University Libraries. My pleasure to welcome you all here for the fall 2020 really graduate series presentation, the first of two. This is collaboratively hosted between the University Libraries Graduate Student Senate and Faculty Senate. The series supports the research process of graduate students through the sharing of their successes, challenges, and their use of information resources in a public forum. The presenters for the series are selected by the Graduate Research Series Committee, most librarians and staff from the University Libraries as well as the Graduate Student Senate. This morning, Adela Shea, Oriane Di, our Oriade, a doctoral candidate in media arts and studies from the students College of Communication, will present Casting Black Cinema, Opinions of African Americans and African Immigrants on Contested Casting in Black History Films, which illuminates the multifaceted issues surrounding the casting of Black actors in Hollywood. Before pursuing his education at Ohio University, Adela Shea earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Mass Communication from Ty Sholomon, University of Education in Nigeria, followed by a Master of Arts degree in Communication and Language Arts from the prestigious University of Fidon, a public research university in Nigeria. Please help me in giving a warm welcome to Adela Shea. Thank you. Thank you. Again, I'm Adela Shea, Oriane Di, and I'm from Nigeria. I'm starting my 40th and 50th year doctoral program with media arts and studies, and my commentary chair is Professor Steve Howard. I must have been knowing he's retired now, but I agree to stay on to see to the end of this wonderful exercise. So, I'm going to go straight into the presentation, and I descent out of this presentation. I'm going to use myself as a pathway into discussing myself into this research as an African immigrant. So, I come from Nigeria, West Africa, and within Nigeria, there are like 250 ethnic groups. So, I come from somewhere in the Southwest, and we are called Yoruba. So, within Nigeria, my form of identity, the way I know, is either I am Yoruba, in my ethnic identity, or religious, Christian, almost, or traditional worship, or within all of this context. So, traveling, I've been to a few African countries, but every time I step down, I'm going to an African country, I do not notice a difference. I just assume to that identity, because almost everyone looks like me. Then in 2019, I took the flight from Lagos to JFK, and my reality changed. Stepping out of the airport, I started noticing a difference. Out of every 10 people I met, 8 or 7 people looked different. At that point, at that conscious level, I started noticing I was different for the first time in my life. In over 30 years, over 30 years of my life, I started noticing some difference. It was at that subconscious point, moving from JFK to Bulgaria, from Bulgaria to Kolumbos, in a very completely different environment, and everything just looks different. Then I came to Yoruba. Then I started feeling false as I went to the DMV, went to search for security. Then I started noticing there was something about my identity that I changed at taking on a new identity called black. In Nigeria, I was Yoruba, I was Christian in America, but my clear is you, that identity blackness. For every form I was about to feel, there was a space of saying, are you black or African-American, black slash African-American, and I had to think, or not Caucasian, I had to think somewhere within there. And as an immigrant, I used myself as an example to other black migrants who come into racialized societies for the first time. They assume a new identity, and in that process of assuming an identity and looking back to the history of America, and its marginalization of black people, their efforts to create diverse places, inclusion, and in that efforts towards inclusion is created around the identity blackness. So we are trying to do some form of reparating justice for black people, and in that way, because I've assumed that identity somehow I fall into that black identity, almost automatically, because any time I take a form, I take blackness, or African-American, and that's the story of black British actors in the integration into American societies. So for, if you've seen any of these movies, Selma, Aread, Get Out, Judas, and Black Messiah, you see that the lead actors for all of these roles, Anuelo for Matthew Luther King, Sinceri Ribbo, for Aread Togman, Daniel Caluya for a racially charged movie like Get Out that talks about the interracial dating, the crisis of interracial dating, then we have Daniel Caluya, Eden for Judas and Black Messiah. Then the question becomes, is blackness actually enough for these immigrants to play this character?  So we now start seeing social media agitations about their place to play these roles. So I've covered the identities of those people. So you see hashtags like Not My Aread, Boycott, Concast, Not My Freedom Team. So African-Americans are challenging their place, the place of black immigrants to play these roles in these movies. And we can see that in these movies, it's not like the old cast is black immigrants. The idea is just to be lead actors. It is historical. Wireshoot in black, British Nigerian play Martin Luther King Jr., Wireshoot, Sensea Ribbo play such a character and all of that. So we start seeing people challenge all of this. We see example, some of this is, Kaluuya lacks the American nuances of the character. Afro-British should not play AUS historical icons. And AUS means American descendants of slavery.  And the idea behind this thing is to create a difference, to say that there is no originating within blackness. There's a difference around these identities. But there's a flip side to it. And the flip side is for every historical African icon, for most of the historical African icons that have been depicted in Hollywood, it had cast African-American African characters. So you have for a spectacle for Ugandan Idiyami. You have Don Chidoo for Teriwanda. You have even for immigrants. We have Will Smith playing Dr. Bennett Forman, who discovered the science behind concussion and football and all of that. And we have Modern Freeman playing in British. So it becomes a back and forth. If you argue that I can't play your historical role, why do you take on our own historical role? And it becomes a crisis. And when we dove into like literature, theories, and all about this, the underlying things behind the fanfare, the blockbuster, people watching it at home, there's the idea that when there's a disconnect between the audience and what you are trying to prove as a form of representation for them, there's a need to dialogue with the audience. And there's been several instances of reception stories around Black audiences, but it's been limited to African American audiences. And it has never really touched on casting approaches. Because over time, Hollywood has tried to develop casting approaches that is more inclusive, that is more representative, and that really speaks to different identities of Black audiences that have not been talked to about the idea of casting. What do you think about these casts that we do for these moments? And that's where my research comes into play, to bring the voice of those audience. And I felt what better to do these groups that are contending about these casting approaches. So, this is the tricky part about it. I came into the degree to study mass communication, I mean, media heritage. And when I started this idea about films and I started thinking about it, I was limited in the framework of media studies to try and look at how do I do this? But as I delved deeper into this conversation, I discovered that it was true in that scenario to be limited to one framework. Then it took me to political science, it took me to media studies, it took me to film studies. Film studies, I was looking at theatre and casting, I was looking at what representation means within the discussion of all of it. And I was looking at the latest, not the latest, at least the most popular approach that has been designed to try and correct the darkness of all you would cast in, colorblind casting and non-traditional casting. And the idea behind it was that you can cast people strictly because of their talent and not look at the color of their skin. Then in that way, when we now drill down, we can now cast them, we can cast them because of their talent and not look at their ethnicity. So we've seen other scholars even try to look at them, we can cast them and not look at their sexuality. So there are studies out there by people who have studied why do you cast non-LGBTQI career actors in place of LGBTQI, for LGBTQI roles and all of them. So I started drilling down in that approach. Then from their media studies, I was