation kids are

especially underrepresented: our message has not been getting in front of them.” So Kishketon reached into his own past — as a teen, he attended a summer bridge program in Utah — to imagine changing that. He envisioned a week for Indigenous high school students to explore Native languages, meet Native faculty, write, hone study skills, connect with each other — and to see themselves at UMN. In 2018, the American Indian Summer Institute was born.

AISI is “putting a face to our programs,” Kishketon says. “There’s this perception that the University is a big, scary, cold institution. Students need to know a human here.” Throughout the camp, participants learn about the department’s offerings and get a taste of life on campus … dipping their toes in Dakota and Ojibwe language lessons, playing games, living in residence halls, and building community. Current Native students serve as their counselors.

Dustin Morrow, who just graduated with a degree in Ojibwe language and linguistics and is beginning his master’s in linguistics at UMN this fall, served as an AISI counselor in 2019. “It was a blast,” he says. “I’m a nontraditional student.

ILLUSTRATION: ANDRÉS GUZMÁN

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Associate Professor Brendan Kishketon (American Indian studies)

I was already an adult when I started at the U, and [campus] was even intimidating for me. I grew up on the Lac Courte Oreilles Reservation; a lot of [AISI participants] are straight from the reservation. Coming from a very rural setting to this huge institution in an urban setting, it’s a big adjustment.”

At AISI, “everyone’s got that shyness, that uncertainty at first. It’s awesome to see them open up and start to feel acclimated. By the end, everyone’s laughing and having a great time together,” Morrow says.

“The idea is for them to really get to know us,” Kishketon says. “We want them to know there are real people here behind these awesome programs, and there are ways for them to get here. Research shows that students who do these summer-bridge programs tend to matriculate into the host university. My thinking is, if they end up coming to the U, great — and really, if they end up going to any university, great.”

Kishketon works with high school counselors to encourage Native students to attend. It’s free, and students simply have to demonstrate interest: “If you want to come, we want you here.” AISI takes place for one week of the summer, typically serving around 20 students.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced its

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cancellation in 2020 and this year — but Kishketon sees the hiatus as a chance to enhance and expand the program.

“I want to create defining moments!

I want to get local [Native] celebrities to come in. And I want to coordinate more with Chicano students; maybe host an American Indian and Chicano dance, a night for everyone to have fun.… Next year is going to be awesome,” Kishketon says.

“Our program is really rigorous — our students get fluent. We’re moving mountains over here, and that’s what I want people to know.”

Stuttering Stuttering doesn't define define you you Joshua Hebeisen first attended the Sioris Family University of Minnesota Kids Who Stutter Camp as a third-grader over a decade ago. He quickly felt right at home.

“As a kid who stutters, it means so much on the first day of camp to sit around a table with a bunch of other kids your age who also stutter. Being able to see, ‘Okay, I’m not the only one,’” says Hebeisen, now a 20-year-old UMN sophomore.

The experience was so affirming that he went back every year until aging out of the camp after eighth grade.

Hebeisen was invited back to be the camp’s first junior counselor in 2016; this summer was his fifth year in that role (COVID-19 caused its cancellation in 2020). He finds the work gratifying.

“I’m pretty open about my stuttering — I think a lot of kids aren’t used to being so open about it. Once you start talking to others who are in the same boat, it’s really freeing.”

Founded in 2009, the camp is the brainchild of Erin Bodner — then a UMN grad student in speech-language pathology, now a clinical supervisor in speechlanguage pathology and camp director.

Just as Bodner and her clinical supervisor, Linda Hinderscheit, were mulling over the idea of a day camp, Professor Leo Sioris of the Department of Experimental and Clinical Pharmacology and his wife Cheryl were approaching the Department of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences expressing interest in helping children who stutter. A partnership was born.

Camp is one week, open to students from third through eighth grade. Usually, 10-12 kids attend — many as return campers.

