[00:00:00] Speaker A: I learned in those first two to three years that the essence of education is expectation.
And I've never stopped believing that.
[00:00:09] Speaker B: Hi, folks. Alex Torpy Here in this episode of Upper Valley Vibes, I sit down with Greg Prince of Norwich, Vermont. Greg has been an educator for the bulk of his life, teaching English overseas in the 60s, administering various programs at different schools and colleges, which, for example, brought him to Dartmouth as the first dean of summer programs in 1970, and of course, where I learned of him his time as president of Hampshire College, where I went from 1989 to 2005. Although he had left the year before I came in. His name and fingerprints were on a lot of Hampshire, the most impactful of which for me was something called the Principles of Discourse, which I came to know as a document in Hampshire that laid out seven principles for how to support more honest truth, focused, civil discourse on important and difficult issues. In this conversation, which I hate to have edited a little bit for length, we cover a wide range of topics from Greg's early education career to the history of developing the Principles of Discourse while at Dartmouth, the issues he has with how we break down higher in K12 education, how to support young people to have the capacity for self directed critical thought, protest and civil disobedience, lessons from giving young people responsibility, the value of living with ambiguity, a little bit of history and community about the Upper Valley, and so much more. I was excited to learn that Greg lived in the Upper Valley after coming up to work here. And it's been really wonderful getting to know someone who has invested so much time and energy in helping find ways to support others, to be the best version of themselves, whatever they decide that might be. Enjoy.
[00:01:45] Speaker C: Greg, thanks for sitting down this morning.
[00:01:48] Speaker A: Wonderful to do. Appreciate it.
[00:01:50] Speaker C: So I'm going to jump right in and just ask a question. There's a great story you have about some Advanced placement tests earlier in your education career.
Maybe you could share a little bit about that experience.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:02:06] Speaker A: I've been teaching abroad in Hong Kong with something called Yale China, and it was refugee college.
All Chinese students, obviously.
And that was my first two years of teaching.
[00:02:20] Speaker D: Right.
[00:02:21] Speaker A: And my first day in class, I remember there, we'll never forget, I kind of opened my mouth to say hello and 25 students in the class, all the pencils came up and all the notebooks were out and everybody was about to write down what I said and I just froze and looked and said, let's wait a minute.
[00:02:43] Speaker C: I said, I have nothing to say worth writing down yet.
[00:02:46] Speaker A: I don't want you to write this down. I want to sort of get to know you and tell you where I'm coming from.
But I just, I was involved in an environment where the students. It was just different than anything I've been involved in.
These were students who knew education was their future.
He knew what the opportunity meant.
They, most of them had fled from Communist China, so they were refugees.
And I just watched for two years. I watched students in a level of motivation that was quite extraordinary. And, you know, and I'm not, for whatever reason, I had hearing problems when I was young, but not a very good linguist.
And I was watching students who would go into a class. I was teaching English, but I would watch them go into a science class and they would sit there and the professor was lecturing in Mandarin Chinese.
They were talking to each other at their desks and working lab work in Cantonese Chinese.
And all were using an English language textbook.
And it was almost nauseous. It was beyond my conception of how the mind could operate simultaneously in three languages. I have trouble with one, have a lot of trouble with more than one. So that was my sort of introduction to education.
And so I come to Woodbury Forest School in Virginia where I've been offered a job before I left for China.
[00:04:17] Speaker C: And around what year is this?
[00:04:19] Speaker A: That was in 1963. I came there, been abroad for two years. And you know, when I left I sort of said, yes, I would love a job because it's hard to look for a job when you're abroad. So I had a job waiting for me when I came back, which was wonderful.
And I go in to see the headmaster whom I had met and we'd hired Pete. I was a Yale graduate and we had a lot of. It was a segregated school, 61, and his goal was to integrate it. And I was part of that strategy. And he said, you're going to be teaching basic, regular and advanced AP American History.
And kind of just distinctly I look at myself, you know, what's the difference?
And his response was, yeah, I guess now, probably brilliant response. He said, you'll figure it out.
So I had about a two day warning to figure it out. And I couldn't figure it out. It didn't make sense to me. I said, you know, why don't we just.
I'm going to teach them the best I can and all that. I know the same that I've been doing for two years. Not necessarily very good teaching, not necessarily, but it's going to be the best. Not going to hold anything back.
[00:05:34] Speaker D: Right.
[00:05:35] Speaker A: I hadn't held anything back with the Chinese with respect to language competence or experiences. Lots of differences, and we try to work through all of those. So it so happened. My first class was basic. So I went in and I said, students, I have this problem. I haven't been able to figure this out.
So I'm just going to give you the same course that I'm giving everybody. And I expect everybody to take the advanced place of an exam at the end, see how you do.
[00:06:04] Speaker C: How did they react to that?
[00:06:05] Speaker A: They just exploded with, you can't make us do that.
And you know, so we had literally an entire class.
[00:06:13] Speaker C: And so with the school, did this school have. It had different levels or tracks?
[00:06:16] Speaker A: Yeah, right. It rated. I mean, that's what I had concluded from what they meant.
[00:06:23] Speaker D: Right.
[00:06:24] Speaker A: And yeah, everybody was not, wasn't. They weren't in a track for all courses. They were in track for specific courses.
[00:06:30] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:06:31] Speaker A: So somebody might be in, you know, more advanced course in science, but less.
[00:06:36] Speaker D: Right.
[00:06:37] Speaker A: But anyway, so the conversation went on for the 50 minutes that we had or whatever length of time it was. And I, you know, we sort of reached a kind of surly neutral, you know, and, you know, impasse. But right near the end, I said, but let me just say one thing. I know you're upset and I haven't really persuaded you, but, you know, when I get to the advanced class, they're really going to be upset.
And I said, what do you mean? They're going to be upset because I've taken away their specialness.
And they said, what do you mean? I said, well, you know, you're not supposed to be. You're not supposed to be as good. And they've been already told they're good.
[00:07:21] Speaker D: Right.
[00:07:21] Speaker A: And I'm going to go in there and tell them they're not any better than you are.
[00:07:24] Speaker C: Interesting.
[00:07:26] Speaker A: Ended the conversation. Never, in other words, never said, really?
[00:07:30] Speaker C: So what do you think? They.
[00:07:32] Speaker A: And yeah, at the end of the semester, end of the year, they all took the advanced placement exam. The basic class was 1/10 of a point lower than the honors class on the advanced placement exams. On the average for the class, 1/10 of a point. I was so upset, they might have beaten him.
[00:07:54] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:07:55] Speaker A: And so I learned in those first two to three years that the essence of education is expectation.
And I've never stopped believing that.
[00:08:07] Speaker C: So you've been in education for decades now, since 1961. And it sounds, I mean, was this experience sort of formative?
[00:08:15] Speaker A: Totally formative. I mean, the two years with the Chinese students.
[00:08:18] Speaker D: Right.
[00:08:19] Speaker A: Sort of set it up with the refugees. It's a sense of just, you know, motivation and expectation and very different cultures. And that's always been a part of my.
And it is today, 50 years later, my belief that the greatest problem this country has is the absence of a real profession of education.
We have lots of associations of educators, but we do not have a profession that links all educators with a common set of principles like medicine does do no harm. Okay, very simple premise. But the nurse in a rural nursing home and a neurosurgeon in Cambridge have at least a shared. They are part of the same infection. And that makes a huge difference for the country as a whole because medical health professions are a huge swath of the country, of the population. They're all delivering absolutely critical services to us. And the quality of those services are very much tied to that professional sense.
And that's what recruits them, you know, that's what holds them together. And that's what. And teachers that don't have that.
[00:09:49] Speaker D: Right.
[00:09:50] Speaker A: Well.
[00:09:50] Speaker C: And we're even losing that, just as a society in general, it seems like, is that we're losing some of the common purpose. Meaning. Yeah, all the sort of.
[00:10:00] Speaker A: Robert Putnam and I just. And I just. Very much so. And I feel, you know, within education. So, you know, I'm. My entire career in education, and I have to. I conclude now that education has failed America. My profession, which I think is real, I think is there, even if it isn't visible, there is a profession there, that we fail the country. We have failed to create a population that can sustain a democracy and can sustain a healthy society.
That something, you know, we've missed. Education has missed something.
[00:10:38] Speaker D: Right.
[00:10:40] Speaker A: And I'm trying to sort out with that part of it, but part of it, I think, is the absence of depression, how we can't recruit the best and the brightest in the K through 12 teaching because in part because of the arrogance of higher education.
[00:10:57] Speaker D: Right.
[00:10:57] Speaker C: And you. I know you. We've talked in the past about the sort of separation between. And some of it even comes down to titles and labels.