studying equal square, the media, the idea that the media at the top and there's a subordinate and how the media, how those behind the media make money based on all of these things and how profits determines every decision in the production phase. From selection of actors to all of the out-profits determines all of this. Then looking at media etymology, casting for profit, then audience research. This is what I'm doing, reception studies. I'm looking at how the audience makes sense of what they watch and all of this. Then I was looking at stop-offs and coding and coding. The idea that the audience brings their lived realities into whatever they watch. So African-Americans are bringing their history into the idea that how can an immigrant act for them and African immigrants are bringing their reality and saying that now you can't be Mandela because you are not from Mandela's ethnicity or from this country and that discourse. So tapping into another pathway of Black audience research, then political science brings into the idea of race and the idea of racialization of America and push back against race through ethnic ideas, how immigrants socialize themselves into the country, how they exact their own identities against racialized systems and all of that. Then I looked into Black control race relations because it was not possible to discuss this without looking at what happened in the past between Black groups that formed the Black population in America and African immigrants just represent in my new part of that group. So it was impossible to look at that without immigration because the possibility of this contentions is due to the fact that for civil rights, fallen tree Black immigrants can come into America. I call them Black right now because they come from their country but they assume Blackness when they come here and because we can come here fallen tree unlike. So it clears the connection between the Blacks who come for civil rights and the Blacks who are fostered as slaves. So for my methodology to do this research I embraced the qualitative research because it was like how near it was like I was jumping into something really new discussing all of that and the first part of this was I did some form of para-textual analysis and para-textual analysis means that you discuss issues around a media text. So reviews, social media analytics and social media comments post and all of that and from that I extracted about 10,000 Twitter and YouTube comments concerning these contentions from Twitter from using those hashtags I was able to extract quite a number of data for analysis and I did some form of para-textual analysis to give me like a framework about how best to go into the second phase of the research which was the interview. So it was going to give me enough information about how to craft my questions, how to reach African Americans and how to reach the African immigrant groups. So every participant that participated in the second half of the of the research were publicly selected so he must have seen like three of these movies. He must have seen three of these movies as an over 18th and he must be over 18 and all of that and I began collection of this data during and the turn of COVID after COVID. So I had some funding from Sudan AFS to travel to places to see but people would not come into these meetings so I would travel to Texas and expecting eight people and two people sure. So it became so there was there was a need for me to readjust my methodology to fit into that period. So I embraced online focus group discussion and because I wanted it to be in a place where people meet their everyday realities I went into social media sites that these discussions about diaspora talk about immigrant talks while already existing site. They used proverbs I don't know if anyone has heard about proverbs it's online so that was where so I went to black groups African American groups then immigrant groups spoke to their leaders and that's so and I'm very happy that was the approach I took because at the end during the conversations I had to stop it like three times before they get the right one because it was full of time. So I was bringing African Americans and African immigrants into the same room online and every time we lost control of it so I was I can now imagine I would not be in person because this is a very tense topic about opportunities about scarce and prestigious opportunities within the groups that these groups are using. So because it was a qualitative research and like online post-positivity research and constitutive research there's no standard measure for for ensuring validity of this thing so that's where I come into place my position and these two images from get out I can't see I don't know if you can see them well show the my place within these two groups so if you look at this first image it's Daniel Caldria looking with some suspicion and that was our African Americans look at me every time I try especially the constitutive ones who are members of foundational black American groups and because they were challenging my place to do this research who are you to talk about you represent the people who talk about and take our opportunities why should we open up to you so those were the kind of things I needed to navigate and the second part is anyone think you know the reaction Chris had when he saw another black person on the plantation and that was African immigrants so they were just so happy he was and he was he was he was a kind of problem to the research because I actually navigate the fact that I'm not here to come and justify what you said I'm here to listen to you and yeah here is like I'll give an example I was interviewing one one of the immigrants and it was like you know us now the way we do when we get here when we go to class we do and they wanted me to affirm everything except so it was difficult navigating these two processes at least for the African American side over time I would have to go back send my consent form send my university profile send everything to say that I am not doing this to try and get some information to use against you this is actually backed by university I've got a note from my professor to try and be a show and be a show but for every time the African immigrants he was just keeping my straight face and in the conversation making it feel normal and because that and it's equal to this study and I'm the most important research instrument and all of that and it was it's also very good to talk about my intentions for going into the research because it spreads like a dashboard I would see the idea that this can blow up into things if not mitigated over time so my idea is to form some form some form of way of looking at solutions looking at this problem helping into this problem and finding some way to create data that would be good enough to solve this problem so in that instance it's not as pan-Africanist as it used to be the idea of correlating all black groups into one jolly fairy merry group it's the idea of saying that there are differences how do you work around these differences and that's and that's what I tried to bring up from this conversation so I go to my finals the first finding how to do identity and the idea was that there's a diverse conception of blackness so African-Americans argue that we are not one how do you come and take that role we are just different people you cannot look at just our color of our skin and just take it our history shows we are different people so the first position is that we own these roles we own these roles and we should have the first rights to cast for this role so there were even examples of that one of the participants gave me about the idea that even for the movie Queen and Black and focus in Daniel Kaluuya that director actually did not even present the opportunities to African-Americans he just chose Daniel Kaluuya and then Daniel Kaluuya chose the person who performed with him unilaterally without opening it up for the possibilities of African-Americans to participate and the idea is that this role they see this role as a form of restitution the idea that we are fought one literally said we are fought for this for long and all of a sudden we are not good enough for what we are fought for so the idea is that defeat there's a feeling of inadequacy the idea that over the years we've seen black representation that go backs to very racist representations like the better of the nation black face and all of that all of a sudden here this prestigious role and it's taken out of our hands so we own it it should be a form of restitution this casting approach should be a form of restitution and are we not just good enough we play gangsters we play all in these movies and all of a sudden there's Martin Tatum who is really good there we come to the