Fees are minimal; no student has ever been turned away. “The generosity, commitment, and genuine care shown by the Sioris family to kids who stutter are so greatly appreciated,” says Bodner, also a person who stutters.

Besides Bodner and Hinderscheit, there are three additional co-leaders — all adults who stutter — and a few graduate student clinicians. It’s evolved based on students’ feedback. “We started incorporating therapy activities around dealing with bullying and teasing,” Bodner says. “A lot of camp is focused on the social, emotional, and attitudinal issues related to being a person who stutters.”

Art activities are big; campers get to draw their stutter. “That’s powerful, using creativity and other means of expressing themselves,” Bodner says. Campers enjoy games that often begin with vulnerability and build camaraderie and trust. “We have one that we call the Silly Stutter Game. When you play games with your stutter and make it something not so scary, and you’re in control of it, it can be really liberating.”

Campers take outings around campus, to places like the Weisman Art Museum and the Raptor Center. A newer addition is a panel discussion with teens who stutter.

Panelists are former campers, like 19-yearold Justin Haag, who enjoys answering questions from kids and helping build their confidence. “It’s fun to come back.… I get to see the counselors again, and see how the community is still growing.”

Among Haag’s favorite memories is the annual end-of-camp outing to a campus fast-food restaurant. Campers — many for the first time — place their own orders. “It seems like a small, insignificant thing, but as a kid it’s really cool to go there and order like an adult. It’s fulfilling; you use some of the skills you learned at camp. It makes you feel like you really made progress.”

The message is “it’s okay to stutter, and what you have to say is important, regardless of fluency.”

Ultimately, camp is about acceptance, Bodner says. “And really opening up the campers’ idea of what being a good communicator is.” The message is “it’s okay to stutter, and what you have to say is important, regardless of fluency.”

Hebeisen agrees, adding that the election of a US president who stutters underscores that. “Here’s a guy in literally the most powerful and influential position in the whole world, and he’s a person who stutters. It shows that you can do whatever you want: stuttering doesn’t define you.”

Goldy engages with children at the Sioris Family University of Minnesota Kids Who Stutter summer camp (pictured 2017)

deep, Deep, structural. structural, lasting lasting change Philando Castile. The Flint water crisis.

Charlottesville. Standing Rock. Family separations. COVID-19. Rising anti-Asian violence. Rising anti-trans violence.

George Floyd. The turbulent six years since the Race, Indigeneity, Gender & Sexuality (RIGS) Initiative was formed have made the strongest possible case for its existence — and for its transition to a permanent center.

“Now more than ever” could be its motto, says outgoing director Kat Hayes.

RIGS was formed in 2015 to “support innovative research, teaching, and community-building for scholars engaged with issues of race, indigeneity, gender, and sexuality.” From fostering crossdepartmental collaboration to nurturing public discourse on urgent questions of the day, the initiative has played a crucial role helping Americans understand intersectional struggles for justice through history, and as they’re happening. Now it’s leveling up as the Center for Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender and Sexuality Studies (RIDGS).

It was originally established with funding from the Office of the Provost and includes: the Asian American Studies Program; the Departments of African American & African Studies; American Studies; American Indian Studies; Chicano & Latino Studies; and Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies. Formerly

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Diversity, equity, and inclusion tend to get put in this neat little package of, ‘do this training, then you can check a box.’

We’re more concerned with deep, structural change at the University and in society. the RIGS Initiative, Critical Disability Studies Collective joined RIGS when it reconstituted as the Center for Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender & Sexuality (RIDGS).

Engaging the public is key. RIDGS scholars dwell in the community and the wider world. Recent RIDGS projects include Morse Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor Keith Mayes’ research on disability rights and Black special education, and Vicente Diaz’s research on indigenous canoe traditions, construction, and navigation.

An interdisciplinary scholar who specializes in critical indigenous studies in North America and the Pacific Ocean region, Diaz has built relationships in the

town of Milan, Minnesota, which has a sizable Micronesian population. “He brings members of that community to campus and also connects them with Ojibwe and Dakota communities for conversations around canoe culture.

