Author Archives: Robert Groves

In other posts, I have argued that Donald Stokes’ notion of “Pasteur’s Quadrant,” was a useful rubric to guide the selection of targets for one’s scholarship. The notion makes the point that when a scholar is motivated by solving a problem in the real world (e.g., an incomplete execution of an artistic thrust, an apparent anomaly in a manufacturing process), often the solution leads to some more fundamental principles that contribute to basic knowledge far away from the original problem. That is, sometimes practical solutions of one problem lead to new theories, applicable to whole hosts of other problems.

I recently came across a 1939 article entitled, “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge” by Abraham Flexner, one of the founders of the Institute for Advanced Study. It employs a line of logic that is rarer today than perhaps in prior years. In short, through a set of examples, it notes the importance of the unfettered pursuit of knowledge. It applauds the curiosity- driven choice of activity of scholars. The creation of new forms of thinking are valued as their own end – the expansion of things that humans know.

We live in a time of rapid technological change. The rise of the internet has linked together vast parts of humanity globally. Miniaturization of silicon-chip circuitry permits computational feats unimaginable in smart phones. Artificial intelligence advances are in their exponential growth phase. Since these achievements have direct effect on the day-to-day lives of billions of people, they are the subject of much popular media. In contrast, media treatment of basic scholarship suffers the dual burden of not being well-understood by journalists and of not directly impacting the average person.

It remains an open question, however, what the fastest route to innovation that improves the lives of the maximum number of people. How much should a society support the curiosity-driven pursuit of knowledge for its own sake versus the application of knowledge in new inventions directly impacting persons?

The Flexner piece provides example after example of work driven by the passion of the scholar. Working at all hours of the day and night to perfect their insights into a puzzle they were trying to solve. For example, he mentions early work on the chemistry of carbon compounds leading to the creation of nitroglycerine, which much later led to application in the creation of dynamite. Or, more benignly, basic theories and mathematics of an “ideal gas” by Einstein in 1925, coming much later to explain why liquid helium at a very, very low temperature flows better, not worse than at higher temperatures, an unexplained exception to the rule of other liquids.

He asserts that the most important discoveries came by minds who were uninterested in any particular use of the discoveries but merely seeking the joy of seeing the discovery emerge. Flexner misses one opportunity for applying the argument to the humanities. First, the scholar of art or poetry or literature often has that essential thirst to build a new creation. Their creation, when absorbed by others, often lead to very practical outcomes – an emotion is evoked, an inference about one’s own life is made, an interpretation of others’ behaviors is crystallized. The applications of the basic work can be as varied as the number of observers of it. The power of the humanities is their ability to evoke a multitude of impacts. Second, some of the product of humanists is left underappreciated for time, just as basic findings in the sciences sometimes find no application for decades. In the same sense, the words or images of the scholar seem to be too far ahead of the society, but the society catches up and rediscovers the work, with deep appreciation rare at the time of its creation.

Flexner notes “a poem, a symphony, a painting, a mathematical truth, a new scientific fact, all bear in themselves all the justification that universities, colleges, and institutes of research need or require.” All of these observations beg a question: “If improvement to humankind is a goal, how should the scholar allocate their time between basic observations/creation and application of knowledge in direct service to others?”

For some decades in the United States, there have been annual national surveys of high school seniors. One of them attempts to measure a set of attitudes and aspirations of the 12th grader respondents. This is, of course, a moment in life that precedes much change in the formation of one’s character. And, the surveys are, admittedly, a snapshot of a group of young people a specific moment in time. The fact that the measurements are consistent over years and are based on scientific samples of students make them useful to compare over time.

There are many repeated cross-sectional measurements that show little change over time. Every once in a while change is notable. The Monitoring the Future Survey asks whether the 12th grader agrees or disagrees with a statement that work will likely be a central part of their adult life. Between the mid-1970’s and the year 2000, there was a steady decline in the percentage agreeing that work would be a central part of their lives. Starting in 2000 through the seniors of 2020, there was a steady increase. Some of these students are now in college. So it appears that more and more look toward a career as a central feature of their adult life.

Other questions asked about what characteristics they thought were important in a job. One option was a job that “gave you an opportunity to be directly helpful to others.” Similar to the pattern on desired centrality of work, the time trends showed declining perceived importance of a job that directly helped others from the mid-1970’s to the year 2000. Since that time, however, that attribute of a job is judged by more 12th graders as important. Later cohorts value helping others more than earlier cohorts.