second position that was very common within this research was the idea that there's a distortion in the history of african-americans so if you watch iris you know the character of big alum and the idea that you create a movie around african-americans fighting for their rights fighting to escape slavery and the bad guys of african-american in a slavery charged movie the black guy is the african-american and the idea is that there's a distortion and that casting assist in that distortion so i frankly we did not argue with that position but that's the position because within this role within these movies the big character might be an african movie but there are other african-americans so the argument is that when you cast african-americans as big characters they come to some form of activist approach to the roles they are looking delving people and saying is this actually true is this can be is this story the true depiction and the idea is that there's an attempt to make this history palatable in a way that it's easier to see so one of the participants argued that so you you can go into argue that a white person can go into the cinema and come out and like oh so black people actually when the black person is the black is the bad guy in the black in his slavery movie and ariads adds some form of romantic relationship with a white slave order so in that way it was they argued that there's a distortion to it and that's this can only happen because african-americans are not really at the forefront of this movies and all that then this was like the biggest thing and it came across both groups that i spoke with even with african immigrants and african-americans the idea that there's a commercial dimension to cast so they don't believe that these historical movies are the cultural reasons for why we are telling those stories and are being lost to the idea of profit making so the argument is that you watch the preview of the movie before the movie comes you see the marketing and the person who is talking whistling for them freedom thing is speaking to you in british English and you're like so how did it play this role it creates this aura around black British actors and this dates back not to even black actors alone it dates back to even white actors crossing over from the united kingdom and the idea that they are better trained they are better than american actors and as part of the marketing they allow them to market those movies in their natural form so they come and speak british movie then they cuts to the movie and you see them speak genuine americana sense and you're like oh this is great i want to see so that there's a marketing around these identities in such a way that it is profit-driven and this was also another pattern that was loses with african immigrants they also argue in that direction the idea that morgan freeman is good enough for mandela is the fact that the producers and we not targeting the african market they are spreading it around when they're looking for a popular place book and drinks and they are not investing in emerging actors so you can't pick up emerging actors then the finding from the african immigrants and the first finding is like the most the most stunning probably i attributed it to some methodological flow on my part in it in the idea of trying to look at participants and the first thing that came up was i don't care that is not my hero so speaking to a canian speaking to a canian speaking to a nigerian and the first thing they tell you is mandela what's my business it's not my business so the idea that there's usually five african immigrants who's become very automatically challenged in that point in the idea that even within in america africans they need according to nations so as a nigerian i'm dealing with synovu running the country the president running the country the naira falling in value why what's my business with somebody playing mandela if mandela is not my hero so and that was why i tended to ask some form of methodology to flow because immigration scholars have argued that when black immigrants come into america they always come and fund pockets around nation states so nigerian immigrants canian immigrants and in that way and that was reflected in this finding they really did not care so to make for sense for this i asked them about specifically their hero so i'm like as a european as in nigerian if somebody came to play our world and they are from another country out with you so and the idea was that no you soon feel right for me are you saying they're not good enough actors in nigeria are you saying they're not good enough because because we own this role so when you say that we can't play we feel inadequate so in that point they were pulling for nation specifically so as a suggestion for further research to look like when you now talk to them on their national level are they going to refer back to ethnicity like i said in the first point in nigeria yeah quite a number of ethnic groups so now if you are going to go to nigerian people actor is somebody from this ethnic group going to say no the hero belongs to my ethnic group and that's for further research so the same way for african immigrants they talk about nation specific casting so you should look for somebody from that country and cast them and the second one is the interplay of essence and the homogenization in depicting african identities so the argument is that it's it's an argument of frustration the idea that these guys just think africa is one everywhere and the idea is that it was built around assent have you seen concussion anyone seen concussion so will smith did a very good job acting for military forces there's no assent like that that speaks to any nigeria and was acting in an e-bowman from nigeria when you hear the e-bowman speak and you play the video next to voce me you see that there's a complete disconnect between these realities so the idea is that if you call pull an african american out today from any crowd and tell them to depict speak like an african they are going to talk about one particular generic assent that we hear every time and the idea is that if you don't cast people from these nations you will not be able to amplify differences within african identities and in that way casting fosters a platform where you homogenize african identities in such a way that they are not different so i tried to bring up a map of showing like like different ethnic groups and i'm saying like this represent like just 20 percent of the different realities within african and the idea that this casting homogenizes these identities into one and african might have to wait for so many years to start being referred to like england belgium rather than saying that i'm going to african because this film industry continues to homogenize these identities in such a way that you are not able to find the differences within african then this was a major finding and it was the idea that african immigrants believe that they are more than one like minorities and i'll explain and it's the idea that these actors were selected so i ended every interview with asking about the opposite i'm like what do you think about african americans complaining about this casting approach and the african immigrants feel oh i just believe the actors are better because they chose them based on talent so the idea is that we as immigrants go on out and work out for these opportunities and we are just better and what this kind of idea does is it returns back into the ages of stereotypes about the idea of saying that some identities are lazy they are not putting themselves out for the roles they are not good enough and that's why these producers automatically select immigrants and all of that so on the free side when i spoke to the african americans and i told them what do you think about you've complained about immigrants taking your place what do you think about mogad preman don chidu for us we're taking african roles like it's an american so they they argue it's an american movie so african americans don't take it so what does what this does is that the argument from immigrants positioning themselves as model minorities who are doing good enough to take these roles and the argument from african americans arguing that it's an american movie creates profit for for the white edgy money that controls this production content in the idea that african americans are supporting media imperialism in african and african immigrants are supporting stereotyping of african americans and who benefits from all of this the media producers and if i go ahead so you complain about something or you support it suddenly when it's done to another person from both groups and in that way that's it so based on this i've come out with a few recommendations and that's the domestication of the nature