A lot of these amazing [endeavors] don’t look like typical research programs and it can be hard to find traditional funding sources for them,” Hayes says.

Hayes became director in 2019: “My term has been largely dominated by George Floyd and COVID.” Both underlined the deadly nature of structural racism in the US — and the urgent need for the work of RIDGS scholars. “Our scholarship has been about these kinds of systemic oppressions and injustices all along,” and in 2020, “we were inundated with requests for emergency teach-ins, events, media [interviews].

“There’s a need for continuous support and amplification of the very careful scholarship our faculty and our grad students have been doing since long before George Floyd’s murder,” Hayes says.

Keith Mayes, incoming director of RIDGS, echoes that. “The units comprising RIDGS haven’t always enjoyed a level of support matching the relevance of their work,” he says.

RIDGS helped “create a community of like-minded faculty who often found Morse Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor Keith Mayes, incoming director of RIDGS

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themselves isolated or marginalized,” Mayes says. “And it’s transcended our individual units, in terms of visibility and [resources], allowing us to create work that we couldn’t create on our own. I want to grow that visibility and influence.”

RIDGS faculty and students strive to embody the equity their research seeks to promote, Hayes says. When COVID exploded last year, “our critical race and ethnic studies graduate student group collected signatures voicing their concerns about support for the most vulnerable graduate students across the University.

Faculty too; when it came to pay cuts, we explored ‘how can we do this in the most equitable way possible?’”

They’re excited about the new Ruby Pernell Fund for Faculty Retention, funded through a grant from the Tides Foundation, which aims to support faculty of color in CLA. “Faculty of color are radically underrepresented; many end up leaving because they don’t feel supported,” Hayes says. It’s not necessarily about salary or individual research funding.

“What’s the campus climate? Are there supportive spaces and opportunities?

Diversity, equity, and inclusion tend to get put in this neat little package of, ‘do this training, then you can check this box.’

We’re more concerned with deep, structural change at the University and in society. A lot of what gets celebrated is outward-facing, but much of the work we’re doing is inward-facing, as well.”

humanities Humanities on the front front line, line, community at at the the center center No scholar, or scholarly work, lives in a vacuum. Yet for centuries, much of Western academia has functioned as if that were the case. AK Wright, a PhD candidate in gender, women, & sexuality studies, is eager to help change that.

“When you’re taking classes, and you have your head down because you’re trying to write or publish, you can become isolated from the community you live in,” Wright says. “But we’re still living in communities; we’re still being impacted” by what other community members are experiencing.

Wright is embarking on a research journey that doesn’t just include community, but centers it. Wright’s project, a podcast series based at Pillsbury House Theatre, is focused on conversations with Black performers involved in the Call to Remember collaboration. The conversations will take place over food, a central part of cultural identity and a powerful form of community care and healing.

The podcast Call to Remember seeks to “prioritize Blackness and explore remembrance as a means to cultivate community” through Black improvisation and Black art, Wright says.

That is just one of many projects made possible through Minnesota Transform, a $5 million public humanities initiative funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Higher Learning Program whose mission is to “collaborate with Black, Indigenous, immigrant, and refugee communities to amplify historical interpretations, create new narratives and dialogues, foster

community well-being, and inform policy responses.” As Tracey Deutsch, associate professor of history and one of six faculty team members who secured the Mellon grant, says, “We want to put the humanities on the front lines of the struggle for justice.”

Minnesota Transform is sweeping in scope, striving to “hold the University accountable for its complicities … to pave the way for redress, and build [its] capacity to be a site of racial justice.”

The endeavor challenges traditional academic hierarchies and processes, placing community at the center. That’s both a matter of justice and of improving the quality and richness of research, says faculty team leader Professor Jigna Desai, gender, women, & sexuality studies, who is among those who envisioned the effort.