[00:11:03] Speaker D: Right.
[00:11:03] Speaker C: The difference between professor and teacher.
[00:11:06] Speaker A: And what does that teacher really mean? Professor and higher education.
[00:11:09] Speaker C: Right. Lower education. Right.
[00:11:11] Speaker A: I like the Europeans. The Europeans are primary, secondary and tertiary.
[00:11:15] Speaker C: That's interesting. That's such a different sort of categorization. I mean, one is just assuming a sequential chronological nature. The other is actually ranking them almost in terms of something else.
[00:11:27] Speaker A: One's higher than the other.
[00:11:29] Speaker D: Right, Right, right.
[00:11:30] Speaker C: Like the Senate and the House.
[00:11:32] Speaker D: Right.
[00:11:33] Speaker A: So. And that's. So all of you can see that, you know, the threads have come back now. I just, you know, I've always been concerned about the lack of professional respect that comes, you know, those who teach, those who can do, do, those who can't teach.
[00:11:50] Speaker D: Right, right.
[00:11:51] Speaker C: What a terrible saying.
[00:11:52] Speaker A: I mean, that's.
That attitude is. It's just using your mind is not the same as doing things.
[00:12:04] Speaker D: Right.
[00:12:05] Speaker C: It concerns me. You know, it's funny, because that saying is so common.
You know, if you can't do, teach. But is there really. I mean, when you think about what the priorities of a community or society are, I mean, all. I think most parents take pretty seriously the idea, the importance of their role in shaping the young person that they're raising and how important that is to set them up for success and pass on their own knowledge, but give them space to make their own decisions and their own mistakes and figure out things. And then yet. And you know, and for many people, you know, raising kids or having a family is the most important thing you could do. But then we have this weird, dismissive attitude towards those who do that professionally.
[00:12:50] Speaker A: Right.
[00:12:51] Speaker C: And shouldn't we hold those up more?
[00:12:53] Speaker A: But, you know, and it's like, this is why it's worth a long conversation. But you. About the role of the family and parents who should be teaching values.
So not tv. A lot. A lot of people would argue that's the family's business. That's what's happening today's debate over curriculum and what's being taught in the schools.
[00:13:18] Speaker D: Right.
[00:13:19] Speaker A: And who has the, you know, the latest state to limit what can be taught in the schools. And the argument is the family should be doing that.
That doesn't seem irrational. That seems important. But the question is, to me, should anybody be doing it exclusively?
It's a partnership. And I can give one example. I was involved when I was in Hampshire.
I was also involved with the Council on Ethnic and Racial Justice, American Bar Association. So I merged these two connections and Hampshire ran, had a series of discussions in Springfield, Mass. On affirmative action and race in America with high school students.
And we recruited high school students who wanted to engage in the conversation. And I don't know, I think we had 10, maybe 70, 80 students.
So we created, I think, seven or eight small groups where the students talk with themselves about these issues. And we just filmed them. We didn't direct them. We didn't sort of. We just started totally unstructured, just filmed.
So we had hours of these conversations and we showed. It was interesting, the students the basic premise the students had is that our problem is that our parents had taught us all these bad things.
One student said, how do we, you know, we're not racist? How did we become racist? How did this happen? And then their answer was, the older generation. They taught us, they created this problem. It's not our problem, it's their problem.
I then showed these unedited films to the council, and one of its members was Nathaniel Jones, the first African American court of appeals judge in America.
And he listened to this conversation. I thought his comment at the end was, this is the most profound conversation about race I've heard in America.
And they don't have a clue as to how they're able to have it.
And there was no historical sense that they were doing something that to him, not even the older, you know, the next oldest, but two generations would have been inconceivable.
It was an extraordinarily painful, in a sense, that it was his generation that screwed it. His generation saved us in one sense, but was also the one that.
And so my is that the family has to be part of it, but they can't be the only part of it.
[00:16:29] Speaker C: Yeah. And having this sort of, you know, we have this. We seem to have this dynamic. I don't know if this is a Western world thing or kind of a modern world thing. Certainly in the U.S. i mean, we tend to not have a lot of nuance and just want everything to be, you know, easily categorized. You know, it's either a left or a right or a Democrat, or it's either in one box or another. It's the family or the school. It's one thing or the other. And, you know, it always. It seems like we. There's a lot of important things that slip through the cracks when we're so binary about that.
[00:17:05] Speaker A: Yeah, I don't. I mean, I wouldn't. I wouldn't even begin to get into whether it's Eastern, Western. But, I mean, ambiguity is difficult.
I think that that's universal. May not be, but I simply accepted it. Universal that we're not any better or any worse at it. It's just part of the human condition.
[00:17:27] Speaker C: And that it's not a bad thing.
[00:17:30] Speaker A: That it can be healthy. The unknown can be exciting.
And learning to live with ambiguity is clearly a skill and a very important one. And if you look at the indices for depression and anxiety in that education, which are growing exponentially, one sense over 20 years, 3% since, well, something 2001, 3% of students in college were consistently clinically depressed or anxious.
Today it's over 12% or 11%. So that's a. That's a huge jump.
And so what are the factors for that? A lot of them. But yeah, not having a capacity for ambiguity leads to depression and anxiety.
[00:18:23] Speaker D: Right.
[00:18:23] Speaker A: So there's. We're failing to do something.
[00:18:27] Speaker C: Well, and there it seems like a lot of the certainty, the motivation for certainty in the face of uncertainty to some degree seems to come from a place of almost insecurity about ourself or about the world. If we want something to be simple.
[00:18:45] Speaker A: And easily define how we get there. You know, if some people, some people find that exciting, some people don't.
[00:18:51] Speaker D: Right.
[00:18:53] Speaker A: But other things, you know, so people are still studying why this rise in anxiety. And there's certainly a lot of evidence that the World Trade Towers, the whole issue of terrorism had something to do with it. It wasn't just accidental.
In the same way that probably my generation, I don't know, I mean, I was raised. Born in 39.
So the first four years of my five years of my life or the first 10 years of my life were all about war.
I don't know if it affected our generation or how it affected. But I can remember, you know, as a very young person spending evenings at night trying to go to sleep, thinking about, my uncle had a farm outside of Washington and we would go out and visit him. And driving out there, every time we drove out, we passed the big signs that said, this highway closed in case of enemy attack.
[00:19:57] Speaker D: Wow.
[00:19:58] Speaker A: That was just normal. I mean, that was.
And so I would figure how we were going to get to my uncle's farm without using the highways, which, you know, wasn't unsettling. It was just. I used to think about that, but, I mean, but you won. So if a whole generation was raised thinking about, does it. Does it change us?
[00:20:23] Speaker C: I think so. I mean, you think about today, there's so much part of our culture, you know, apocalypse movies and zombie movies, and.
[00:20:31] Speaker A: It'S hard to sort all that out. Right. And I'm not sure we have. And yeah, we feel. And there's a whole issue of.
Excuse me.
Yeah. All statistically, we are safer than we've ever been.
[00:20:47] Speaker D: Right.
[00:20:48] Speaker A: But we feel less safe.
[00:20:52] Speaker D: Right, Right.
[00:20:53] Speaker A: So that's partly the fact that news travels so fast that we feel so much a part of it. I mean, I can, you know, for us, it was just, you know, our growing up middle class.
You. You got out of Washington in the summer because of polio.
That was just. I mean, polio was Yeah, I.
I can't imagine raising children with polio. And our children. We raised our children without even ever thinking about it.
[00:21:22] Speaker D: Right, one. Right.
[00:21:23] Speaker A: But our parents, as I tell my children, one of the. One of our great moments as teenagers, my brother, myself, is we were in New Hampshire, squalumbly vacationing, getting out of Washington, escaping the polio, and suddenly there was a case of polio in New Hampshire.
And the parents brought us all together in this Roger Little defamation camp, brought all the teenagers, everybody together and said that because of the polio, it was no longer possible for us to go to the movie theater.
So we could only go to the drive in.
And, you know, there are 30 or 40 teenagers looking, saying, really best summer any of us ever had.
[00:22:13] Speaker C: It's amazing. I mean, it's so.
[00:22:15] Speaker A: It's just. It had such odd. Such odd repercussions in the way, but very, very real. Very real.
[00:22:23] Speaker C: Yeah, it's fascinating. I mean, and I wonder if some of this does goes back to something you said earlier about the students with the AP exam in education, which is expectations, and just how much of a role expectations plays in. The expectation is perfect certainty, perfect safety, and that's unattainable no matter where you are. But if that's the expectation, then the smallest, and you.
