Bonni Stachowiak [00:00:00]:

Today on Teaching in Higher Ed episode number 515, faculty’s role in student success with Jody Greene. Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential. Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak, and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches, so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students. Jody Greene serves as the University of California, Santa Cruz’s 1st associate campus provost for academic success. Their background is so fascinating to me that today we start the interview learning more about them right away. Jody Greene, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Jody Greene [00:01:04]:

Thanks so much, Bonni. It’s delightful to be here.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:01:07]:

In June of 2024, I will celebrate 10 years of airing an episode of Teaching in Higher Ed every single week. I share this with you not to brag, Jody, but to say I read a lot of higher ed bios. And as I read your higher ed bio, I just wanted to say, let’s just talk about these things and not even talk about anything else. You are a fascinating person, and you have agreed to share a little bit about yourself and your background. Because if I try, I am never gonna do it justice in addition to very clumsily pronouncing some of these names. So, Jody, I’m gonna open up the floor to you. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Jody Greene [00:01:49]:

Well, thank you. And and first, of course, congratulations on the 10 years. I mean, it is truly an institution and a place that so many of the people that I’ve collaborated with go to hear what’s happening in higher ed teaching and learning. So it’s a it’s a real honor to be here with you. So I have been at UC Santa Cruz for my entire academic career. I came here in 1998 as a literature professor. I was hired to teach a 17th and 18th century British literature and some French literature, but my work is actually more in kind of legal studies and the history of institutions, literary institutions. So my first book was on copyright and the relationship between copyrights and responsibilities.

Jody Greene [00:02:38]:

Some people have called it a paranoid view of copyright that says we only got copyright so they could show who was responsible for writing things that the authorities didn’t like being written. And and my work since then has really stayed in the realm of the relationship between rights and responsibilities. So I work on the history of human rights, how the history of categories like the pirate and the terrorist have been used to draw boundaries around the human. I’ve worked on nonhuman rights, so what are called rights of nature or more than human rights. I’ve written about animals. I’ve written about war. I’ve written about lots of places where the question of our our rights to each other come into play. And, you know, I’ve been very influenced by the work of Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, and and other thinkers who have asked us to think about these categories like the human and and the rights.

Jody Greene [00:03:36]:

Most recently, I actually worked on a book on teaching environmental justice, which brought still some of these questions around ethics and rights and interdependence into play. But in 2016, I made a little bit of a swerve and founded the campus teaching center at UC Santa Cruz, originally working by myself and and over the years, accumulating wonderful colleagues who built the center, not so much with me as around me, I think sometimes. And I became a full time administrator in 2018, working on how we balance faculty success and student success. So we have this huge movement nationally for student success, research universities trying to figure out how to keep the undergraduate experience at the center of their mission while also being research institutions. My own institution is a double minority serving research university. So trying to think really structurally about how the faculty role might need to change so as to make all of these institutional priorities possible for the faculty, meeting those priorities possible for the faculty.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:04:50]:

If someone could see the bubble above my head of all of my thoughts, there are approximately 42,987 questions I’d like to ask you, but I’m gonna revisit your bio just briefly, and then we will speak much more about about the issues for today’s interview. I’m curious about how you become curious about things. What do you remember about some of your early origins, about the things that you’ve researched and written about, about just what made you curious? What sort of ignited that kind of curiosity in your mind both as an individual? Although I’m going to potentially guess that, your curiosity did not originate as an individual and probably in community based on your sense of that common good and and collective work.

Jody Greene [00:05:36]:

Yeah. I mean, I’m in the second half of my fifties now, and I I think I’m only just beginning to be able to understand why or how I’m interested in the things that I’m interested in, but I am very interested in things that don’t conform to rules that are supposed to be universal rules. So one way of understanding a kind of through line of my of my work, but also my life is is carrying with the non dual or the non binary. So when we set up a situation in which some things are deemed human and worthy of rights and other things are deemed not human and not worthy of rights, we immediately start to see those kinds of binaries troubled. And, of course, the institution of literature is the place where the supposedly hard line between fact and fiction is muddled and worried. And the special power of literature comes from that capacity to have one one foot in the factual or the real and one foot in the imagination or the fictional. International law, which is the kind of law that I have mostly worked on, some people would say is a fictional kind of law. Right? There is no such thing as international law.