Another job attribute for the which the survey asked seniors to judge its importance was whether it was “worthwhile to society.” Again, falling percentages viewing that as important to around 2000, then an increase. Later cohorts of seniors value jobs that are worthwhile to society more than earlier cohorts.

Of course, these are rather simple questions about very complicated life values. They, as with all surveys, are blunt instruments. However, consistent measures over time deserve attention. These time trends raise both questions of the causes of the increasing orientation to helping society and their effects on the behavior of successive cohorts of young persons as they age.

With regard to the causes of these changes, there are too many possibilities to sort out. These 12th graders in recent years have seen many different events, from foreign wars, to financial crises, to terrorist events, to political polarization. In addition, there is well-documented increased prevalence of mental health concerns in these younger cohorts. But these trends are also consistent with other studies showing that younger generations are more focused on climate change impacts, racial/ethnic equality, and supporting a larger role of government in the societal wellbeing.

The surprise, perhaps, is that, despite the many negative forces affecting these later cohorts of students, they exude an external, not internal focus for their aspirations. There seems to be increasing attention to using their working lives to build a better society. It didn’t have to be so. The experiences of mental health challenges and negative societal events might have bred cohorts of complete ego-orientation. These survey data suggested otherwise, on the whole.

Turning to the effects of these changes — if the data are accurate, they suggest that the finest days are ahead for Georgetown, as a university that seeks to form “people for others” through research, education, and service activities. If the university is getting its fair share of incoming cohorts of students who share aspirations of helping others, our jobs will be enriched in manifold ways.

Currently, there is much discussion about the polarization in modern societies. Other posts, here and here, have discussed this.

Universities thrive on the presentation of alternative perspectives. Learning is catalyzed by absorbing new information and synthesizing it with old information. Key to making this environment successful is the presupposition that those presenting such alternatives do so within a good-willed search for the truth. That presupposition requires that each locutor interacts with some humility, with the possibility that ideas contrary to theirs may be closer to the truth. In addition, curiosity to alternative ideas is a valuable attribute in such an environment. That makes one open to different ways of approaching an issue.

We are fortunate to have colleagues throughout the university who share a concern that we could do better in transmitting such valuable skills to our students. Some are wondering whether more public events with participants presenting alternative viewpoints on an important issue would be useful. Another idea is more co-teaching in courses deliberately designed to have each class present two different perspectives by the instructors. Other ideas are pairing up students to work together with some attention to pairing students from different backgrounds.

In these discussions, there often arises some different language for this work. Some use the term “debate;” others use the term, “dialogue.” There are subtle but important differences between these two words.

From one etymological source, the Online Etymology Dictionary, the verb “debate” is from the late 14th century meaning quarrel, dispute, combat, fight, make war, but from 13th century French, to beat down. The noun “debate” from the 14th century was a quarrel, dispute or disagreement and by the 15th century a formal dispute, a contest of arguments in a formal manner.

Debates have winners and losers. They seek to influence a third party to form judgments more aligned with one side than the other. The actors in a debate seek persuasion. They have no obligation to recognize weaknesses in one’s own position. They maximize attention to the strongest logical points in their own perspective and downweight the strengths of the other’s argument. In some sense, the other side is an impediment to their success in winning the argument. They would prefer it merely go away or admit defeat.

Further, the meaning of the word has morphed over time. The events we label as debates in political spheres or on cable television often violate the formal rules of debate in place over centuries (e.g., requirement to address the issue at hand, to explicitly forward one’s own arguments and to rebut the position of others). In these settings, talking past one another seems de rigueur. In the extreme, shouting, overtalk, and ad hominem attacks become acceptable.

The etymology of “dialogue” is different from that of “debate.” In the 13th century, the noun referred to a literary work presenting a conversation between two or more persons. Latin and Greek roots are about a conversation. The “dia” refers to conversation “across or between” actors, not the “di” of a limit to two actors.

In contrast to debate, dialogue is cooperative. The audience is not a judge of the winner. From the viewpoint of the actor in the dialogue, the other actor is a necessary complement to one’s own actions. Knowledge-seeking is the common goal of each actor. Their challenges to each other’s perspective are proffered in the spirit of gaining deeper understanding of the other’s position. Expressions like “you may be right” arise from time to time in the interaction, but the goal is not to persuade the other actor or others observing the dialogue.