[00:22:48] Speaker A: Your expectations get set, get calibrated by sort of what's around you, and that's something to learn, and you want to create some sense of awareness around you. And so Covid was a real blow because that, you know, we had not had a medical emergency like that since aids.
[00:23:08] Speaker D: Right.
[00:23:10] Speaker A: And AIDS itself was prejudicially limited, so it only affected part of the population, and part of the population could dismiss it as their due, which was one of the tragedies.
But so it's. So back to my first teaching experience.
Those kids taught me a lot.
[00:23:40] Speaker C: So how do you think about me when you think about education and you think about expectations and being comfortable with ambiguity, how do you bring that into a mentorship or classroom environment? Like, what can you do to help people be more comfortable with those sorts of things or be able to navigate?
[00:23:58] Speaker A: Just give them responsibility, give them expectations.
[00:24:02] Speaker D: Right.
[00:24:03] Speaker A: I mean, that's Hampshire. That's what. That's our pocket.
[00:24:07] Speaker C: In your time in Hampshire.
[00:24:08] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, is it. Yeah.
What makes Hampshire so unusual? You know, coming from Dartmouth?
[00:24:16] Speaker C: Just one thing.
[00:24:17] Speaker A: Yeah, well, in some ways, yes, one thing. The one thing about Hampshire is the expectation that the student will own the process.
And that's a. That's very fundamental. Very fundamental. But once You. Once you begin with that, then everything else seems to move very naturally. It isn't. And once the students absorb that, it's very hard to do.
And you can't.
Yeah. I think you have to create the expectation. Students have to learn how to accept that expectation.
And there's nothing in education.
I think one of the big problems in education, the issue of the profession is one, but one of the others is that we are not creating the expectation that students be responsible for their education.
Everything in the system, from the most elite schools to the least, is it's top down.
You may do a lot of independent work, but you're doing independent work in a structure where you're not really being given the choice.
You may be able to pick the topic.
[00:25:32] Speaker D: Right.
[00:25:33] Speaker A: But you're still in a kind of graded structure that tells you you're going to get this. And so one of my recent points of education, I was at Dartmouth graduation this June in the pouring rain. I had a great nephew who was graduating, and we were sitting in the pouring rain with umbrellas. So you couldn't even see the jumbotron. You couldn't even see Federer, couldn't see anything.
Couldn't hear a lot. Couldn't see anything. And so I really studied the program because at four hours of sitting under an umbrella, you need to know when to maybe hearing something, but not hearing a lot and not seeing anything. And so I looked at everything and I looked at every, you know, looked at the fact that there were 18 valedictorians and even more salutorians.
So that meant a lot of students had 4.0 averages and more than that. And I've now suggested to somebody at Dartmouth, I hope they follow it, that. And there was only one person who gave the faculty, you know, the valedictorian address.
And I was saying. I said, I really would like to have had a book with their addresses to sit here and read while they're sitting in the rain.
So I suggested to some people at the Dickey Endowment that they ought to publish. Every valedictorian ought to have the option of writing an address.
Only one will give it, but all should be published.
[00:27:04] Speaker C: Interesting.
[00:27:06] Speaker A: I hope they do that because I would. I mean, 18 different. It would have been fascinating. Yeah, that would have been worse. Sitting in the rainforest. Right.
[00:27:14] Speaker C: And I'm sure they'd be very different.
[00:27:16] Speaker A: I mean, it'd just be an incredible.
I'm really, you know, I feel like I missed a source of information that was denied me.
All those 18 people were sitting there and I'd have only heard from one.
[00:27:31] Speaker C: So does that mean when you were president of Hampshire, you read everybody's div. Threes who was graduating every year?
[00:27:36] Speaker A: I didn't read everybody, but I read a lot. I should.
[00:27:38] Speaker C: Many of them.
[00:27:38] Speaker A: I should have read more, But.
[00:27:41] Speaker C: And so people aren't.
[00:27:42] Speaker A: But a lot of them had already given me their views. I mean, I'd already. I already knew what they thought. They made sure I did.
[00:27:48] Speaker C: They made sure you knew. Yeah, yeah. And for folks that aren't familiar that might be listening with Hampshire, I mean, one of the reasons why it's such a pleasure for me to get to sit down and talk to Greg here is, you know, moving up here a couple years ago. And then someone mentioned to me that Greg Prince, you know, lives in Norwich in the Upper Valley, and somebody mentioned.
[00:28:06] Speaker A: To me that there was a Hampshire alum who was town manager.
[00:28:10] Speaker C: It's a small enough network of people that it's really quite shocking when there's somebody else from Hampshire around.
[00:28:15] Speaker A: That's right. Yeah. It's noteworthy.
[00:28:17] Speaker C: It is, it is. And of course, I don't think you had known. You know, there's no reason for you to know my name beforehand, but I certainly knew yours from Hampshire, you know, on a couple buildings, and many documents and literature. But one of them was this Principles of discourse that I believe you delivered in a speech. But I came to know.
[00:28:39] Speaker A: Convocation.
[00:28:39] Speaker C: Convocation, Okay. I came to know as a document that we used in what turned out to be a more relevant training ground than I ever could have imagined, being involved in sort of student government in college, for being involved in government beyond that. And it laid out these different points of how to engage people in conversations, in constructive, civil ways. And, you know, and I've used that document. You know, I shared this when we first met a couple years ago, of course, but, you know, I've used this document half a dozen times over, more than that, throughout the years, in the classes that I teach, in facilitating meetings as an elected official, in working with people in different leadership environments where you're trying to create this thing. You mentioned before to some degree, this sort of shared set of baseline values that everybody in a given environment can work off of. So maybe we can read them out. Maybe you could share a little bit of what drove you to create those 30 years ago. And if you think they're still relevant given our political discourse today.
[00:29:47] Speaker A: Well, I mean, what led me to create them is that at Dartmouth.
I came to Dartmouth in 1970, John Kemeny hired to get Dartmouth I was hired as dean of summer programs to get Dartmouth to help Dartmouth be able to consider the option of going year round as a way of doing co education.
Kemeny was the leadership team at Dartmouth really wanted to go co ed and they had not been able to find a financially viable way to do it. They looked at coed at college, they wanted to get somebody to move, but for all kinds of reasons, none of that worked. And the economic structure of New Hampshire, all non academic buildings at Dartmouth are taxed. Same property tax that everybody else pays in a state with no income tax, I might add, for the people who hear this, who are outside of New Hampshire. And so Dartmouth was.
They were between a rock and a hard place.
They couldn't. And you know, which is only probably true for Dartmouth, but they really couldn't take fewer men because the alumni, a lot of alumni didn't want to go co education and they certainly didn't want to do something that would weaken Dartmouth athletically, which taking fewer men would have done at that point in time.
One can ask, you know, does that make sense? No. But that was, that's simply the reality of the moment. That was the pressure. And so, you know, a number of people had concluded that the only way to do it was to go year round.
They had a summer school that was losing money that nobody went to. There was not anything. And you know, I was looking for a job and arrived at Dartmouth and somebody said, what would you do if you could stay at Yale? I said, be dean of the Yale summer school if I could. But they don't have one. Which is a good answer if you're looking for a job. It's their fault, right? Not my fault that they're not hiring me.
And it was like pulling a fire alarm.
But anyway, I was. Yeah, as soon as Kemeny came in as president, I was hired to help government go year round. And I was told that you have three years to make the summer respectable, exciting, and people can conceive of it as operating year round. It was a political thing to create an environment in which we could take a vote which would have really amounted to. So we took that vote. But I was at. It was a very controversial time and I was at the center.
Just a gift, sheer chance that I ended up at the center of it.
And because I was running the summer, I was responsible for a lot of the summer programs. And so I ran the first powwow on an Ivy League at campus.
The students came to me and said they wanted to run a powwow And I said, that sounds great, but what is it?
What does it involve? And what do we need to do to make it successful?
And the Navy Vernon students taught me all of that and including. And we had a dining hall staff that was incredibly imaginative, flexible. We went to them, and they said, we don't have a clue how to do that.
Will you teach us?
They said, yes. Said, okay, we'll open up. You know, we'll. We'll be there, and you tell us what to do. So we'll produce the fried bread, and we'll produce whatever you want to have as your banquet if you just teach us how to do it right. And so we had a huge Native American pow. Wow. Food and everything. And they've been doing it ever since. But so it was a Some. It was a place where a lot of experimentation took place.
[00:33:37] Speaker D: Right.
[00:33:38] Speaker A: And also, the structure was such that, yeah, basically everybody went away in the summer, and I was president, groundskeeper, janitor, and sorry.