Jody Greene [00:06:52]:

It’s not binding. So we agree to conform to these rules that are not actually binding rules. So I also have, you know, another life in Zen Buddhism that runs alongside my my scholarly and professional life. And that is a philosophy that is also deeply rooted in the non dual. So I would say the 2 things that really draw me to to a problem are the fact that someone’s trying to solve it in a binary way, and it’s not working, and they’re not seeming to be able to drop the binary. And then this this matter of the relationship between rights and responsibilities, which is very central to the work that I do for the university.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:07:35]:

I only know a very, very tiny amount about nondualistic thinking. One thinker who I’ve read a decent amount and heard him on a number of podcasts is Richard Rohr, and he is a Franciscan friar and and is known for really asking us as we think about our beliefs to the dangers of really thinking in dualistic ways. And I I’m curious as you consider you you were talking about faculty success. I I think even just that word success being used in conjunction with faculty, I see a lot of dualistic thinking around what does it mean to be successful as a faculty member. And we’d love to have you share a a bit about where you see dualistic thinking with regard to faculty success and how we might nuance that a bit.

Jody Greene [00:08:26]:

Yeah. I mean, I I now have a title that is the associate campus provost for academic success, and that term academic success was was coined by our provost to describe the place where faculty success and student success meet on our campus. And I think in some ways, that is the binary, the binary between faculty success and student success that I’m trying to trouble because I don’t believe that a university set up the way the University of California is set up. You can have one without the other. Right? You have to figure out how to keep these things in balance. As far as the notion of of success itself goes, you know, certainly, I can say on the student side, there are a set of standard metrics. The the HSI scholar, Gina Garcia, calls them white people metrics that we often use for success that have to do with time to degree, graduation rates, retention rates, and so on.

Jody Greene [00:09:24]:

And we know that there are so many other important elements to students’ success, their well-being, their thriving, their career pathways, their ability to pursue interests and curiosities, their engagement, their activism, and all of these multiple measures. But as I often point out to my colleagues, if we don’t retain the students, then that that expanded or more holistic view of success isn’t going to really have an opportunity to to blossom or flourish. So I think, you know, I think of those more constrained notions of success as necessary, but not sufficient to have this thing called student success. And on the faculty side, you know, we need to be research productive. We need to teach well. But in the same way, people who are research productive and and do well in their teaching are not necessarily successful in the sense of feeling that they’re doing work that matters to them, that they’re fulfilled, that they’re able to have some measure of work life balance, and that when their interests take them in a new direction, and this is one reason that I feel so fortunate to be at Santa Cruz, when their interests take them in a new direction, they’re able to follow those interests, and they’re able to keep that kind of energy of new thinking and teaching new things that we have as faculty members when we’re kind of on a new trail. You know?

Bonni Stachowiak [00:10:44]:

You mentioned that you had been teaching for about 20 years before then taking on these different roles, and I have also been teaching for around 20 years. And I think about all the things that I have changed my mind about in the time that I try to be more gentle with myself, because I can I can be pretty hard on myself, and then also gentle with wanting to remember what it was like in some of those earlier years so that I might be more effective at at in in my own role? I’m curious as you think about those 2 decades of teaching, what’s one thing that that once you were in different types of roles that looking back on that time was maybe missing in your own flourishing or your own learning until you moved into that other role and had a a slightly different perspective?

Jody Greene [00:11:33]:

That’s such a great question. I I had a lot of structure in my courses, especially compared to some folks at a place like Santa Cruz. I had attendance requirements, and I had pretty strict deadlines, and I had a very considered reason for having those things. And I told the students, for instance, I have an attendance policy because I would like to try to correct for prior educational privilege. I don’t want some of you to be able to phone this in while some of you have to, you know, come to class. And I think 2 things I was I was interested later in studying what works in for for university students. I was interested to find that that intuition, that structure was important and would ultimately be appreciated by my students, which it was, that that was correct. But the thing that I would change is how I communicated about that structure and the way in which you kind of walked into my room and were met by a hailstorm of rules associated with the course.