Exploration of differences, sharing deeper understanding of differences are the goals. It is desirable for the actors to repeat the arguments of the other, to validate understanding. Paraphrasing other’s arguments is common. In some sense, the ego of the actors, their self-image, their identity are irrelevant to the dialogue.

Respect is key in dialogue. But autonomy and equal agency are also key. Actors should be under no obligation to “change their minds.” A common comment is, “I understand your argument better now, but I don’t agree with it.” And that’s okay.

As we at Georgetown attempt to fulfill our obligations to transmit skills of positive interaction among conflicting viewpoints, it is probably wise to use the notion of “dialogue” rather than “debate.” We seek an environment where all perspectives are presented with the view that none have the sole purchase on the truth of the matter.

One of the impressive recent accomplishments of artificial intelligence (AI) is the use of AlphaFold to predict the 3 dimensional structure of protein folding. Proteins are composed of amino acid chains, that are folded in a specific way into a three-dimensional structure key to the resulting function of the protein. Knowing how proteins fold is thought to be a key in drug development and associated therapeutics.

Prior to AI prediction of protein folding, painstaking experimentation work identified protein structures at the rate of one per five years or so by a given researcher. For example, whole PhD dissertations have been written on one protein’s construction. So, although there are 100’s of millions of different known proteins, only about 100,000 have documented experimental evidence of their folding. Hence, the “protein folding problem” became one of the grand challenges in biological research – a challenge taken up by computational approaches.

One interesting feature of the evolution of Alphafold was that the learning data set on which it was based was rather small by AI standards, roughly those 100,000 records of experimentally validated three-dimensional protein structures.

The sequence of building AlphaFold started with the 100,000’s or so and then assessed how it performed. It did well, but not that well. However, for each output of that first stage of AlphaFold development, it also produced a confidence measure, based on its assessment of how likely it was that the given structure was indeed correct. If I understand this correctly, the confidence measure was a function of the model-based variance, as well as level of match between various features predicted structure and other known proteins. Those predicted protein structures (along with their confidence scores) were added to the learning data base of about 100,000 verified structures and a new learning cycle was conducted. By July 2022, AlphaFold had predicted rather accurately the structure of over 100 million proteins!

Having confidence measures is a valued property of scientific evidence and many other knowledge domains. That property presents both the conclusion/answer and the confidence that the scientist has in the answer. But apparently, confidence measures are currently not a common automatic feature of LLMs.

For example, a question to ChatGPT about how confident it was in an answer about AlphaFold yielded, “As an AI language model, I don’t possess emotions or personal opinions, so I don’t experience confidence in the same way humans do.”

The literature in cognitive and social psychology has examined self-reports about a person’s confidence. It’s a large literature with interesting twists and turns but there seem to be some common findings. Self-confidence seems to vary across persons, with some personality traits being relevant. Social context tends to affect perceived confidence, with others affecting our perceptions. Some confidence measures seem to be related to self-consistency as well as distance to some external truth. In that regard, confidence reports also reflect prior expectations of the person making the confidence assessment. But the correlations between confidence measures and truth seem to be highly variable.

Self-reported confidence among humans thus appears to be difficult to measure and a fallible state at best. In many contexts we’re not very good at generating a confidence assessment that is highly correlated to how correct our judgments actually are. It would be an interesting development if AI might be used to assist humans in assessing the confidence that their given solution or judgment deserves.

Life is interesting when completely independent events evoke the same thoughts and reflections. We know that sometimes this is due to a cognitive availability heuristic. We break our leg and are in a cast and suddenly we notice others in a cast; in fact, large numbers of people seem to be in casts. We experience one thought-provoking event and subsequent experiences reinforce the thoughts.

I learned recently of a man who lives in the same village that his family has occupied as far back as written records permit him to trace. His family has been sheep farmers for generation after generation. So, he knows as he walks his ewes and new lambs up the mountain each spring, that his grandfather, his great-grandfather and on and on, had walked the same trails each year. In his case, despite the messages of teachers that he was so intellectually gifted that he should be an academic, the wisdom of his farmer grandfather devalued the advice of teachers. He, like generations before, stayed on the farm and nurtured the same living things that his ancestors had done.

His thoughts on his choices had two apparently opposing perspectives, which, upon further reflection, are not at all in opposition. First, he said the fact that he was but one link in centuries-long chain was humbling. His one time on earth was not likely to be that significant in the broad sweep of time. This, he thought, was true of the generations in the past that worked the same farm. And so, those thoughts bred a type of humility that he found healthy for him.