of black history so at this point from the two groups the people i spoke to they are tired of what one of them called it black trauma on the idea of seeing black bodies suffer this history so there's more to tell i'm sure if somebody put a camera on me since 2019 it will make the blockbuster surviving surviving in america taxes that's an emigrant story and then the example of bob at abyssalah was similar those are stories that go beyond the idea of tight slavery racism supremacy once you diversify these stories there are so many stories to be told and african immigrants and african americans are not fighting over scarce opportunities within these prestigious roles they're cultural sensitive casting if there's a disconnect between those you want to represent and what they see of your representation then it is fair so there should be some form of cultural sensitive casting a way that drills down i don't want to hear somebody speak like an evil man and i'm hearing a south african accent a generic south african accent so in that way there should be cultural sensitive and production companies and production organizations need to categorize black history casting is it a form of restitution are you giving back to groups who have suffered marginalization and in that way if it's the form of restitution you limit the casting to people who are members of those groups but that is the moral argument because production companies are all about profit so what is my argument to them i think we need to take that moral step in the idea of looking beyond profit when you don't see the actor you want investing on emerging actors and in that way so in that way we are not fighting over black issues in that and then supporting up and coming actors the idea that oh you talk you say that i've chosen the best fits for this role and the best fit is from another group why not invest in an emerging actor from the group you are trying to represent rather than cost the scales because it it causes chaos between the black groups and to benefit of production companies yeah i cannot tell you this without talking about the library yeah and this is like one important part and i know some of my colleagues are here who never used the library try and use it in my four years i've used they used the library from home try using it here in my four years i've used the library in a crazy way so i'll say crazy my first year i used to go to the siren rooms and on the fourth floor i felt the best way to approach american education and all problems was to keep silence and just do it then i realized that it needed the craziness of the problem every professor has given you an assignment like they are the only professors teaching me no one cares about the other professor so that i step from the fourth floor i moved to the seventh floor over a year so i think the ambience the different sections i just go in the mood some days i want to see everybody coming from the coffee shop on second floor the bus or another and some days i'm like there's no progress i have to go somewhere very silent and so i move around people who know me seeming on the third floor last computer there and sometimes i'm on the second floor and that's where i've used the library and i've gone to the seventh floor once once i didn't know what i was looking for academia would try to be crazy and you would do things that i've benefited from the interlibrary or the subject library and even before i got to this point of this research in my first year when i was not sure what to do i I stopped until i think yeah and i was doing research around representations of like LGBT qi characters and i stopped about finding literature for me within the african point and and i just stopped sharing at some point so i was looking for a very a concept that sounded like everybody has worked on it's cultural anxiety look it sounds like something you just speak up and everything and i can't just find any book i've gotten books that had cultural anxiety as the the title of the book and there was nothing no definition of it in the book and it was like 300 pages wow so i yeah i had cultural anxiety and i spoke to tragically and tragically gave me a list of citations then i went to cherry cherry and i gave it to her and she went went back and forth and she was coming back i was like i don't see the citation i don't see the citation then i say that then she was like wait where did you get this yeah then i said tragically like cool this is fake and that's that's when i realized you don't rely on such a fake citations and all of that the life chapter has made a life saver just going on library site and like looking for materials within the library page google scholar not finding it and the person who i was starting the just told me i just pasted this in google when i came up with it and i've searched for like five hours on the live website and all that so it was life saver the data analysis software on second form computers in second form that was where i did all of my data analysis and as i don't know if i can make suggestions to the library the idea that now especially for those of us in the media ads communication most of real life communication at this point to social media and there's the need to embrace more softwares or extracting on social media because they are usually very expensive to to get i use netletics i use leximons uh leximons takes like a hundred and something dollars to use and if those kind of things those kind of softwares are provided for students it makes life easier i know that i subscribe on leximons twice with two different emails so when you have 30 days free so i would try to do an analysis that is like i'll charge you one grand for five dollars and i go consume it and i bring my gmail register and do what i have to do so if those social media analytics um software can be brought to the library to be helpful students thank you and that's so first of all thank you for this presentation you delivered it very well and very interesting what about the lack thereof of deia in the united states maybe potentially at some point making changes that could affect the film industry da diversity equity is inclusion and how it would well so in the united states especially the kings about during covid where there was a movement looking at different diversity within the united states or the lack thereof and i'm just curious if this movement the way that you may see it whether or not that has a chance bringing more people into the films that typically are not that are not in the films yeah that is a very important question and that was why i spoke to you to my recommendations on two grounds first in the recommendation is less diversified students why not talk about a caribbean family in south of chicago surviving within the buses and all of us and in that way you bring new people into the movie industry to represent them then the other position is diversity inclusion and all of this would not matter if the people you are representing don't feel you are representing them so the idea is to bring these blank voices and tell the production companies the people relating casting casting directors and say that the groups you are trying to represent feel a disconnect with the characters and feel a disconnect with the stories in this approach so it's going to be a good movement but right now the movement needs adjustment the approach towards inclusion needs adjustment to read to fit into the new realities of those that are included in this position we've got two questions from online i've got first first welcome a comment one person said insightful presentation another person said amazing so i've got uh simian sunday uh asked how does the accent of the actor affect the authenticity of the story and the actor's credibility of playing such roles yeah so let's go back i'm not making a position yet i'm bringing the voices out it's exploratory that's the first thing then the second thing is if you don't speak like me how do you represent me so it automatically challenges the authenticity so if if i'm watching somebody and and the person is playing a role of dr betz uh oman the doctor they eat an adrian people doctor and i watch those meet all true then somebody tells me that his references somebody from from my culture and i don't understand i don't speak like that my people don't speak like that so the people who are being represented the group who are being represented feel left out every other person might not feel left out every american all the americans watching these movies or across europe don't know how a nigerian people want to speak but the group whose character is being presented know it and feel it disconnects from it so for to ensure inclusion you must the cultural assets in such a way that you represent even to literally means like the