Jody Greene [00:12:36]:

But I think I chose a very labor intensive way of dealing with those rules, which is that I only taught lecture courses for my whole teaching career. I liked to teach lecture courses, not seminars. And anyone who wanted an excused absence or or not to turn something in on deadline had to speak with me directly about it. And and I see how, even though it was incredibly labor intensive, I see why that was effective because it allowed the students to feel seen. So I think I did intuit that relationship between structure and responsiveness. I don’t like the word flexibility at all, but I do like the word responsiveness. So I could respond to students’ needs and I was teaching them about how to advocate for themselves. But I think the way I came out of the gate in the syllabus is a little cringey now.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:13:28]:

And since you do have this background in in literature, I’m now curious about tell me more about not liking the word flexibility and why responsiveness is more precise for you or or closer to your values?

Jody Greene [00:13:43]:

I think we’ve had an outpouring since the pandemic of calls for faculty to be flexible with students in ways that are really important and come out of the recognition that so many of us received during the pandemic of, you know, it’s like our students became three-dimensional to us. We understood them in the context quite literally that they come to us from. And so we got that sense that we couldn’t have a cookie cutter or one size fits all set of expectations of students that were not aware of all of the difficulties that students may be facing in their lives. But I feel like the pendulum went so far in the other direction, particularly from people who don’t really understand how teaching works, especially at a university like mine, where there’s lots of large lecture courses. You can’t just give a test on a different day from the day that the test was scheduled without writing a new test. And so are you really supposed to do that for every student? Some people would say, well, why are you still having tests? Right? And so for me, the flexibility, it got caught up a little bit in a kind of a neoliberal or market based, the customer is always right philosophy. And what I like about responsiveness is that it means I am in communication with students. I’ve set up communication as a two way street so that they can tell me what they need and I can make accommodations for them within the capacity of the course as a whole so that I’m not I’m not throwing these complex systems off.

Jody Greene [00:15:22]:

To give a really obvious example, I taught a course for many years that was a writing intensive course and had writing every week and a lot of revision and many TAs. So if students were handing in work whenever they felt like it, the teaching assistants would have their workload kind of all over the place, and we couldn’t stay on track with the revisions. And so flexibility in that context, responsiveness in that context might sometimes mean actually just excusing somebody an assignment rather than saying, yes, you can hand it in 10 days later whenever you feel like it, which throws off both the labor conditions of the teaching assistants and the ability to keep the course moving forward in a way that is workable for the whole.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:16:05]:

Whenever I do speaking engagements with other universities, I’ll ask them for a list of words that in their culture, in their organization would be considered curse words. And

Jody Greene [00:16:17]:

I love that.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:16:17]:

To get the best the best responses. But for as you might imagine, it will not surprise you at all. On the list often is HyFlex courses. And, of course, HyFlex is one of those words that means so many different things to so many different people. And I I’m seeing from what you’ve said that oftentimes in my university, we will talk about build build designing a course for flexibility, but teaching the course for context. Yep. And I’m seeing in your use of this word responsiveness that for myself as a communicator, that might be closer to a word that wouldn’t bring on the immediate visceral reaction. And and part of this reaction gets to the next thing I’d like to talk to you about where we just get to where we just feel like we’re just piling more and more things on.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:17:08]:

And I know that’s certainly a concern when we start seeing where I I love that intersection that you talked about, that academic success being where student success and faculty success meets. So what what’s your response when we think about if we’re gonna try to shift a culture, shift systems and structures to better support students as faculty to that feeling of just, oh, it’s one more thing and it’s being piled Bonni, and and do do we not understand how much is already on our proverbial plates?