I had Dartmouth for three months, do anything I wanted with it. And senior officers who were imaginative, creative, and took risks, and I was a risk.
But out of that John Kemeny, when we got to affirmative action, I became Dharma's first affirmative action officer, qualified only because they were waiting for Errol Hill to finish sabbatical for a year, and they needed a compromised candidate. And I told my father my qualifications were that I was neither a woman nor a minority.
I was satisfactory. Everybody was happy to have me do it for a year, but I just learned I was in the middle of all the controversies.
And I would go out the alumni, and they were upset with the Dartmouth Review, which was just horribly racist. But Dartmouth View's philosophy was, truth doesn't matter. All that matters is effect.
It was the lesson. It was Dartmouth. I was trained in the current situation 40 years ago at Dartmouth by the Dartmouth Review.
So I was in all of these, and I would go out to speak to alumni and a lot of parents. What do you think of the Dartmouth Review? So I had to develop an answer.
And that's where the principles of discourse came from.
The answer is, yes, there's freedom of press and yes, there's free speech.
But an academic institution has its own standard, which are the principles of discourse, and they are as critical to the institution as free press and free speech are to the society. But they're not identical.
And it's common sense. In an academic institution, you can't distort data.
If you're a scientist, you can't just make up your data.
[00:38:01] Speaker C: You shouldn't be able to do that in any environment.
[00:38:03] Speaker A: But you can maybe in cases, some cases you should be able to do that. But I'm not going to defend that. I'm not worried about that. It's just in the academic institution, you can't.
[00:38:15] Speaker C: So you had these set of standards.
[00:38:18] Speaker A: So when the alumni. So the parents would say.
I would go out to speak to alumni.
Parents say, well, what do you think of the DART Review? Well, the odds are that that parent's child is an editor of the Dark Review. You just got to take that as a given. May not be, but it just to sort of begin with that. And so I would say, I said, you know, I said I oppose them. And I think they're wrong because they violate the principles of discourse.
This is not an issue of free speech. It's not an issue, but this is an academic community, and that's what they're violating.
[00:38:51] Speaker C: So sort of. It's sort of a higher. Not a higher standard, a more.
Another layer.
[00:38:57] Speaker A: It's a different. It's a higher or lower is not the issue. It's a different layer.
[00:39:00] Speaker D: Okay.
[00:39:01] Speaker A: You know, I. I'm not going to say that it's higher than free speech. It's just. It has a different purpose. An educational institution is about generating knowledge.
That means, you know, generating falsehoods cannot be a part of generating knowledge. That's just, you know, the non sequitur.
[00:39:18] Speaker D: Right.
[00:39:19] Speaker A: And so the academic institution to operate has to have a set of fundamental principles that. And they don't have to be the same free speech, and nor should they be.
[00:39:32] Speaker C: And so you develop these in response. Some experience.
[00:39:37] Speaker A: The Darkness Review taught me a lot.
You know, I ended up debating on Crossfire with Buchanan and Braden, Tom Braden. We had a session. It was all Dartmouth on the. On crossfire, national TV thing. Editor of the Dartmouth Review and Buchanan, conservative leader in America. Tom Braden was a liberal leader. And Kemeny sent me.
[00:40:04] Speaker C: Put you right in the middle of it.
[00:40:05] Speaker A: Put me right in the middle. And yeah, the irony is that we. And Braden and I were supposed to have a meeting the morning of the taping. It's done by tape, and he had a dentist emergency. So I had no meeting. And I just.
I walked in to the set and the three of them were there, were all mic'd up, and they were micing me up. And Braden just leans over and said, it's unseemly for a dean to take on a student, so I'll take on the student. You take on Buchanan.
Buchanan is national conservative spokesman national figure, and I'm nobody.
I looked at Brayton, he just smiled like he knew what he'd done.
[00:40:49] Speaker D: Right.
[00:40:50] Speaker A: He's going to take on the student. And that in itself was an interesting experience. They just, they kept interrupting at discourse.
[00:41:00] Speaker C: Yeah, I bet.
[00:41:00] Speaker A: Yeah, it was, it was a real. And I just sat there and say, work for about the first 10 minutes. And the producer offset, right, that, yeah, you're messing everything up. You're supposed to be jumping in there.
[00:41:15] Speaker D: Right, right.
[00:41:16] Speaker A: And finally, Buchanan probably signaled from the. Probably said, well, I think we need to let the dean speak. Well, they couldn't just jump on me. They couldn't interrupt me. So I had a chance to in two minutes make the statement about principles of discourse.
And it really slowed. It slowed him down a lot. And. And at the end of the thing, Braden, it was all over. Braden said, I said, I don't know that they make great television, but they are good, so don't give them up.
[00:41:51] Speaker C: Oh, wow. But that's sort of an interesting contrast, right? Is, you know, I had an experience like this years ago on a radio show that was about marriage equality in New Jersey when that was being sort of debated before the state supreme Court overturned it and allowed it. And I was on this radio and you had a liberal Democratic politician, a conservative, a Republican politician, and me, because I was non party affiliated as mayor, and they were sort of debating and there was a lot of encouragement to interrupt each other and argue more. And I had. It's funny we hadn't talked about this, but, you know, I had to. I sort of was weight. I just said, well, I'm not going to do that. And they kept looking at me and pointing to me and said, like to jump in there. And I was like, I'm not doing that. Like, that's not how I wanted to.
[00:42:39] Speaker A: That was just. I don't know what the instinct. That was just, you know, I was lucky.
[00:42:44] Speaker D: Right.
[00:42:44] Speaker C: But then it also works in some ways in your favor because at a certain point people have to ask you.
[00:42:50] Speaker A: What you think and they have to stop. And Right.
[00:42:52] Speaker C: Right now everybody turns to you.
[00:42:54] Speaker D: Right.
[00:42:55] Speaker C: And you get a minute or two maybe.
[00:42:56] Speaker A: Yeah. You don't have long, but. And you know, and Dartmouth had prepared me into certain quotes that I could use in the process. So I wasn't. I didn't come completely unarmed, but.
[00:43:08] Speaker C: And do you feel like you're able to sort of make the case for having a different structure behind? Like, do you think you made your point?
[00:43:16] Speaker A: I don't think there's any Question about it. I mean, I think that's what academy. That's the purpose of universities, and that's where. That's where, you know, that's where the presidents of Penn, MIT and Harvard, when Stefanik was doing and said, you know, they missed this huge opportunity. I nearly died when I said, you know, the answer is finally. Because of course, you know, genocide is. Yeah, there would have been consequences, but I would have just been confident. But, you know, in the university, we're guided by the principles of discord. You, as politicians are not. You may lie, you may say anything you want in politics, and we have to be smart enough to figure that out.
[00:43:56] Speaker D: Right.
[00:43:56] Speaker A: I mean, it would have been.
[00:43:58] Speaker C: Their principles are almost the opposite of these to some degree. And some of the motivations in the sort of media world, I think are the opposite. It's not what.
[00:44:06] Speaker A: Yeah. One of the principles is, you know, the ends don't justify the means.
[00:44:10] Speaker D: Right.
[00:44:10] Speaker A: We're living in a world where the, The. The ends justify the needs.
[00:44:16] Speaker D: Right.
[00:44:16] Speaker A: And that's the tragedy.
[00:44:19] Speaker C: I was gonna. Yeah.
[00:44:20] Speaker A: I mean, that's a fundamental. That's a fundamental principle that is, you know, in the principle of discourse, it's not allowed.
[00:44:27] Speaker D: Right.
[00:44:28] Speaker A: Yes. You may believe that, you know, this truth that you have is absolutely important and the world needs to know about it, but you may not distort the data, you may not distort the fact to the best of your ability. Doesn't mean you won't, but you can be held accountable for doing so.
And for scientists. Yeah. For historians, that may be harder to have fine truth. You know, in the time I gave them, as I think I told you, it was my convocation address. I think my first convocation address at Hampshire may have been the second, but the faculty were politely sitting there, and the first principle is we are committed to the pursuit of truth to the best of our.
You could just see the whiplash that even.
[00:45:16] Speaker C: Just that statement.
[00:45:17] Speaker A: Yeah. They walk here. Oh, at that point in 19. In 1990.
[00:45:22] Speaker D: Right.
[00:45:23] Speaker A: Was, you know, a war cry.
[00:45:25] Speaker D: Right.
[00:45:26] Speaker A: For the whole school. You know, critical theory, the sense that truth is relative, culturally it's defined. So truth for this culture is different than truth for this culture. You know, at some level that's true, at other levels that's not true. At least I don't believe it is.
And that's what I was arguing. And. But that was a real.