assets next question from online says thank you thank you so much did you learn anything that surprised you yeah the africans are united they they refer back to their nation states rather than having an african identity despite the fact that everybody says that when they speak so when we know as an african immigrant i know i've encountered people this in chicago encountered police in africa and really i speak they can they know that i'm not african american people i'm not native american and i think i get it but i got it passed my friend and i got it passed in chicago just because of our accent so they know so the idea that everyone sees us as african but within the groups within the african community we don't see that we refer back to our nation specific identities even in the diaspora again so that was very surprising and he didn't see that coming i i i i i let it as a methodological flaw but and for more recommendations i didn't have a question so i'll just comment it's like the accent thing i get because you like the movie fargo like the accent that movie is not correct i think it's not even making me crazy so like i understand that but i would like to figure out how do you deal i mean i'm not an expert on the cinema or the loading industry right i do think like a corrupt industry right so like how do you make integral changes that work towards a democracy and an institution that already exists yeah and that's why i said my major recommendation is a moral argument so we see this play out in affirmative actually uh policies in the past in the idea that should be needed to just african americans but when you go into black colleges you see Nigerians they're thinking of this list so the argument becomes a moral argument are those in charge of this policy ready to adjust to make it a form of restitution rather than diversity so the idea is that it is driven by profits the big six have a hand in all of these movies there's no how you can any of these movies that are highlighted here there's an application to the big six you're just there in the background funding it and like the creature says you face the pipeline it takes the term so the idea is that every casting decision is in profit position uh the idea is at least what he pretends sometimes to do some form of real representation maybe as the pretend along the line to get the rise of true representation but it's a moral argument we can really make suggestions got another question from online also a general representation uh do you think racial classification of african americans and africans in the same category as black slash african americans plays a significant role in film representations yes so that's that's the problem here the problem here is that we pay the identities in america are racialized and in the form of those visualizations approach to casting for movies so if if i put a picture out you can say i want to cast for uh fredantine for another movie and all of that everyone who looks like fredantine is ready to show everyone who looks black like fredantine is not going to show until i say that i'm casting african american for fredantine and actually humans other people so the idea right now is that black people are pushing back against the racialization of the idea and the reason why they are pushing back against that racialization is the idea that there are no opportunities so we want to hold onto opportunities that are that are capable to adjust our identities rather than have a generalized form of it so for example the idea of seeing and think identities so and the advantage of once we force to immigrants and the idea that as the people to avoid the problems that come with racialization with blackness the idea of all uh stereotypes violence and all of this is african immigrants say that i'm nigerian amerian but to take on opportunities they assume blackness so they can their identities are manageable they can switch between blackness and nation-specific identities depending on what benefits it brings and that's the sticking with some african americans because we must stick that line and all of that so those the way of conflating it into racial identities creates problems for trans people um i know that you previously talked about collecting qualitative data um and i was curious about that because you were pulling the comments on youtube using hashtags from twitter and i just want to know did you collect any other data anywhere else using like our databases or our services like satistha or anything like that was it just the social platforms yeah it was social platforms where i wanted to collect it from where these conversations were happening in real time to study real-time conversations about them so that was why i collected the conversation on youtube and i looked at a few reviews i also took an interview from our party zero took from everywhere just to see a generalized view and every one i tried to analyze was coming from the position of the groups involved in the conversation so i didn't take i do have a follow-up sorry um so i'm a researcher as well so this is kind of like a silly question but um how did you organize all that data like do you just have like folders so now like like i'm just curious i have folders folders folders folders folders then i merge bring the data merge clean merge clean that way if i'm going to look for my source data now it has newest s newest x so the one the longest s is the newest that i've worked with so i count the s new s x x because i have to clean manage clean manage and fight and put them into the software for analysis so it's it's crazy in my own right now i wouldn't wish it on anyone right she asked for one more question but let's have a bit um um i spoke to eight african-americans just the background study i think like opening it up for for that study so i spoke to eight african-americans and seven african-americans spread across cities that day it was then for the focus group discussion i have like transformed over two sessions and it ran into too much data for one person to take care of but it's what i sign up for so it's like my finding had now moved to more quantitative studies so you can now take from what i have gotten right now then we can now amplify two quantitative studies and test on a larger sample size and see because one of the findings i got was people essentializing the role of acting so the idea that oh because trauma has been passed through generation and the actor if you choose an actor from that group that trauma helps them bring out their group and that becomes very problematic because acting is just maybe behaving like somebody you are not so the moment we start actualizing it and that was when i talked about culture and anxiety and true towards essentialism there's a need to test it on a larger population do people really believe in this and if people really believe on that idea of biological essentialism then it comes in problem because those kind of ideas we need to balance ways to turn all of the opportunities so so yeah and that's the idea between restitution and diversity the idea that oh it's made believe you can play but the idea that so when i was doing the focus to discussion the person who challenged my place the most about being able to do this research is a state chapter chairman of foundation of black americans and his argument is is in his i think 47 year old and he said that my mom moved through segregation and she's still here this thing happened yesterday it is not time to open it to everybody it is still my role so the idea is that are we looking at that as a form of restitution and if the casting directors have said we selected the best person who can do it are you saying that there's nobody within our group who can actually do it so the the idea right now is people still look at this roles as a form of restitution because of the history behind the rules so they would not look at the argument of whether or the actor they are seen it as a very good opportunity it's the biggest black movies usually they become the biggest black movies so white lead out to everybody so it's about economic opportunities as much as it is about whoever is playing it i would not hear that becomes a very tricky question for me to ask because i can't make decisions so you spoke about positionalism yourself being part of the data and as an african i believe there are some preconceived ideas about this so how are you able to suspend some of the preconceived ideas yeah it was it was tricky it was tricky suspending progressive ideas because even i struggle with the identity blackness so oftentimes i'm always on twitter when i see a Nigerian say as a black person he acts like you are not the black person being Nigerian never been on a plane never even gotten to a racialized society how do you take on an identity that