Jody Greene [00:17:42]:

Yeah. I mean, I I have said many times that I think we have an additive model of student success in the research university context. So it’s it can feel a lot of the time like research universities just woke up to their responsibilities to undergraduates in a very profound way. And in particular, ask the faculty to think very differently about our role in student success. You know, if you’d asked me 25 years ago I mean, I I love this phrase that the the Scandinavian professional developer, Bonni Roksha, uses all the time about opening his shame briefcase. If you’d asked me 20 or 25 years ago whose responsibility student success was, I would have said the students. Right? That that that they’re responsible for their success. And obviously, now we have this much more kind of shared notion of student success.

Jody Greene [00:18:32]:

But I think we have to realize that sometimes these are design problems, and we can put time into redesigning our courses and curricula. And those redesigned courses and curricula will not create infinitely more work. But our desire for much more responsiveness to students is going to take more time. Our desire for more detailed forms of mentoring are going to take more time and energy. And so I think a lot about the the virtue of sustainability. So what if we were building our approach to student success with the notion of its sustainability, both in terms of institutional resources and in terms of faculty workload. And faculty members tend to think of their work as an they don’t we don’t think about our work as a limited quotient. Right? We don’t think in terms of how many hours a week we work.

Jody Greene [00:19:29]:

We kind of have an expand to fit notion of our of our workload. And I think that’s been really damaging because it’s allowed people to get into this state where we’re talking now so much about faculty burnout. The one other thing that I would say about this additive model of student success is that when we when we talk about student success in the university, we have a tendency, the national conversation and even the institutional conversation tends to be very much a moral conversation. Why don’t the faculty care more about teaching, right? That’s the question that gets asked over and over and over again. Why don’t they value teaching? Why don’t they care about teaching? And I try to really remove that language as much as I can from the way I try to frame what’s happening in research universities right now, because I think these are structural and systemic challenges, not primarily moral and ethical ones. I think people care about what the institution has told them that they need to care about, and that is winning grants, producing research, and, you know, doing well with your teaching, but that’s not the thing that we are primarily hired for, retained for, tenured for, for those of us who are fortunate enough to be in a tenure situation. So we can’t be surprised when people are not caring more about something that in fact the institution has not made a priority for them and hasn’t allowed them to make a priority in many cases.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:20:55]:

The other day, people were making jokes on social media, which I definitely participated in about the chili peppers that show up on the rate my professor. Jody, I used to have I think I may have even had more than 1 chili pepper at some point in my life, but I am in my early fifties, and at some point, I don’t know when it happened. I can’t tell you the decade, but it definitely went away when you talk about the idea of caring. It is something, by the way, that I do ask students for feedback Bonni. Did they feel like I cared about them during the class? And if so, how? What was it that I did? And if not, what was missing? As of today, a 100% have felt like I cared, and and I’ve I’ve received some very edifying comments about what specifically it was I did to convey that care. I will say that as you were sharing those words, I’m thinking about how gendered that is.

Jody Greene [00:21:50]:

That’s right.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:21:51]:

And I’m thinking about all the books that I’ve read and my own personal experience from starting at a relatively as sort of whatever whatever it is that you’re having tend someone told me once that that I reminded them of their mother, and that’s why they felt so angry. Which I mean, I’m like, well, this is an interesting thing that probably is best, you know, with a therapist or that kind of thing, but thinking about the way that women of color are are often subjugated to needing to demonstrate that care in a very gendered and a very cultured way, and we don’t always do that for all members. So talk more about the ways in which care can also be gendered and and the ways in which it might be structured. Tell us more about the the tension and about what that might look like if it doesn’t look like me showing up as a-

Jody Greene [00:22:53]:

Yeah. That’s another word that is on my is on my list if you said to me what are words that set your teeth on edge.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:22:59]:

The k the care or the gender?

Jody Greene [00:23:02]:

Hair. Yeah. Gender it’s gender is complicated for me. I I identify as a nonbinary person, and I know that some of the responses that I got from students over the years had to do with their confusions about my presentation. And what I mean by that is their confusions about what their expectations ought to be of me based on my presentation, which I thought was strange because I don’t think we should have expectations based on people’s gender in a classroom. I’m not saying that we can get away from them, but I I think it would be great if we didn’t. So one way I’m gonna answer your question is to say, you know, I had the opportunity a few years ago to be part of a small team that rewrote our student experience of teaching surveys or evals at UC Santa Cruz. And we spent a lot of time thinking about how the way we ask questions really contributes to racialized and gendered expectations and worked very hard to try to ask questions, first of all, that mitigated that gender and racial bias.