Second, by staying on the farm, he enjoyed the respect of his extended family and of the local villagers (all of whom he knows). They gave him all the joy and satisfaction he desired. He was a core part of a community that worked together in many ways, to support one another, and to continue the enterprises that generations made possible. His full identity was fulfilled in that small social system. For him, his lineage and his community reinforced the feeling that he was part of a much larger whole, and the whole was good.

The second set of events were a few discussions with scholars from different fields. Some of the disciplines were built around scholarship that was the product of a single mind (albeit with the help of archivists and librarians). Others were organized about teams of faculty, with complementary skills and knowledge, which led to group products – articles, books, and other scholarly outputs. Finally, there was a third group within a discipline that was undergoing a transition from single scholar to collaborative works.

The events reminded me of the shepherd farmer. The group research forced a bit of humility on the participants. Each member knew that they were not the only source of guidance for the scholarship. Each was one link in a chain. They depended on the complementary knowledge of others. But also, they were respected by others for their own knowledge. They offered reciprocal gifts to their colleagues.

The scholars with group work also reported one other reaction. They had fun. It was fun working with other scholars on a shared project, to an extent they rarely attained working alone. The social side of academic work was enhanced through the group. When one ran out of ideas in grappling with the inevitable puzzles of a research project, another in the group came forward with new perspectives. They learned and discovered jointly. The group indeed became part of each member’s identity. Deep ties were possible. Further, for that research, it was clear that each person was part of a greater whole. For some, the shared experience forged a group identity that each member valued.

The farmer and the academics shared the value of linkage with others.

Forgive, dear reader, a commentary on issues of intellectual interest to me alone, perhaps, but…

Much of what we know or are told about modern societies rest upon analyses of self-reports of people. Journalists talk to passers-by and ask questions about their welfare and interpretations of events. Customers are asked by sales representatives about how they evaluate the service. Comments to articles express readers opinions. Storytelling describes the state of a single person, often illustrating experiences common to others.

For decades and decades in the late 19th and early 20th century, decision-makers used these collections of self-reports to build evidence to guide decisions. Around the time of the great depression, however, the weaknesses of such haphazard methods of measurement of public beliefs and behavior became obvious. For example, in the 1930’s the US did not have credible estimates of the number of unemployed. How could ameliorating interventions be designed without good measures of the extent of the problem?

The scientific sample survey was an invention of the mid-1900’s, using structured uniform questions posed to a representative sample of a target population, and producing accurate estimates of the full population based on a subset identified by giving each member a known probability of entering the sample. The sample survey is considered by some as the most important invention of the social sciences in the 20th century.

This is a post identifying four prominent eras of scientific surveys. The first (1930-1960) was a period of wonderful invention. A 1934 article provided theoretical logic that probability samples, when measured in consistent structured ways, could generate unbiased estimates of large finite populations like those existing in nation-states. Such theory permitted the development of national statistical systems throughout the world. Many countries developed ongoing measurement of employment, income, housing, education, GDP, and other societal attributes, providing monitoring of the well-being of the country.

The second era of surveys (1960-1990) saw the survey method spread throughout societies, providing the evidence base for key decisions in government and the private sector and as a tool of research discovery in academia.

One of the weaknesses in the 1934 theory is that it had to assume complete measurement of the sample drawn, in order to achieve the accuracy extolled. Chosen sample persons had to be willing to interact with a complete stranger, an employee of a remote institution, and reveal to that stranger intimate details of their life or their enterprise’s economic activities.

In the third era of surveys, roughly 1990-2010, the social fabric that permitted high participation rates appear to fray. This first appeared in private sector surveys, which used relatively few efforts to contact all sample persons and persuade them to provide information. But it spread to other sectors, lastly, the central government sector. As it attempted to increase efforts to encourage participation, survey costs greatly inflated. Cost inflation in government statistical agencies has prompted the dropping of some surveys. In that sense, some countries know less about their societal welfare than in prior years.

The outline of the next, a fourth, era of sample surveys is emerging. Instead of a world in which surveys become extinct, it is a world that will transform surveys. We live in societies in which digital data arise from almost all processes involving human activity. The fourth era will involve a blending of survey data with digital records of transactions in e-commerce, digital records of program participation in welfare support systems, educational records, employment records, social media data, and other digital information.