was created to create a distinction and hierarchy in different places so i think that first helped me because i struggle with the identity blackness in its first place that is one of the things that first helped me and the second thing was the idea of trying to disassociate it is almost not possible for qualitative researchers because of our bias and all of that so the best way to do it is to let my intentions know we need to research so that you can judge the findings of my research based on my intentions and how I integrated data and all of those things so i wouldn't say i was able to completely disassociate but i put in some effort towards achieving that and by talking about my bias in my dissertation it's like a long over four pages of talking about how i try to solve these problems like the first example of saying talking to an African immigrant that wants me to confirm everything he said and i'm just looking at them like trying to just succeed in some way so it's very tricky but i did my best just a comment here um uh boomaru i'm probably what's your name sorry uh says as long as you are transparent about your positionality you are fine so that was just a comment i just wanted to say thank you i really really really enjoyed this but i also really really enjoyed some of so this was just a very fascinating way of looking at this topic and i have like a million questions that i want to deep go down the rabbit hole about so just thank you for raising awareness about this kind of thing i mean there's so many like ways i could like keep talking to you about this further it's very fascinating because i also ideal with theater and the same issues and online casting and so it's huge all these issues are very huge about representation of people and how yeah but thank you so much it was wonderful thank you thank you thank you thank you for coming in


This is stock number HA501A. We are here at Summit Automotive in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. You're new and used Jeep headquarters. Today we are checking out this super clean 2014 Jeep Cherokee Limited. This vehicle has the 3.2 liter V6 Pentastar motor which pumps out 271 horsepower. From this HD video you will be able to tell that this Jeep is in excellent condition. I think this color is light cashmere or light brownstone. They both very similar colors. Not sure what the 14 color was but very clean down this side. We shoot all of our videos in 1080p so if you have HD capabilities on your computer tablet or a smartphone device turn them on right now because it's like you're right here looking at the vehicle with me. Grand Spirit Touring LX tires with about front tires here look like they have probably about 70 percent of the tread left and these are 225.55 R18s. We have LED running lights, projector lamp, headlamps, factory fog lights. There are no dents. 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Those seats do fold down for extra storage, backup camera, didn't see any dents or dings on that tailgate and as we come around to this side of the vehicle just as clean as a passenger side it does have the mud flaps on it which are a nice feature and this back rim is in nice condition as well maybe one little scuff right there but nothing too major and as you go down this side just as clean as a passenger side no dents no dings very nice condition does have heated mirrors with built-in directional signals enter and go system and as we hop inside here you'll notice that this one has a pretty unique interior it is the indigo blue and brown leather interior it's what the limited package gives you no rips no tears on these seats we have floor mats in here power windows power locks power mirrors auto headlamps and as we hop inside the vehicle you can see that this one has 59,256 miles you get the seven inch tft display with the digital speedometer outside temp and compass display the heated indigo blue leather wrapped steering wheel cruise controls on the right bluetooth and information center controls on the left and it does have radio controls on the back of the steering wheel this one has the 8.4 touchscreen radio with the nav capabilities and it does have the nav system am fm and serious xm radio capabilities as well it's also where your backup camera shows up down here we have the dual climate control as well as all the other climate controls and your stability control and down here for the radio you have an sd card usb and aux jack nine-speed automatic transmission passenger seat flooring and carpeting are in nice shape in seat storage underneath that seat passenger seat no rips or tears nice condition up here we have the home link buttons for your garage door security systems and lighting systems map lights and then you'll notice it does have the power vista roof which is in really nice condition really nice feature to have that front piece is power and then it does have the 911 assist buttons in the mirror which are features of the vehicle you never have to pay a subscription for this one has keyless entry like i said and factory remote start so nice feature right there we'll take a quick look at the back seats and then check out under the hood the back seats are just as clean as the front seats no rips no tears back here it does have that latch child safety system for car seats and then it does have side curtain airbags and knee bolster airbags it actually has 10 airbags in this vehicle and these seats do go down really nice and flat and then finally there's a 115 volt 150 watt plug-in back here and the carbon and floor mats are in nice condition as well didn't see any rips or tears on that i'd personally like to thank you for checking out the video today hopefully from this hd video you'll have been able to tell just how clean this Jeep is inside and out all the way around under the hood we have the 3.2 liter v6 pentastar motor it's just like the three six just a little bit smaller and uh 271 horsepower really nice motor for this vehicle i've owned several Cherokees and uh all of them have had the three six in it and they uh moves the vehicle really well engine base very clean runs very smooth this one has been fully safe and inspected by our priceless certified technicians has a fresh oil and filter change and all the fluids have been checked and topped off this one is 100 ready to go and to see more pictures of it or one of our other 450 new and used cars trucks suv's minivans wranglers uh you name we got it go to our website www.summitauto.com full pictures and descriptions of every single vehicle on our lot videos of every single used vehicle that we have all at summit auto.com thank you so much for checking out the video if you want to make this one yours give us a call right now<PHONE_NUMBER> ask for one of our sales associates to make this Jeep Cherokee years today once again that number is<PHONE_NUMBER> and if you'd like to check out more hd videos you can go to youtube.com slash summit auto remember to like subscribe and share on this video and all the videos that you see there in fact in a second you will see a link to subscribe to our youtube channel on your left a link to more used inventory videos like this one on your right if you have not been to our website on the bottom link to this video or this vehicle on our website click those check us out we really look forward to helping with this super clean 2014 Jeep Cherokee limited front wheel drive um v6 thanks again


Greetings and welcome to this, the first campus conversation of the new academic year. I'm Dan Mogulah from the Campus Office of Communications and Public Affairs. Today, I'm honored to welcome Ben Hermelin, our Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost. Ben took office in July 2022 with just over a year under his belt. It's really great to have this opportunity to talk with him about his plans and priorities for the campus. Ben holds professorships, both in the Economics Department and at the Berkeley Haas Business School. He received his PhD from MIT in 1988. The same year, as a matter of fact, he joined UC Berkeley as an assistant professor. From 1999 to 2002, Ben served as the Berkeley Haas Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Chair of the Faculty. He was the Economics Department Chair from 2005 to 2008, the Chair of our Academic Senate from the fall of 2015 until spring 2016. And then Vice Provost for the Faculty from 2016 to 2022. His areas of research include corporate governance, the study of organizations, especially leadership, Andy, I'm sure, industrial organization, law and economics. We already have a number of really good questions that you guys have sent in before we started today, but please, as always, feel free to post additional queries you may have for Ben on our Facebook live streaming site. And we'll do our very best to proceed to