Jody Greene [00:24:07]:

You can’t eliminate it, but you can mitigate it. And second of all, that really asked students to think about what they could speak to, right? So I don’t know how helpful it is for me and how it would change my practice to answers to ask students, you know, did it seem like I care? Mhmm. What I do ask them, for instance, on a mid quarter survey is always, is there anything I could do to better support your learning? And is there anything you could do to better support your learning? Right? Because I think what we’re really saying about care is Dave I created a context in which you feel supported to learn, both in the kind of specifics of the course and in the environment in which that learning’s taken place. Do you feel like you can show up with as much of your personhood as is necessary? Do you feel that this is an environment where you can where it’s safe to not know? You know, those kinds of pieces. Right? And those are all things that might be part of what they’re thinking of when they think about whether you care. But I think also, do I care about your learning is a better if you’re gonna talk about care, let’s talk about do did I did I seem to care about your learning and not did I seem to care about you? Because then we really are in a context that is so marked by gendered expectations.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:25:35]:

Yeah. That is so helpful, and thank you for that. I don’t usually use this phrase, but that’s seriously the most constructive feedback I’ve had in such a wonderful such a long time. Because part of what I realized is I do I do what you described as far as saying we do the stop, start, continue. Uh-huh. And and I do it for what I do it for 3 3 groups. What could I do to better support your learning? Start, stop, continue. And then what could you do as an individual? And then I’ll ask the question, what could we do as a community of learning? And, yeah, I’m realizing that what I was looking to get from my question of care is probably sufficiently and and more properly held up in that exercise.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:26:23]:

So it’s like the whole less is more thing. I don’t need to be doing that. That is sort of me potentially falling into a a set of gendered expectations I do not wish to perpetuate, even though, as you said, seems to I think we’re we’re gonna be navigating that one for quite some time for the foreseeable future. The other thing that you just did for me is solved a mystery because the moment that I was introduced to you and as soon as I saw your face, I said, I know this person. Why do I know this person? And it turned out you gave a workshop that I attended, or you gave a speaking engagement about course evaluations, and you’ve been swimming around in my head. You do you were with an somebody it was a panel of some sort, and somebody was interviewing 2 of you. And you were talking, and and I would love to ask you a little bit more about this, the ways in which course evaluations can or cannot give us information and and the specific thing that’s been floating around in my head and I’ve shared with colleagues is that you wouldn’t wanna ask, you know, how qualified was this person to teach my class? Because students aren’t in a position to judge that. And I wanna go back to what you said earlier about neoliberalism and and, specifically, students as customers, not the greatest paradigm, but us perpetuating inequality is also not great either.

Jody Greene [00:27:50]:

Correct.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:27:51]:

How do how do you get away from students as customers to what’s a better paradigm there?

Jody Greene [00:27:57]:

Yeah. So that was a lot of questions.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:28:00]:

Oh, yes. 40 too.

Jody Greene [00:28:01]:

To not get into that you just snuck in there. So so let me say, you know, the the the thing that you said about what students are and are not qualified to comment on, that’s really important. Yeah. I mean, if you ask knowledge of the subject matter, how does a student know what your knowledge of the subject matter is? I mean, unless you really don’t have any knowledge of the subject matter such that it was obvious that the vast majority of people that they’re taught by have knowledge of the subject matter, but I don’t really know what that question is supposed to elicit. And so we really think about SCTs as developmental. I am interested in what your experience has been, and I can learn from what your experience has been as a student in one of my courses. And I want to ask you very specific questions about that experience. And so for me, changing from student evaluations of teaching to student experience of teaching surveys is a really critical dimension of that because I don’t know that students can evaluate my teaching.