This fourth era will bring the benefit of repairing the growing gaps of coverage by surveys. However, while surveys are governed by informed consent of the responding persons, many of these digital resources spur privacy concerns from potential harmful uses. Further, while survey measurements are designed to achieve prespecified informational goals; the “harvested” digital data were designed for other purposes. Hence, there are formidable analytic challenges of deriving credible estimates of some important societal attribute (e.g., unemployment, income distributions) using multiple data sources that were not designed to be blended.

This fourth era will perforce require unprecedented rates of innovation. It will be a ride.

Summer is the time when various meetings of professional associations and gatherings of university administrators occur. It is always refreshing to interact with others working in the same area. It’s useful to be reminded that the puzzles and challenges one faces at their home institution are shared by others in similar roles elsewhere.

Recently, at a gathering of leaders of higher education institutions we quite naturally fell into sharing thoughts about the current political climate affecting universities; the mental health challenges faculty, staff, and students are facing; the lack of tolerance of speech acts of various sorts; the role of social media in harming interpersonal communication among students; and the apparent lack of social cohesion as campuses return from the shock of the pandemic.

The stories shared were familiar and repeated for all the campuses of those in the conversation. Of course, each school had slightly different contexts, but it was clear that macro-social forces were creating new problems at universities and colleges.

At one point, a leader familiar with Jesuit institutions turned and said, “But you have a set of animating values and a language that lets you talk about these things. We don’t have that.” After more talk about their own state university, it became clearer what contrasts they were drawing.

These features of today’s campus are difficult to navigate. While they are arguably more diverse than decades ago, they struggle with building shared senses of community.

The Jesuit notion of the “presupposition” is that understanding and acceptance of an other can be assisted if we by default assume that they are acting in good will. Assume their intentions are positive. Encounter them as if they are honest with their feelings and benign in their intent. Of course, knowing the notion of the presupposition doesn’t make it easy to practice it in everyday life. But it does give one a language to use in addressing potential interpersonal conflict. It does prompt thinking about seeing the world from another perspective.

Many in the meeting commented at the pressures on university leadership at this time. While the opportunities facing universities have never been greater, the diverse stakeholder groups affecting universities have never been more complicated. The Jesuit paired concepts of “magnanimity and humility” seem complete apt at the moment. Of course, leaders need to inspire collective action to achieve the highest ambitions possible, but effective leaders, those in touch with the concerns of opposing groups, need to do so with humility. While there are moral and ethical reasons for this, others observe that these two apparently-opposing attributes were deeply needed during the COVID epidemic. One could easily make the case that they are also perfectly suited to re-establishing a sense of community in this time of teleworking and hybrid work arrangements, a new type of “community in diversity.”

Of course, the Ignatian pedagogical role of reflection in learning is a strength at this time. It can be a tool for all of the above, a vehicle to re-engage with one’s self, to re-integrate all of the stimuli of this noisy time, to separate the trivial from the important, and to separate the true from the rest.

These attributes that Georgetown seeks to nurture in all give us a language to discuss the concerns we face and a set of cognitive and interpersonal tools to achieve our mission. Not all universities have these. We’ve fortunate we do.

There is much criticism of higher education these days, from tuition costs to ideological indoctrination. In this atmosphere it’s good to be reminded of its mission and its accomplishments.

In the US, we are blessed with an ecosystem of over 4,000 community colleges, small private colleges, state university systems, land grant institutions, state flagship research universities, and private research universities. How do they benefit the society? How do they benefit individual students? Every once in a while, it’s good to remind ourselves of answers to those questions.

With a focus on society, universities are engines of transformation. For example, it is easy to draw direct ties between university research and development and the internet with its fundamental alteration of the global economy. Universities tend to provide the basic research discoveries that permit the private sector to innovate years later.

Health care improvements depend on university-based biomedical research. Basic engineering research is key to advanced computer hardware. Creativity in the arts help interpret the new realities and help form cohesive cultures in society. The social sciences inform how norms and policies affect the experiences of different groups. The humanities continuously offer new perspectives on key societal concerns. All told, the thought leadership from universities is fundamental to the improvement of lives of all persons.

Colleges and universities are often the largest employer in their area; they are anchor institutions for the region. Private sector firms choose to locate near universities to attract talent. Universities thus strengthen the local economy. They are also key to supplying the local community with cultural events and arts. Their faculty are active in public scholarship addressing the needs of the local community. At Georgetown, our ongoing social justice activities act to build community. In short, universities enrich the quality of life of their locales. They produce collective goods, not just individual goods.