respond. So let's get started. So Ben, start off just a little bit about what exactly is a provost and what's the full scope of your job and responsibilities on campus? Thanks, Dan. And thanks for having me participate in this conversation. So the provost is the Chief Academic Officer for the university overseeing everything that has to do with academics. The deans report to me consequently as do a number of other people like the university librarian and working with them and the council of deans as well as of course, consulting with the academic senate as part of shared governance. We set the course for all things academic, the teaching and the research. In addition, as executive vice chancellor, I am the number two person after Carol, our chancellor and I serve with her to help run all the other parts of the university. And the way that Carol has organized the organization is that many things, many people report to what's called the box, which is the chancellor and the executive vice chancellor. So I'm wondering, obviously, you were a vice provost and none of this was entirely new to you, but what surprised you? Well, share some impressions from your first year or so in office of what it's like to sit in that corner office that you occupy. Well, it's a different view. In both a literal sense and a figurative sense. When you're the vice provost of faculty, you're principally concerned about faculty welfare, faculty advancement and so forth. And now the scope of things I need to attend to is far greater. Some things I knew a little bit about, some things I've learned a lot more about such as our finances, particularly how we can, how we do our finances and how we can improve our finances. I've got a better sense of some of the challenges across the campus and other in areas outside of the academic part of the university. Learned strange things I didn't think I'd ever need to know about seismic safety and things like that. So it's a lot of different things. It's a very interesting job. Are you having fun? It depends on what day you let us come in.  Oh, don't spend the spinner. Okay. Yeah, this is, look, look. This is a very rewarding job. This is, I think this university is one of the greatest institutions out there and feeling to have any job where you're helping to advance the mission of this university and supporting all the people who worked in it is really satisfying. It gives meaning to my life. I mean, I know that might sound trite or contrived but truly it does and that, it's very rewarding. I think everyone to really be content in life has to feel that their life has purpose and doing this job creates a lot of purpose for me. You know, I noticed I was reviewing before we sat down today, the speech or the remarks you recently shared with the deans and chairs. And you talked about gratitude. I mean, quoting a past guest of campus conversations, our very own, Dr. Keltner, why was it important for you to bring that up to the deans and chairs? Well, I think Dr. Keltner could answer the question better than I could. So I'm really channeling him to some extent. I think that when we lose sight of gratitude and we don't recognize gratitude in our day-to-day lives, we are certainly less content, less happy, less compassionate, we are less collegial. And so it's something that we want to feel and something that we need to pay attention to. I also think that it's very easy sometimes for people to lose sight of just what an amazing institution Berkeley is, how great it is, how much in demand it is, right? Over 100,000 students every year apply to come here.  Faculty around the globe would like to be here. And I think sometimes we lose sight of that, how well we do and how important our job is. And I think having some gratitude for that as well as perspective is very important. Otherwise, I don't think we can be as effective to our jobs as well and maintain good mental health. Yeah, that's great. I'm gonna go on and ask about plans and priorities before I do for those of you who may have joined us late. Welcome to the first campus conversation of the academic year. We're with Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Ben Hermlin. We already have a number of questions that we received before we started. But if you have any queries, post them to our Facebook Live site and we're gonna do our very best to respond. Ben, let's talk a little bit about your priorities. What occupies sort of the top three or four items on your list this year? So the top three are working on financial sustainability. This has many dimensions, principally has to do with thinking about how we do our budgeting. Our budgeting model is not one that reflects our strategic needs. And so changing that to ensure that resources are going to where they're needed to maintain our excellence is important. We face some challenges due to the fact that over the last few years, our costs have risen at a far faster rate than our revenues. And so part because of that, our central ledger, that is the central reserves of the university are fairly depleted in that rebuilding those central reserves and figuring out how to function with some of the depleted central reserves is critically important if we're able to continue to be able to fulfill our mission. Second priority is trying to continue to reduce the bureaucratic burden. We had a lot of success this past year. There's a task force report that's defined on the EVCP website, summarizes a lot of what has been achieved and a lot of what we hope to achieve. And we wanna continue to work on reducing the bureaucratic burden in large part by changing the culture around bureaucracy here to really make everyone feel that they're a problem solver not a gatekeeper and that they're recognized that everyone is a vital member of our team who plays a vital role through their own initiative and thought. And then the third priority is to continue to improve inclusion and belonging that applies in so many ways across our campus. One way I'm particularly wanna focus is in the classroom making sure that we have inclusive classrooms. I feel that every student who comes to Berkeley comes with a contract from us that we are going to do everything we can to make sure that they have, get the education that they deserve and are able to go as far as they wish. And that means that we have to think about that when we think about how we design our classes so that they lift up every student. We can't teach to a particular point in the distribution we must teach the entire distribution and we must also recognize that we live in a society that is very unequal. And so we have bright students who come from high schools where they can take BC calculus and beyond and others who come from high schools where the highest math they can take is algebra two. And if you've only had algebra two no matter how bright you are, that's gonna put you at a disadvantage competing with students who've taken BC calculus. We have to figure out how to make Cal work for everyone so inclusive belonging, inclusion and belonging particularly in the classroom as a priority. But let's unpack those a little bit and start off with the finances. I mean, I've been on campus for 19 years and boy, the budget seems like a perennial evergreen issue. Is there a fundamental problem at the core? Is there a systemic issue? It seems, it just seems to be a recurring issue that we can't get past. Is there hopes that we're gonna ever put financial challenges in our rear view mirror? Well, yes and no, Dan. One of the amazing things about Berkeley is there's so many wonderful things we can do. And you think of all the wonderful things you could do will never have enough resources. No university would ever have enough resources to do all the wonderful things, Berkeley or even Harvard with all its riches would feel resource constrained in some sense to try to do all the wonderful things that we can do. So in that sense, no, the answer is no, we're always going to have to make decisions, trade-offs and so forth, that's inevitable. On the other hand, I think what you're getting at is where we're always gonna feel this incredible austerity that we've felt off and on. And here I'm hopeful, but we also have to recognize the challenge that we face for quite a long time, ever since the Great Recession and even somewhat before that, state funding has really fallen off. And although California state funding has started to come back from that deep trough following the Great Recession, in California in many ways has been a better state than other states in that. And we are very fortunate that the governor and the legislature has put in place this five year compact with 5% increases every year. Nonetheless, our revenues for a very long time have fall, our operating revenue, so for a very long time fallen short of our