Minnesota Transform outcomes include undergraduate and graduate internships, podcasts, documentaries, archival reports, museum exhibits, and public histories of the COVID pandemic and racial justice responses. Projects include a push for Indigenous language revitalization, specifically Dakota and Ojibwe; an exhibit on the history of mutual aid in Minneapolis; and an archival exploration, as the AIDS epidemic turns 40, of the Aliveness Project and its work.

Relationship-building with community partners is key. Minnesota Transform aims to change the very nature of public humanities research and how it’s conducted — for the benefit of all. “We’re creating opportunities to address the fact that the University has mostly had extractive relationships with its BIPOC [and other marginalized] communities,” Desai says. “We want to transform that through relationships that are mutually beneficial, in which we redistribute

Professor Jigna Desai (gender, women & sexuality studies), one of the six faculty members who brought Minnesota Transform to life

resources that support the communities we’re working with.”

Mellon announced the grant as the nation reeled from an exploding pandemic and the murder of George Floyd. Desai and her colleagues moved quickly to create their proposal, while mindful that the work with community must be done “at the speed of trust.” Though some efforts under the Minnesota Transform umbrella had begun before the grant, it enabled the launch of many more. And while COVID presented challenges, it also offered a silver lining: embracing video to transcend geography and partner with faculty at the University of Minnesota Duluth.

Although the approach that Minnesota Transform scholars are taking is timeand labor-intensive, Desai and Deutsch hope it can serve as a model for other researchers and the University as a whole. “We want to change the processes, relationships, and therefore the outcomes,” Desai says. “How we do the work: that’s a big part of racial justice.”

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The Unifying Power of the Arts GIFTS TO CLA’s Departments of Art, Theatre Arts & Dance, and the School of Music create opportunities for students and accelerate the practices of our faculty and visiting artists.

We are grateful to the 5,542 donors who gave $20.4 million during the Shattering Expectations campaign to advance the arts in — and through — CLA. As Associate Dean for the Arts and Humanities Josephine Lee says, “Art demands presence, a word that sounds like ‘presents’ but describes something that is much more difficult to come by.”

30 UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA

“Through the Harlan Boss Foundation Visiting Artist Program our students and visiting artists have regular, relevant interactive experiences. Each visiting artist designs how to teach and interact with our students based on their art practice. For example, artist Christina Seely (pictured in the monitor

above) visited our department remotely in spring 2021 and gave a public talk and a workshop titled “Fragile Energetics: The Interplay of Art, Science + The Human Condition in the Age of Climate Change.”

As a final manifestation of their participation, students produced a book titled Fragile Energetics Workshop

Field Notes. Students are exposed to diverse ways of processing and developing ideas and making and thinking about contemporary art in the context of the complex cultural climate of the world today.”

— Rotem Tamir, assistant professor of art

PHOTO: RAU+BARBER

“To me dance is healing. It is a positive way to showcase all of my emotions and channel them through my body. Dance is communication, a beautiful bridge between what is said and unspoken. For today’s youth, the arts offer a constructive and creative way to interact and form connections with people

you might not have ordinarily thought about. For me, the best way to create is to observe, to incorporate other art forms, and appreciate their purpose.

I truly believe we are able to do all things through dance.”

— Connie Pierce, recipient of the Jani Larson Dance Scholarship

“Our current time is full of division, intense anxiety, and alarming expressions of hatred. I am constantly considering the possibilities of what we can do together.

What draws on the ensemble’s strengths, while pushing us to grow to the next level of achievement?

What composers and texts

will connect with my singers and our audiences?

Focusing on not just the possibilities of sound, but also the possibilities of the individuals making the sound and how they contribute to the whole ensemble, is a daily reminder about the beauty and power of community.”