Turning to the individual, life-time earnings of college graduates exceed those of nongraduates. Universities giving access to students from poor families become the most potent vehicle for social mobility in the society.

The career trajectories of graduates are more robust to disruptions that may affect an industry. College graduates are more active in civic institutions; they vote at higher rates; they are more informed about current societal issues. They tend to be healthier, live longer, with fewer comorbidities. They build more stable marital and family relationships. They have lower divorce rates, lower suicide rates, lower so-called “deaths of despair.” In short, college graduates live better lives.

The traditional residential college experience tends to give graduates other individual benefits. They expose the young person to different groups of people, different ways of thinking, different cultures, and different life experiences. This exposure to differences is for many a first introduction to an uncomfortable part of all adults’ lives – the needed capacity to interact successfully with those who disagree with you or have different perspectives.

These exposures, however, in college have the safety net of the mentoring of faculty and student affairs professionals. Group-based learning enhances the likelihood of these exposures. The learning from these encounters are key to developing critical thinking skills. They nurture the ability to see the complexity of issues. They foster skills in finding compromises that lead to consensus solutions where once there was conflict. College graduates are thus more likely to avoid extreme postures on civic issues.

The college experience also hones what academics call “research skills.” Research often involves posing an unanswered question. The job is to acquire pre-existing knowledge about the question by searching past works or to make novel observations. The work is often unstructured. The student must create ways to navigate the unknown. They are forced to evaluate alternative perspectives and discern the strengths and weaknesses of each. Success is defined by finding a preferred answer to the question. Since dissemination is part of the research protocol, students develop writing skills, expressing their findings in words and/or displays (including paintings, sculptures, performances).

Many of these capacities are transferable across fields. So, when the college graduate experiences a change in career, either by choice or by disruption of their current occupation, these skills permit the person to self-teach to prepare for their next career opportunity. The college experience breeds resilience.

There are few institutions in society that provide such a wide variety of benefits. Over the past century, the US has built the most powerful system of higher education in the world. We are privileged.

It is difficult to read any account of current events without being reminded that we are increasingly a divided society. The hypotheses of what has produced such balkanization are myriad, including echo chambers from internet algorithmic controls, racist systemics, radical income inequality, relatively high immigration, isolation due to the demise of family and community groups, and on and on.

Within university communities, the commentary focuses on cancel culture sensitivity to language that touches identities, a perceived reduction in class participation, increased reports of mental health impairments, and challenges of new cohorts in forming class bonds, and a lack of skill to encounter differences.

From the provost perch, one begins to see faculty efforts to continue a devotion to formation of our students, the nurturing of mind, body, and spirit to be a leader in a society with such attributes. Of course, we must admit that the classic design of university teaching decades ago offers few features to address this new world. In those years, courses would be dominated by readings read in solitude by the student, lectures with limited questioning from students, and homework assignments, examinations and papers as assessment of learning. For the most part, there was little need to interact with other students with different perspectives.

Of course, many courses presented to students alternative theories or viewpoints on the substance of the course material. Effective instructors would convey how radically different theories were resolved over time, if ever. They would give the student a flavor of how differences were confronted in the dialectic of the scholarship.

Increasingly, this old format is being replaced by innovative designs of university instructors. It is more common now to create group assignments, where a cluster of students are asked to work together to create a product demonstrating concepts and tools emerging from the course content. Of course, as the students will learn in group work later in life, this exercises interpersonal skills of consensus-building, division of labor, and shared devotion to task. (A funny quip going around notes: “Georgetown: where everyone is smarter than you, except the three students assigned to your work group!”). When instructors design these groups to induce heterogeneity of background within them, students are forced to grapple with differences.

Other instructors bring into the classroom (increasingly via Zoom) guest speakers who offer a different perspective on the material than that in the readings and lectures. These are deliberate attempts to have the students confront a vivid disagreement in the field, as a stimulus to question and deliberate on their own synthesis of alternatives.

Flipped classrooms can also be designed to heighten discussion about differences. Lectures are viewed online before a face-to-face class discussion. If the lecture is designed to heighten attention to alternative theories or perspectives, then the in-class discussion can deliberate on those differences. Sometimes these can be prepared debates among students; other times, they are designed point-counterpoint discussions involving all students.