And, but, you know, to my entire time at Hampshire, nobody challenged the value of those principles. They did not necessarily follow them, at least as I.
[00:46:01] Speaker C: But they didn't make explicit arguments against them.
[00:46:02] Speaker A: They did not make explicit arguments against them. And the students were wonder. The students would come in, you know, and say, you know, we understand the principle. We believe in the principles of discourse, then they proceed to violate them right and left.
And I think I told you one story where the African American students were just reading the riot activity. And. But they began with, we're following the principles, discourse.
And they went on and they presented their demands.
And I said to them, you know, you clearly had to write these before we had our conversation, correct?
Yes, I said, so that's not completely in keeping with the principles. Oh, no, we understand that, but we just didn't have time. You know, it's like we're not going to, you know, we don't want to argue with the principals. We understand that, but you still have to forgive us. You know, at that point. At that point, I felt I can't lose. If they've accepted that, even if politically they've already made these demands, we're having a conversation, and that's what matters.
[00:47:06] Speaker D: Right.
[00:47:07] Speaker A: And we agree on the terms of that conversation.
[00:47:10] Speaker C: Right. How many people can even do that today, you know, in a conversation about a political issue is. I mean, it seems like forget figuring things out, we can't even talk about the things. And that there's so little shared truth or values or understanding or goals. Like, people are starting in such different places. So I don't know if you have any. I mean, are there any ways when you think about, you know, intellectually understanding, you know, something like.
I think that. And I don't know if this is exactly written as the way you said it in 1990, but the last one, which is that we reject the premise that the ends, no matter how worthy, can justify means which violate these principles. I mean, it's. That's such a powerful statement. You know, you were talking before about the means and ends, and I think that's one of the things that kind of gets mixed up the most in some of our discourse today. I mean, I think a lot of elected officials, people in the political world, mix up the ends and the means between their political goals and their kind of government goals. And is that really you want to be running for office so you can make good decisions to help your community or your region or state. You don't want to be in government to help your political goals, but those get switched a lot.
[00:48:19] Speaker A: Oh, absolutely.
[00:48:20] Speaker C: And so means. And like, being somewhat clear and critical about means and ends seems like a really important thing to do. Are there ways, have you found ways that can help people not just think intellectually about these things, but actually implement these things in their lives? How do you translate from saying, okay, I've read something like this and I understand it to here's how I'm going to practice it?
[00:48:42] Speaker A: Well, part you have to practice the practice.
It doesn't come.
It doesn't come easily, or so you.
[00:48:50] Speaker C: Can'T just read it and do it right.
[00:48:52] Speaker A: I mean, you have to practice doing it right. And the way I practice at the moment is that, you know, I imagine myself in situations that would be really uncomfortable.
And another suggestion I've made to Dartmouth and other places, but I made it to dick and death is what's the most. I mean, politically, we have a lot of conflict, but the most, to me, the most possible problem we deal with is the Palestine, Israel conflict. I mean, it is just so viscerally painful on both sides to condemn both sides and support both sides.
So I was asked a lot over the last year, last six months, well, if you were president, why would you have been? Since I've been a president, and particularly when Dartmouth arrested 90 students and had the either the imagination or the goal to pile them into Dartmouth outing club buses and send them off to jail. I thought was for camping in the green. I thought was somehow symbolically either tone deaf or something. But anyway.
And so.
And you know, what would I have done in Hampshire, what I've done in Dart? My response, the sort of thinking through me is, and I'm urging Dartmouth to do this now and any other university they should have brought, I would have brought the Palestinian pro, Palestinian pro Israeli students together, try to get them into the same room, but if not in separate rooms, the anger. He said, look, you're demanding divestment. Some of you don't want me to divest. That's basically the demand. I don't want to divest because the companies producing those arms are going to Ukraine as well as Palestine, Israel. So divestment is not an answer for me at this point, but it's a real issue. I think it's a real issue.
I will talk to any corporation about their investment if they do not support a peace treaty that you all construct, but you have to construct the peace treaty that I take to them.
And it has to be real and it has to be persuasive and it has to be tested and I'll fund it, but instead of fight with each other, solve the problem and I'll give you the money to solve it.
I'll send you to the Middle East. I'll get other universities in the Middle east to join you.
But you solve it and then I'll support your solution.
There's a risk. I may not like the solution, but I can't solve it. So maybe they can.
Now that to me is.
That's the practice, right?
You don't know that sort of. That's how I practice in my mind. That's my solution.
But boy, I would love to see that happen.
[00:52:12] Speaker C: And it's kind of going back to some of what you were saying earlier, which is really putting responsibility back on.
[00:52:18] Speaker D: Right.
[00:52:18] Speaker A: I mean, my, my premise at Hampshire was every problem I couldn't solve, I got the students to. I figured out a way to get the students to solve it.
[00:52:25] Speaker D: Right.
[00:52:26] Speaker A: They were mad at me about something I couldn't get. Get them unmad and get the problem back to them. They figure out how to do it right.
And it worked every time.
And.
But engaging them is what makes it work.
They're not on the outside throwing stones. They're on the inside and they can't throw stones because they're going to hit themselves.
[00:52:52] Speaker C: Well, and exactly. I mean, it's such a good point. It's part of taking this to a slightly different but similar environment, like within your kind of town government spaces.
You've got your officials, you've got your staff people, you've got people who come to some of them. You've got all these different stakeholders in and around. And I've encountered hesitancy in the past among some, for example, to appoint people who disagree with them to a committee about the issue that they disagree with them about. So you might have a committee about parking or housing or things like that. And you have someone in the community who, you know, let's say an elected official doesn't really like and doesn't agree with and they want. And they're just like, no, no, I don't want that person on here. Well, that person then is outside. Is outside. If you bring them in and make them, and make them partially responsible for working with other people not to criticize this state of things, but to design a solution to fix the state of things. I mean, you're totally changing the. And not 100% of people I feel like can get across that doesn't always work.
[00:53:57] Speaker A: I mean, it doesn't, it doesn't always work at the Loop and there's some people who aren't going to ever cooperate.
[00:54:04] Speaker D: Right.
[00:54:04] Speaker C: But it works a lot more than none of the time.
[00:54:06] Speaker A: But. Right. No, but But. But it's a lot. You know, it's better. It's better. You get. You have higher success rate.
[00:54:13] Speaker D: Right.
[00:54:13] Speaker C: Than not.
[00:54:14] Speaker A: Than not.
[00:54:14] Speaker D: Right.
[00:54:15] Speaker A: And so it's a. And it's a very.
I think it was interesting. We ran Hampshire did. But we were asked. We were asked to do it, to run this. I talked to you about in the very beginning of my time at Hampshire, the second year, I think I was there, or maybe even the first year. The second year, the New York Transit Police and the New York Police Department approached us about running a national conference on law enforcement in America.
And the approach was. Actually, the approach was made.
If I'm getting my memory back, the approach was made the day after the papers carried that I've been picked as president. I got a call from somebody who knew me, who was in the Transit Police, said, can we meet?
And they literally, as I told you, but I said, you know, they said, you know, sooner rather than later. And I'm passing through New York on the way to Atlanta, and I have a layover.
And they said, we'll meet in the airport, laguardia.
So the plane from Lebanon lands at laguardia. A policeman steps aboard and said, would everybody please stay seated? Would Greg Prince please get off?
We said, all kinds. Yeah, the rumors, you know, okay, what did he do? But he took me into a conference room and we met, and they said, would you host this conference? I said, yeah, I'll be happy to host it, but why are you asking me this? They said, because nobody's listening to us. And you're the last. You know, we have conferences at John Jay. We have conferences at all. Nobody pays any attention. You're the last institution in America that would think would host a conference on policing.
[00:56:10] Speaker D: Right.
[00:56:10] Speaker A: This was in 19. You know, Hampshire's ahead. Everything that was authoritative.
[00:56:14] Speaker D: No, Right, right.
[00:56:16] Speaker A: And I said, yes. And they said, do you need to ask permission? Anyway, I said, look, I haven't. I'm not even president yet. So, you know, forgiveness. Right, right. You know, the same. They just laughed. So we're going to operate on that principle. And. But we held it. We did it for three years.
And, you know, in that situation, the problem. There are two major problems. But the most important thing we did in that situation was we involved the students.
And they were. The conference was. Lee Brown, who was commissioner of police in New York, was the one heading it up.
And he and I basically planned the conference. And we met for the first time at a dinner in New York. I mean, just a private dinner. Two of Us.
And we had outlined this in Hampshire. We were working on this design and two things. At first, it should not be just the police who should be the head of every major department.
So we went from hosting a conference for nine people to one for 80.
On average, about 10 people in each city.