Jody Greene [00:29:03]:

I do know that they’ve had an experience and that it’s important to me to know what that experience is. Do I explain concepts clearly for the majority of my students is, you know, one that we ask, you know, did my feedback help you improve? Right? We don’t use numbers at Santa Cruz either. We use frequency scales. So explain concepts clearly frequently. Right? And that in and of itself, you know, and we learned that trick from our survey specialists, that in and of itself takes the students a little bit out of the Yelpification of teaching and and and really asks them to think about what they observed. So it puts you in a slightly different it takes you out of the position of judge and puts you in the position of witness. And I think that’s elicited much more helpful feedback. Do we still get really mean feedback? Absolutely.

Jody Greene [00:30:00]:

Right? From time to time, we do. But for the most part, it it’s been really helpful that way. In the in the, you know, the best I think I can do with the question of the customer is that they are students are, among other things, customers of these educational institutions, but the classroom relationship is distinct from that. K? So it, of course, has a role to play in the overall experience, but I think you really have to talk to students about what a learning environment is and what learning is and what we do in college classrooms. Right? And I think that is something that I was always doing even before I started thinking about this stuff for a living. I spent a lot of time talking with students about what I think a classroom is for, what kinds of questions I think we should ask in classrooms, how much we have to, you know, have structure, but also allow for unanticipated forays into things that we didn’t plan to talk about today, which is also a kind of responsiveness. So keeping that aliveness in the classroom, I think the more you can do that, the more the students feel like co creators of a learning experience. And when you’re co creating something, you’re not a customer.

Jody Greene [00:31:22]:

Mhmm.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:31:22]:

You know? It’s beautiful. That’s so beautiful. Thank you so much, and thank you for helping me solve that mystery. It was really driving me.

Jody Greene [00:31:29]:

There you go.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:31:32]:

Well, this is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations, and I just have a couple of them. Earlier in the conversation, you said something about showing up, and I thought you were gonna say in the fullness of ourselves, but you said to the degree that I believe you said the word necessary to the degree that it’s necessary, and that maybe I’ll have to leave that question for another day since we’re running out of time here, but your your thoughts on these are so intriguing to me. I had a chance to watch a video by Alicia Keys, and it’s a live recording. I’m not usually a big fan of live recordings except for when I am, and then when I am, I feel like there’s no better way but to listen to that particular song live. This is a song called new day, and it’s a live performance she gave at, VH one storytelling. And she introduces the song, which is generally one of the reasons I enjoy the live performances that I do because you get a little bit of the background, and she talked about how the song helped her find her center. And she used the phrase being the whole me. And I love the idea whenever we can be some part of helping other people be the whole them in conversations and in communities and in classrooms, and it’s a beautiful song, and it gets stuck in my head.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:32:48]:

And, of course, it repeats itself. It’s a new day. It’s a new day, and I think sometimes when I recently had a chance to interview Laura and Catherine about their coedited Higher Education for Good, one of the comments was how mean higher education can be, and that keeps floating around because it so much can be. And so sometimes when higher education can be mean, it’s just fun to just be reminded it’s a new day. It’s a new day, and that song of hers just keeps floating around. And since, I guess, YouTube is gonna serve me up more of its algorithm, then I got recommended the NPR Music Tiny Desk Conference of Alicia Keys, and the song at the end that she does is her song falling. And it I have in my notes here let me check my notes. It was chef’s Kiss.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:33:38]:

And I would sing a bar if I weren’t suffering a bit from a cold, but I keep falling in and out of love with you. And all of the musicians that are there just have so much fun with that. I keep falling in and out of with you, and they’re just so fun to watch them. And then I don’t see this in very many tiny desk concerts, but at some point, she interacts with the audience, And then they pan out to the audience, and you see them collect because she’s invited them to sing along with her. And you see them just so much having so much fun with those lyrics. So those are my 2 recommendations for today. And, Jody, I’m gonna pass it over to you for whatever you’d like to share.

Jody Greene [00:34:17]:

I mean, I’m still stuck on the on the meanness of higher ed. Oh, yes. And it’s a topic that I that I think about a lot and experience an enormous amount of of pain from because I don’t really understand why we’re so mean.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:34:30]:

Yes.