— Shekela Wanyama, DMA candidate in choral conducting and beneficiary of the Stanislaw Skrowaczewski Endowment in Conducting

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FALL 2021 Special Campaign Edition College of Liberal Arts cla.umn.edu DEAN

John Coleman Office of Institutional Advancement CHIEF ADVANCEMENT OFFICER

Louis Clark IV EDITORS

Tessa Eagan Kaylee Highstrom Susan Thurston-Hamerski CONTRIBUTING STAFF

Amanda Haugen Lisa Miller Colleen Ware Simon Whitney DESIGNER

Woychick Design PRINTER

Modern Press This is a special edition publication sent to select alumni and friends of the College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota.

Address changes or cancelation requests can be made at update.umn.edu or sent to the CLA Office of Institutional Advancement at 220 Johnston Hall, 101 Pleasant St SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455.

The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity educator and employer.

This publication is available in alternative formats upon request. Direct requests to the Office of Institutional Advancement at clanews@umn.edu or 612-625-5031.

The University’s mission, carried out on multiple campuses and throughout the state, is threefold: research and discovery, teaching and learning, and outreach and public service. ©2021 Regents of the University of Minnesota.

All rights reserved.

32 UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA

We gratefully acknowledge the vision, generosity, and contagious enthusiasm of our Shattering Expectations volunteers.

Campaign Cabinet Brian (BA ’71) and Kathie Blankenburg Mary (BA ’72, MA ’76) and Armeane Choksi (MA ’74, PhD ’78) Pamela Edstrom* (BA ’71) Brian Engdahl (BA ’75, PhD ’80) Beverly (AA ’52, BS ’72, MA ’76) and Richard* Fink (BA ’52) Julie Gilbert (BS ’94, MBA ’99) Deborah Hopp (BA ’75) and Christopher Dahl (BA ’65) Janis Larson Jose Peris (MA ’80, PhD ’82) Robert Sands (BA ’62, JD ’65) and Sally Glassberg Sands (PhD ’77) Kenneth (BA ’66) and Janet Talle Asher Waldfogel (BA ’79) and Helyn MacLean Kurt Winkelmann (MA ’82, PhD ’87) Faculty & Staff Campaign Committee Frederick (Rick) Asher* Dan Brewer Varadarajan Venkata (VV) Chari Raymond (Bud) Duvall Nanette Hanks (BA ’88) Colin McFadden (BA ’04, MPA ’16) Susanna McMaster Millie Reid Rivera (BA ’10) Tom Rose Mark Snyder * Deceased

Dandelions

BY PETER CAMPION

After the cling of roots and then the “pock” when they gave way

the recoil up the hand

was a small shock of emptiness beginning to expand.

Milk frothing from the stems. Leaves inky green and spiked.

Like blissed-out childhood play turned mean they snarled in tangled curls on our driveway.

It happens still. That desolating falling shudder inside

and then our neighborhood

seems only sprawling loops … like the patterns eaten on driftwood: even the home where I grew up (its smell of lingering

wood-smoke and bacon grease) seems just a shell of lathe and paper. But this strange release follows: this tinge like silver and I feel the pull of dirt

again, sense mist uncurling

to reveal no architecture hidden behind the world except the stories that we make unfolding: as if our sole real power

were the power of children holding this flower that is a weed that is a flower.

Source: Poetry (July/August 2010) reprinted with permission from the author, illustrated by Caitlin Skaalrud, MFA ’21

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220 Johnston Hall 101 Pleasant Street SE Minneapolis, MN 55455

Please tear off this BACK cover!

We don’t often encourage readers to take covers off of publications, but in this case, we’re making an exception.

Just inside, on the last-but-not-least page of this issue, you’ll find our gift to you. A recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, acclaimed poet and Associate Professor of English Peter Campion generously gave permission to use his timely — and timeless — poem “Dandelions” as inspiration for cartoonist and visual artist Caitlin Skaalrud (MFA ’21). Caitlin is a past recipient of the Josephine Lutz Rollins Fellowship in Art. Our hope is that you will post the page where it can be read and viewed regularly as a reminder of the profound influences found within the seemingly small moments encountered throughout life.

Nonprofit Org. U.S. Postage PAID Twin Cities, MN Permit No. 90155