And the next thing we concluded in Hampshire was students should be involved.
So I go to see Lee Brown, and we outline that all the departments. Mayors will not be allowed to come.
Hampshire will find the money. We will raise the money. So the mayors cannot come because they're not paying.
If they pay for your plane ticket, they can take the seat.
And Libra just. He just sort of smiled. So I said, we will pay.
Okay, can you do that? I said, we don't know how, but we'll figure it out.
So everything was just great. We were getting near the end of it. I said, now, of course our students will be involved.
And at this point, I persuaded him to have 80 people, not nine people, right? And how we're going to do. So they could. All the department heads could talk to each other. But the problem was the isolation, right? Separation. He loved that idea. But I got the students, and he literally, absolutely not.
And his bodyguard had been standing in a corner, all three, perks up, perks up. And they're like, oh, my God, I have to do something here.
I just. I didn't argue with him. I just said, you know, I just sort of thinned. I just said, I hear you.
And the Hampshire students were just enraged when I came back and told them the story.
And they said, so what? And they were enraged at my solution. I said, look, I just got to get you in the room.
So these eight people are going to be talking about their problems, and you're going to be the scribes putting notes on the flip charts. And you can imagine we're going to be secretaries.
They were.
But after a while, they said, you're new. We'll take a chance. They were very nice. I mean, they said, you're a new president.
We'll take a chance.
[00:59:32] Speaker C: They'll give you one.
[00:59:33] Speaker A: We'll give you one. It was basically that, well, you know, you say it's going to work out. We don't think it's going to work out, but we'll go with that.
[00:59:40] Speaker C: And you knew their role was going to be more.
[00:59:43] Speaker A: If you're writing the notes on this flip chart, you control the media, you control the meeting. I mean, whatever anybody thinks, what you decide to write, what you turn to. And I made that. I mean, they Listen to me. And they. They didn't believe it, but they thought they'd try it. And so they came. I mean, they came and there were students who were protesting that we were even doing this. And interesting enough, alumni tried to shut it down. And the students went out to the alumni, said, this is what we're about. This is what we're supposed to be doing. You're telling us not to do this.
That was an interesting.
And we went through it. And at the end of the two and a half days, Lee Brown stood up and said, this has been the most too important professional days of my life.
This is the commissioner of police of New York City. He said, it's because your president disobeyed a direct order and included you. The students could have kissed him at that point.
And that was a real lesson.
I mean, and, you know, three years they came through a whole, whole series of recommendations that were basically what. Minneapolis would never have happened, right, if they had taken place. And this whole defund the police stupid language. But basically three in 1990, all of these police chiefs were saying, reallocate the budgets, change the process.
You know, the health commissioner of New Haven stood up at one point, very intense moment in the conversation with all these talking about these problems and said, you got to remember that your law enforcement problem, your education problem, your health, your problem are all my health problems.
And it really stopped everybody.
The argument was, where will the money have the greatest impact?
We're going to go at the end of the beginning. And so the whole. It changed the whole.
They could not change. They could not change their professions.
Lee Brown, I had dinner with him after Minneapolis and just a really sad.
He said, we failed. We could not get it done.
[01:02:06] Speaker C: But they felt like they had worked out some ideas.
[01:02:11] Speaker A: None of. If it had. If it had taken, none of Minneapolis wouldn't have happened. And all the solutions that were coming out of Minneapolis were already been what they had tried to do and failed to do.
[01:02:23] Speaker C: And that conversation, I mean, so 1990, this is kind of coming on the heels of this kind of war on crime, war on drugs. And there was, I guess, an interest in.
[01:02:34] Speaker A: They were losing.
Leigh Brown and these progressive. We're losing. We're losing the population, right?
[01:02:44] Speaker C: They're seeing it firsthand every day.
[01:02:46] Speaker A: Nobody's listening to us, and we have no trust. I mean, it was a. It was a real recognition of the problem.
[01:02:54] Speaker C: And so why do you think the. Why do you think those conversations were so constructive? Those two days at Hampshire 30 years ago, what was part of the Partly.
[01:03:02] Speaker A: Is that they had never had our question to Lee Brown when we started.
Your commissioner of education talks about community education.
You talk about community policing. Do you ever talk together?
And he said, no.
He said, okay, then all we're going to do is provide you a chance to talk together.
[01:03:19] Speaker D: Right.
[01:03:20] Speaker A: That was simple.
[01:03:22] Speaker C: Yeah. And still a lesson for today. Just things not being siloed anything.
[01:03:26] Speaker D: Right.
[01:03:29] Speaker A: So. And that was a.
That taught me other things that there were a lot of one in the Hampshire. This is a Hampshire story between Hampshire.
But at the end of that conference, I remember one of the factors I still know really well and still involves some projects with. But she was sitting there and she looked up at me and as he made that statement, and she just turned to me and said, you know, you believed in us more than we believed in ourselves.
And that's probably the best compliment I ever had.
[01:04:05] Speaker C: It's. It's kind of a beautiful statement. And it actually, I don't know if you intended to circle back to the beginning, you know, as we sort of wrap up the conversation, but the idea of. Same with, you know, telling the, the non AP students you're doing it.
[01:04:20] Speaker A: Believe in.
[01:04:21] Speaker D: Right, right.
[01:04:22] Speaker C: I'm holding you to this same standard. And I believe that you'll. I believe and they did.
[01:04:26] Speaker A: If I give you the responsibility, I trust you're going to carry it out.
[01:04:30] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. But there's so much sort of protectionism these days.
[01:04:34] Speaker A: There's a lot of fear in doing that. Not quite really to let go.
And it's not easy. I mean, believe me, I've had some long sleepless nights.
Have I gone too far? Have I just overreached?
[01:04:51] Speaker C: Well, it's amazing. I mean, it's such an important topic, especially today.
[01:04:56] Speaker A: How do you trust and how do you have civility?
[01:04:59] Speaker C: Well, and to some degree for people, you know, we're in such a rut to some degree right now that for people to break out of that, they almost need to have that sense of agency. They don't have to engage, you know, with the family member who has a different political view or the colleague or they don't have to engage with that person the way that it sort of seems like you're supposed to, which today is kind of negative that you. That you can decide to do it differently. You know, you can come to a town meeting or you can come to a Thanksgiving dinner or whatever, and you can bring a set. You can say, I'm not going to debate this person this way. You can, you can, you know, look at something like the principles of discourse and say, I'm going to try and, you know, use one or two of these today and that people have that sort of power, which could be really impactful.
[01:05:43] Speaker A: But schools. But also these kids don't have the experience, the children don't have practice. And I mean, the adults as children didn't have practice doing it.
[01:05:50] Speaker D: Right.
[01:05:51] Speaker A: And you know, a lot of. A lot of school policy is avoid controversy.
[01:05:56] Speaker D: Right, right.
[01:05:57] Speaker C: Okay. Then you don't know how to deal with.
[01:05:59] Speaker A: Don't take positions.
[01:06:00] Speaker D: Right, right.
[01:06:00] Speaker A: And that's. And that's. That was partly what. You know, that's what. Basically that was my. That's what my book was about. But it.
If you don't ever take a position. Haven't any practice in taking a position.
[01:06:15] Speaker C: That's right.
[01:06:16] Speaker A: And you know, and interestingly enough, one of the recommendations to give in your field, one of the recommendations, Canada, are these conferences, urban conferences, was that for every older adult committee in any community, there ought to be a younger adult counterpart.
Very interesting principle.
[01:06:39] Speaker C: That is interesting. That is not something I've seen out there.
[01:06:43] Speaker A: New Haven did it. And New Haven created a young adult police commission that had all the powers of a police commissioner, except they could not command action.
[01:06:57] Speaker D: Okay.
[01:06:59] Speaker A: So every police officer in New Haven was required to respond to any question that a police. Young adult police commissioner to ask him at any time, any place, under any conditions.
[01:07:11] Speaker C: Wow, that's interesting.
[01:07:13] Speaker A: That's real power.
[01:07:14] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:07:14] Speaker C: Yeah, that's very interesting.
[01:07:16] Speaker A: And their greatest supporters were the rank and file police.
This is the first time we've ever had anybody we can talk to.
[01:07:26] Speaker D: Right.
[01:07:27] Speaker A: If we walk into a school and start talking to somebody, they're a snitch.
An elected police commissioner is not a snitch.
That's their role.
They're supposed to be there.
[01:07:41] Speaker D: Right.
[01:07:42] Speaker A: I have a right to talk to them. They have a right to talk to me.
[01:07:45] Speaker D: Right.
[01:07:45] Speaker A: An obligation, but I have a right to talk to them.
They loved it.