Jody Greene [00:34:31]:

The longer I’m in practice, the more mystified I am by this feature. So I guess one of my recommendations is try a little kindness.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:34:38]:

Mhmm.

Jody Greene [00:34:38]:

You know, and see what happens. Just imagine in in in a moment, particularly if it’s with someone or a group of people that you almost reflexively feel antagonistic towards, just ask yourself if maybe even as an experiment, you could imagine dropping that antagonism for one interaction and see what the result is because I just feel it’s it’s unnecessary much of the time, not all of it, but much of the time. And I think my other recommendation is I’m I’m a walker. I walk a lot. I sometimes go on pilgrimages of many months where I walk, and that’s not available to everyone. But what I love about walking is the relationship between time and noticing. And so it’s a it’s an opportunity to notice. And even if you’re unable to walk, even if you have a physical limitation, just stepping outside and seeing all the things that you can notice with your, you know, however many senses you have, that I think is something that can change your view really quickly to just notice how how kind of wondrous it is.

Jody Greene [00:35:58]:

I I was once walking through the monastery where I practice, and a teacher was walking towards me, one of the abbots, and he he I greeted him and I said, hey, Abbot Ed, what’s happening? And he looked at me with these huge eyes and he said so many things. And he didn’t mean I’m so busy. He meant out here in this mountain valley with the wind and the leaves and the creek and the critters so many things are happening. You know? And it just changed my view to think so many things are happening. And so that’s my other recommendation is go outside and notice.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:36:38]:

I I don’t know if you plan this, and, of course, I don’t know that you plan the first recommendation to begin with, but I love how these can go together, how we might notice how we’re feeling about another person. Yeah. And then I’m thinking as you were sharing about the stories that we tell ourselves. And then could we try on a different story?

Jody Greene [00:36:57]:

Absolutely.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:36:58]:

And I just got off before we we hopped on today. I just got off with just administrative meanness that I don’t think probably people meant to be mean in this situation, but people are it’s triggering old hurts and old wounds, and let’s just try another story on and see if we can be kinder to each other and and and assume that this upset is actually coming from a real hurt. And and let’s go with that, and let’s try to figure out ways to heal the hurt. But but also from what you said earlier, some of that hurt is gonna get healed through individual kindness, but a lot of it’s gonna need to come to a collective kind of kindness as well.

Jody Greene [00:37:36]:

Yeah. That’s right. And I think, you know, one of the practices that I have is what is the best possible what is the most generous possible reading I can have of what’s happening right here? And one of the things that I see in higher ed, the particular form of meanness is the attribution of stupidity and or malice to others a lot of the time. And I think there’s actually almost always, at least at my institution, there’s almost always a good and principled reason why someone is making the decisions that they’re making. So at least I should try to see what those reasons are, even if I don’t agree with them. But fundamentally, most people are making decisions not because they’re jurors, but because they are constrained by a set of conditions that are I can’t see. So I try to find out what those conditions are that I can’t see before I assume that they are being stupid or malicious.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:38:30]:

Such wise words to end Hassan. Jody Greene, I’m so glad to have been introduced to you and to have gotten to have this conversation, and just thank you so much for your generosity and wisdom.

Jody Greene [00:38:41]:

Thank you and congratulations again on that 10 years. I mean, how wonderful that you’ve brought so many voices talking about these matters to so many listeners.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:38:53]:

Thanks to Kim Saichai for introducing me to Jody Greene and making today’s conversation possible. Today’s episode was produced by me, Bonni Stachowiak. It was edited by the ever talented Andrew Kroger. Podcast production support was provided by the amazing Sierra Priest. Thanks to each one of you for listening today and being a part of the Teaching and Higher Ed community. If you’ve been listening for a while and Dave yet to sign up for the weekly update, head over to teaching and higher ed dot com slash subscribe. You’ll receive the most recent episodes, show notes, along with some other resources. Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you next time on Teaching in Higher Ed.

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