One course design that has promise is more difficult to organize. When the content of the class yields itself to alternative perspectives and two instructors co-teach, new possibilities emerge. Each class setting can be discourse between one instructor presenting one argument and the other presenting the alternative viewpoint. The extended presentation of a disagreement, civilly presented, with each participant obviously listening to the other, without rancor or shouting, can model for students the behavior that they so infrequently see on cable news. This class format requires more coordination and support for equitable reward for co-teaching. It holds promise, however, in modeling how two adults with strong disagreements can present their cases to the other, listen carefully, show understanding of the conflicting argument, address the counterargument, and then end the discussion with an amicable agreement to disagree. It is such behavior that our students need to see more and more, as a way to build the skills to navigate their future.

For some years the Provost Office has supported a Student Advisory Committee. Groups of undergraduate and graduate students fill its ranks. It consists of students who currently occupy roles that represent other students. School academic councils consist of undergraduates chosen by their peers to work collaboratively with their dean’s office in improving the academic affairs of their school. Some members of the provost advisory committee are academic council members. They’re joined by elected officers of the undergraduate and graduate student governments.

The Provost’s Student Advisory Committee serves dual functions. The students have an opportunity to bring ideas to the Provost’s attention, and the Provost brings ideas to students who act as a sounding board for early-staged university initiatives. Committee members inform the Provost on student issues brought forward by fellow students within various schools. The Provost seeks student comments at an early stage before presenting them to the larger student body for further discussion. Feedback is sought from the students on various student-related ideas to ensure that Georgetown continues to advance towards achieving its goals and mission.

This is a post noting appreciation of the good work accomplished by the group over time.

The operations of the committee consist of polling members about desired agenda items and consulting with students about topics for which the provost office seeks student input. The students on the committee receive questions and expressions of concern from fellow students continuously. Sometimes, the question reveal that the university needs to clarify practices in an area (e.g., the opening hours of Yates). Sometimes, there are perceived gaps in services that students believe they should enjoy. On its part, the provost office floats ideas it is considering as “trial balloons” for the students’ reactions.

For example, some years ago, students raised issues about food insecurity. After investigation, it appeared that two simultaneous changes made sense. First, we established a food pantry available to students and staff who needed help. This has been in operation for some time and has expanded its offerings. Second, we realized that some students were cashing out their meal plans, and having too little money to feed themselves. We altered meal plan design to assure that no undergraduate could fail to have access to the food at Leo’s.

With regard to provost office initiatives, the undergraduates provost advisory committee were very helpful in designing a special program to bring to campus in Summer 2021, the entering class who started their Georgetown experience in fall, 2020, when all teaching was online and students were largely away from campus. The resulting Summer Hilltop Immersion Program (SHIP) gave that cohort of new students a chance to experience life as a residential student and do some bonding as a class. The session appears to achieve its goals.

More recently the group forwarded a new set of concerns. They noted that students were able to access digital versions of some national newspapers through the electronic resources of the library, but that not all features of the papers were available and the access was clunky. With a little polling of interest and negotiations with newspaper companies, we were able to sponsor free access to the New York Times and the Washington Post electronic versions for all faculty, students, and staff. This is a case where the students’ forwarding the proposal benefited everyone in the community, not just students.

Last semester, the provost office presented to the student advisory committee the need for student input into designing the social environment for students on the Capitol Campus. The students reached out to their peers, and we were able to mount multiple focus groups that yielded a large set of good ideas, many of which will be implemented as the Capitol Campus builds out.

A final example was a problem undetected by the administrative oversight. During the semesters heavily affected by COVID-19, the grading of courses was liberalized, allowing students to take more course using a Pass-Fail designation. The empirical result of this policy was that the grade point averages (GPAs) of students tended to rise. This affected Latin Honors at graduation (i.e., cum laude, magna cum Laude, summa cum laude), which are based on the prior year’s GPA distribution of graduates. As we moved away from this period, average GPAs will decline, producing some disadvantage to those classes. We were able to alter the policy so that all classes are treated fairly, using the current year’s GPA distribution as the base.

The committee works. Students on the committee serve the entire university by their membership. The committee is a hub to link student concerns with various offices around the university. Information is shared, concerns are aired, and new initiatives are launched. The dialogue has taught the provost things he did not know, and students have learned how a complicated organization like a university operates — all work toward the common good.