[01:07:52] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:07:52] Speaker C: It's an interesting model.
[01:07:55] Speaker A: Cannot get it.
You don't see lots of young police commissioners.
[01:08:00] Speaker D: No.
[01:08:00] Speaker C: Or even young people involved.
[01:08:02] Speaker A: A lot of these having one for.
Imagine any city that would have that. Imagine the change that might take place.
[01:08:10] Speaker D: Right, right.
[01:08:11] Speaker C: Yeah. The conversations alone would be fascinating.
So I know we have some time concerns. I would definitely. You can sit here and I'd be happy to talk with you all day. I'd love to hear a little bit also. Just about this is a bit of an Upper Valley podcast. And so maybe switching gears a bit.
[01:08:32] Speaker A: I just did.
I want to have a Hanover Police Commission.
[01:08:38] Speaker C: Well, you're going to have to talk to someone else now.
[01:08:40] Speaker A: I know that.
[01:08:42] Speaker C: I'll be happy to pass on the.
[01:08:44] Speaker A: Thought.
[01:08:46] Speaker C: But yeah, so just tell us, share a little bit about, you know, we're here. Beautiful restored kind of farmhouse in Norwich. How long have you been in the Upper Valley? And just tell us a little bit about.
[01:08:59] Speaker A: Been here since 1970 when I came hired by Dartmouth and my wife brought with her a riding school. She had at the age of 10, had a chance to have a pony. And her mother said it was a single parent, single child. Her mother said, you have a pony, you have to support it, work for it, take care of it. So at the age of 10, she started running a riding school, McLean, Virginia. She literally. She lived in a little log cabin in the countryside, but not too far from a housing development. And she would go over after school with her pony and walk around the streets saying, would you like a pony ride?
And made money. Started that. That was. That was, you know, it evolved from there. I met her in 60s November of 60 and I was senior at college.
She was. She had gone to college for two years, but was running her business full time. She could not really both afford at work, deny the time, but I met her in literally Thanksgiving of November.
And By March of 61, she was teaching Robert Kennedy's children.
She was teaching almost everybody in the new Frontier because as a child, her neighbor across the street from her log cabin was Nina Aencloss of the Jackie Kennedy's family.
[01:10:35] Speaker D: Okay.
[01:10:36] Speaker A: And she would go play in their gym on rainy days instead of ride her pony because Nina had a pony. And they were the only two with ponies.
I was really impressed with their clientele.
[01:10:47] Speaker C: Yeah, really.
[01:10:47] Speaker A: And the world she was traveling.
[01:10:49] Speaker D: That's pretty good.
[01:10:50] Speaker A: But anyway, so we get married. She brings four horses to Yale graduate school. Puts me through graduate school teaching horseback riding.
[01:10:59] Speaker D: Wow.
[01:11:00] Speaker A: She literally, we. Before we got to Yale as a graduate student, she. We walked around or I went around New Haven knocking on doors, saying, I'm gonna be a graduate student and my wife runs a riding school. Would you be interested in having a riding school on your property?
My parents can't believe I did that. But anyway, so we. She had a ride. She. Somebody said yes, they built us a barn. She ran a ride in school.
[01:11:24] Speaker D: Wow.
[01:11:25] Speaker A: So we came to.
When we got to. When I got the job at Dartmouth, went to real estate agent said our first priority is four stalls. Second is the dining room.
[01:11:36] Speaker D: Right.
[01:11:37] Speaker C: It's good to have your priorities Straight.
[01:11:38] Speaker A: That's right. But those were our priorities.
They found this place which was just ideal but way out of town.
Yeah. Psychologically in 1970.
[01:11:52] Speaker D: Right.
[01:11:53] Speaker A: And was completely populated by Philly fizz plant workers from Dartmouth.
No faculty out here now, 50 years later, 60 years later. Yeah. All, you know, the opposite. And so we had a. We had a lot of help. People helped us put the barn together and put things together. Mainly fist plant workers.
And she's been running the writing school ever since.
[01:12:20] Speaker C: And she's still doing that.
[01:12:21] Speaker A: And she's still doing it. So she's. We've sold the school to the people who bought the farm. He's a builder and he built this cottage you're sitting in. So we've transitioned and it's just, it's a miracle, one in a million that we could find a family interested in horses. Had the skills.
[01:12:43] Speaker D: Right.
[01:12:43] Speaker A: Have the children provide the labor.
So the school still runs and we just live here now. Helping but not fully being responsible.
[01:12:56] Speaker C: What are some of your, I don't know, what are kind of some fond highlights of, you know, living around here over the last couple decades. I mean it sounds like there's a lot of, a lot of folks, a lot of the kind of community that.
[01:13:07] Speaker A: You, I mean, look the place, the. As a community, huge amount of support.
Our children were athletes and they were nurtured, mentored and supported by other athletes in this valley.
We came here though interested in horses.
Wife, wife was naturally never done three day eventing.
We met the Perkins family in South Stratford.
I've never forgotten the night I came home from work, sat down for dinner and Tony and the children said, we have just been to this incredible place in South Strafford. You should see the jumps the horses do.
And it was the beginning of the whole part of my life that I took up the sport.
[01:14:02] Speaker D: Right.
[01:14:02] Speaker A: And became three day riders competing at the national level as the Perkins family did. Because one of the Beth Perkins taught our children, come down and coach them a little bit. When they say I'm not going to be around for a while, I'm trying out to the US Team, she goes off, tries out team, makes it, goes to the world championships, breaks her ankle. It gets to ride as an individual. Places third in the world.
And that's what our children think is the way life works.
Comes to the Olympics. 76 Olympics in Montreal.
Three day riding team.
Three of the six members live in South Stratford, Vermont.
So, you know, you try out the team, you make the team, you go to the Olympics and you win the Gold medal. So our children have this kind of unrealistic sense of the way the world works, but a very, you know, very supportive they were, given all that teaching. Our son was a skier, Nordic combined skier.
He would wear the equipment that older students gave him until it was threadbare.
[01:15:12] Speaker D: Right.
[01:15:13] Speaker A: Because it was theirs. So the role models that they had as kids, I think the best thing educationally that I don't know, is still done.
But the policy in Hanover High School when our children were there was that a student could miss as many classes as they missed, as long as no teacher complained.
[01:15:38] Speaker C: Interesting.
[01:15:39] Speaker A: And to be a national competitor in three day riding, these were not one day events. They were three day events which had two days prior day to let the horse rest after. So it was a week long absence to compete.
They were Nordic Combined skiers. Junior Olympics would go, you know, take a week away.
[01:16:05] Speaker C: I could think of something.
[01:16:06] Speaker A: And they. What they learned was how to manage.
And there were teachers who said, you have everything done before you go.
[01:16:15] Speaker D: Right, right.
[01:16:16] Speaker C: So they sort of set some rules and they were. It sounds again like they were responsible.
[01:16:19] Speaker A: They were responsible for making the arrangement.
[01:16:21] Speaker D: Right.
[01:16:21] Speaker A: With the teachers.
[01:16:22] Speaker D: Right.
[01:16:23] Speaker A: The teachers, some reluctantly, but would create as draconian a set of measures as they could.
[01:16:30] Speaker D: Right, right.
[01:16:31] Speaker A: But short of saying you can't go and they learned how to manage all of that.
[01:16:39] Speaker D: Right.
[01:16:39] Speaker A: That's incredible. That is education. I mean, I think in some ways it's the most important thing they learn.
[01:16:45] Speaker C: You can't just open a book and I mean, you can intellectually understand it maybe, but actually having, okay, I want to do this, and for me to do this, I have to do these other pieces to enable that.
Actually practicing that is such a big difference.
[01:16:58] Speaker A: And, you know, and we had a lot of comment about how the skills are the same and that reading, the training, your physiological training, reading gives you, makes you a better athlete.
And they had coaches who, you know, it's the mind, mind over matter.
So, you know, and so we had our children going and money was not all that easy. Dartmouth paid nicely, but you did. Pursuing some of these sports was a little hard. In one year, we just decided that Gregory had been through enough this and that, and somebody in the community said, no, they should go. So it was done anonymously, but their way was paid.
[01:17:52] Speaker C: There's a lot of philanthropy.
[01:17:54] Speaker A: So just, you know, it's just.
And it was, you know, and there was a book, there was a book about Norwich, you know, something about Norwich skiing, about how special a community is. I forget the name. I Have a copy.
And my complaint with the book was it was. It was not. It was about Norwich and it should have been about the Upper Valley, because it really was not just Norwich. It created the skiers.
Certainly a lot of the jumpers were from Norwich and the Hastings and so forth. But it was the entire community line, Hanover and Strafford, that we found they're just very children oriented and had high expectations for children.
[01:18:46] Speaker D: Right, right.
[01:18:48] Speaker A: And, you know, and we were just. It was part of the culture. And I'm. Tony would never do this. She'd be very upset that I was about to. But, you know, I think from, I don't know, 1970, we came in 1970, I think somewhere for about 30 years, there was never an Olympic team that didn't have somebody she had coached in some community process here.
[01:19:16] Speaker C: That's a good tagline for the business.
[01:19:18] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. It's just not necessarily in the sport they were in, but just that she had interacted with that child as a coach. She only did beginners.
And, you know, one child was. Or she. I ski jumping. One child from here. I. Lily Hammer Olympics, was doing well in jumping. So CBS interviews the CBS local. So how'd you get into jumping?
Scary. What was your first jump flight? Well, I was a little scared, but one of my teammates, Tara Prince, was there and said, I'll give you 25 cents if you make a jump. I just went right up there and did it. So there's, you know, our phone starts ringing from all over the country.
Did you know Tara's name was just mentioned for giving 25 cents to this guy?
[01:20:24] Speaker C: It's a good 25 cent investment.
[01:20:27] Speaker A: So is that kind of community that just the kids. The kids support each other?
It was a very.
It wasn't cutthroat.
It was just. It was competitive.
[01:20:39] Speaker D: Right.
[01:20:39] Speaker C: Competitive but supportive.
[01:20:40] Speaker A: But very supportive.
So for us, you know, and given that my wife's a coach and that I coached in high school, you know, if I could, you know, if I could change anything, I mean, I would. I would require all public school teachers to be coaches.
[01:21:00] Speaker D: Right.
[01:21:02] Speaker C: I was going to say, I mean, basic. I think that mindset, you know, certainly throughout your time in education, I mean, it's just. And one of the things that I appreciate about you is just this sort of. And not everybody has this sort of outlook, but looking at other people and seeing the potential and figuring out ways to encourage that person to be whatever the best version of themselves are, which they get to define.
[01:21:27] Speaker A: Right. It's their choice.
[01:21:28] Speaker C: It's Their choice. But you're sort of.
[01:21:30] Speaker A: And coaching is a very. Coaching is a. You know, at the end of the day, the student has to play the game.
In teaching, you're just putting knowledge into their head. They have to take the exam.
They don't get. They don't necessarily do anything with it.
And somewhere they may. But you're not really involved coaching. You're directly involved.
[01:21:52] Speaker D: Right.
[01:21:54] Speaker A: And in my teaching, probably the teach I enjoyed most was when I was teaching and coaching because I knew the students in different ways.
And so I always had freshman trips at Dartmouth because I just was. Yeah. I got to know students, a group of students, in a way I'd never get to know them. Let's say I'm taking a course. I might know them that way, but it was only four days. But you just.
You got a sense of your interaction with a group. And some you. Some you never saw again, but some you do.
[01:22:31] Speaker C: Yeah, I think. I think it's a good. It's a good outlook. Teachers, coaches, managers, bosses. I mean, just approaching things that way. There's so much value to that.
[01:22:43] Speaker A: And I. You know, Tony's a much better reader of students than I am from the coaching.
And she's coaching kids who have to take care of something that's big and dangerous.
[01:22:55] Speaker D: Right.
[01:22:55] Speaker A: So there's a different.
That's a whole different dynamic.
And it's a. So it's a.
And that comes back to the issue about a profession of education that we're so fragmented. I mean, in kindergarten, you're responsible for teaching how people behave.
[01:23:17] Speaker D: Right.
[01:23:17] Speaker A: That's one of your jobs.
[01:23:18] Speaker D: Right.
[01:23:20] Speaker A: Colleges don't think that's their job. That's supposed to have been done. That's a huge mistake.
[01:23:25] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:23:26] Speaker A: And in Hampshire. Hampshire, I always tell the students with, you know, prospective families, I say, what's different about Hampshire than most of the places you look at is that we are a developmental institution.
We feel we are responsible for the development of not just the intellectual development, but the entire development of the child. We don't think they're separable, and we feel a responsibility for that.
And you're free to hold us accountable for it.
And I always say I remind them of that at the end of graduation.
My one liner was, for 16 years, I was only given, you know, if you remember, the Hampshire run by the students.
[01:24:10] Speaker D: Right.
[01:24:10] Speaker A: Students gave the president five minutes.
[01:24:14] Speaker C: And you'd be thankful for that.
[01:24:17] Speaker A: I was glad I had five, and I really didn't want more.
But I'd always say to the parents, which I Always get a very big laugh. I said, students run this graduation.
If you love it, it's because we are an incredible institution.
If you don't love it, just remember you had them longer than we did. Right. And they.
And sometimes they didn't love it. I'm sure sometimes they did. But it was. But, but that was a. You know, that was. We. We are accountable.
[01:24:52] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:24:53] Speaker A: The behavior matters. Will be embarrassed by it sometimes, but that's the way they learn.
So you can't be. Let him behave and misbehave.
[01:25:03] Speaker D: Right.
But that's part of it.
[01:25:08] Speaker A: But I never. Yeah, I was lucky. Sixteen years. I never. I never was embarrassed.
[01:25:15] Speaker C: Well, it's because I was in Ann.
[01:25:16] Speaker A: Hampshire when you were.
Yeah. There are things they did I wouldn't have done. There are things I didn't like to do, but when push came to shove, they always kind of showed up.
They showed up when it really came to.
And they had a sense of humor.
[01:25:42] Speaker C: Also important.
[01:25:46] Speaker A: And. Yeah, I tell.
I have lots of stories about the good things they did. I don't have as many about the bad things as they did.
I mean, the worst. I think I did tell you that the worst one. The worst. One of the most embarrassing moments I ever had was when they didn't protest.
And some of the students, to this day, when they see me, they said, just never forgotten how chewed out we were because we had failed to try to disrupt something you were doing.
[01:26:14] Speaker D: Right.
[01:26:15] Speaker A: Now, I think I have to tell you that Lee Brown, which ties back to the. He spoke at the convocation and I'd gotten word and the students had warned us that there was going to be a disruption. I said, okay. He's certainly seen those before.
I don't think you're going to mount one as big as anything I've seen in New York. But sure, but be my guest. I said, just, you know, be civil in a sense, be disruptive, but not physically.
They all agreed. I said, fine.
And then it never happened. And I'd alerted him in. As he got in the car, shutting the door with his one bodyguard, he said, what happened? There was no disruption. Like, you know, I was really looking forward to this.
And I called the students together the next day and they said, oh, we were there. I saw you in the balcony. Gymnasium. You had the balcony. And as I saw you up there, nothing happened.
We didn't know he was black.
I just looked at him. I said, I hope I am never as embarrassed or disappointed at Hampshire College as I am at this moment.
And I just read in the riot act, the disrespect, the lack of. Right.
They walked out of my office, I think.
Absolutely.
And some of them later said, I tell people that story all the time.
Yeah. My college president tore me apart for not protesting.
[01:27:51] Speaker D: Right.
[01:27:52] Speaker A: And that was a lesson that really, I think, got around New Hampshire and may have. I mean, I know I got around. It was like two minutes later. The whole campus knew that. They just got almost threatened to be thrown out.
But it shifted the nature, I think.
I think students just absorbed a lesson that protesting is fine, it's serious, but it's not a game.
[01:28:23] Speaker D: Right.
[01:28:26] Speaker A: Yeah. And later I said, look, you did me a favor and such because it allowed me to make a point.
[01:28:32] Speaker D: That's true.
[01:28:34] Speaker A: Just at your expense. I'm sorry, but that's the kind of environment where you learn civility.
I gotta go.
[01:28:50] Speaker C: Well, thanks for sharing all this and just appreciate. Appreciate your investment in other people.
[01:28:56] Speaker A: I appreciate yours. And I, you know, wish you were still town manager for people.
[01:29:02] Speaker C: I appreciate that.
Hopefully there's a lot. There's a lot of good work to be done here around the Upper Valley, so.
But thank you again, Greg, for. For sharing everything with us.
[01:29:13] Speaker A: Glad to do it.
[01:29:15] Speaker B: Thanks for listening to this episode of Upper Valley Vibes.
[01:29:17] Speaker C: I hope you enjoyed it.
[01:29:19] Speaker B: And if you did, please feel free to share this episode with a friend. If you have any feedback or ideas of people I should meet or for future episodes, please feel free to reach.
[01:29:28] Speaker C: Out to
[email protected] and look forward to.
[01:29:32] Speaker B: Seeing you all out around the Upper Valley.