operating expenses. Now that's not the end of the world because we've had non-operating revenues as well as reserves we could draw upon to cover that difference. But as I said earlier, our reserves are now fairly depleted and our costs are rising much more rapidly than our revenues. So we're going to have to think about how can we raise our revenues and how can we get, have our revenues grow more quickly? There are a number of things. Philanthropy is one, we've been incredibly successful. We've hit $6.7 billion in the campaign. Our goal remember was just 6 billion. We've hit 6.7, we hope to get to 7 billion before the end of the campaign. We now rank number seventh in the country in terms of philanthropy and we're the highest ranked school that doesn't have a medical school. The highest ranked university does know a medical school. We are an entrepreneurial powerhouse and we're increasingly figuring out ways to profit from innovation and intellectual property. And that continues to be a growing source of revenues. We have a number of programs, academic programs that bring in revenue. So we have to continue to work on all those things as well as the state continuing to increase its share of funding for us. And then we're just going to have to think about how can we ensure that we're using our funds wisely into the best purpose and that's the financial sustainability analysis initiative is about and we're doing a deep dive analysis and a number of different units to make sure that we're doing that. And we'll have to have some thoughts about where are there places where greater discipline in terms of increased expenditures can be implemented so that we can slow the growth in our expenditures. So it was interesting. You talked also with the deans and chairs and I was looking at remarks. You shared a very similar message but you also talked at length and it was interesting and impactful I thought about Berkeley's resilience and this idea and your impression that we always rise to meet the challenges. Well, there was a good deal of confidence between the lines. Where does that come from for you? Well, I've been at Berkeley 35 years then as you mentioned that the outset. And when I, in that 35 years I've only seen Berkeley get better. I mean, the university of today is a better university than the one I joined. It was obviously a wonderful university but I think we're a far better university on any dimension that you want to think about. And yeah, the whole 35 years I've been here people have also been very anxious about various financial things. I had no sooner arrived and there was a state budget problem and we had the voluntary early retirement programs and many cuts. We suffered with the dot com bust. We've suffered with the great recession but we are amazing in our resilience and part of that resilience comes about because we're very innovative. We're not wedded to the status quo or always asking a question. How can we improve? What can we do differently? Where are things going and how do we stay ahead of that curve? And I don't know of any universities that have been as successful as we've been in that regard. Wow, let's move to the second one, the bureaucratic burden. And in fact, we got a question directed exactly at that issue, if you don't mind I'll read it. Sure. For many reasons, the UC Berkeley is a wonderful place to teach and conduct research. At the same time, the excessive bureaucratic burden associated with hiring staff and non-latter rang faculty, financial management and establishing public and private partnerships severely dampens the growth trajectory for many of our individual and collective research endeavors. We are, quote, significantly out of step with the flexibility enjoyed by our colleagues for these routine processes at peer UC and non-UC institutions, which ultimately has the potential to threaten retention of the brightest minds at Berkeley and limit educational and research opportunities. How is the institution trying to make it easier to be successful as a faculty member at UC Berkeley? And if you could go from there, maybe and talk more generally, but let's just focus on that. So it's an excellent question. It is an excellent question. I think just to give just a little bit of caution. So one always has to remember higher education than those highly regulated industries in America. We are a state institution and many of the policies and practices or procedures that we have to operate under are not set on this campus, but set at 1111 Franklin Street in Oakland. And that would be the address of? Off to the president. Got it. Okay. And now, you know, different UC campuses are perhaps a little bit freer in how they interpret some of the dictates from the office of the president's or policy. So there, I would agree with the question that, you know, some of our sister UCs seem to have less of a bureaucratic burden than we do. And one of the things we're doing as part of the financial sustainability initiative, but it does spill over to reducing bureaucratic burden is examining our processes as benchmark against other large public R1 universities such as UCLA. So we hope to learn from what they do and to make changes accordingly. We are looking into a lot of the hiring practices and other things that have caused people a lot of concern and we're trying to improve those. Some of what we've accomplished already is listed in, as I said, on the EVCP webpage. And the other thing is people should make sure that we know about what those pain points are. And no one should sort of suffer in silence. We're committed to working on that. And so please, you know, bring to my attention or bring to someone's attention the specific issues and we will look into them and we will try to resolve them to the best of our ability recognizing some of the constraints I mentioned earlier. Got it. Let's move on to the third leg of your priorities stool as it was, as it is. And that was diversity and inclusion. And so obviously this is something important for the campus, equity, inclusion, diversity and belonging, number of people who are working on that every day. But why did you feel it necessary to elevate it to one of your three priorities this year? Well, this was a priority I started last year. But it remains a priority this year. And in fact, I hope to accelerate our work on it. I think that one of the things that has struck me is that we have worked very hard to improve diversity on this campus. And I read the first to say that the pace has not been as fast as we would like but we have made a lot of improvements. That's only part of what we need to do though. I really feel strongly that everyone who comes here should feel a strong sense of belonging and a sense of belonging not only that they feel they belong but they're confident that others see them as belonging and being a vital part of this campus and its community. And so I think, I don't wanna take my foot off the diversity pedal or some of the other pedals but I think trying to work on inclusion and belonging is important because I want everyone who comes here to thrive and to really benefit as much as possible from their time at Berkeley whether it's a student, faculty member or staff. And so that's, and I think we have not always done worked on that and we've not always been as conscious about making sure that everyone feels that sense of, feels included and feels that sense of belonging. So that's why I raise it because I think it's vital. And I think, when we think about our mission has many parts but really key part of our mission is education and I don't think we can do a excellent job in educating people if we are not conscious about inclusion and belonging there are all kinds of studies that show that when people feel that they're not included that they don't belong, they don't do as well as they can or they don't take advantage of all the resources that are available to them. So I think part of being excellent in our educational mission is improving inclusion and belonging as well as I think it positively infects everything else we do as well. You know, I noticed you also talked again referring to that same set of remarks to the deans and chairs recently. You talked about community and I'm always struck about how community is front and center in so many speeches and messages delivered by Chancellor Christ as being an inherent and essential element of a high quality education. How do you see it? You see the importance of community. Well, I totally agree with what Chancellor Christ has said about community and she's absolutely right.  Yeah. You know, one of the things that social scientists have pointed out all the way back to the 14th century in Ibn Kaldun is that what makes an organization successful or a key to an organization success is its social cohesion. It's a sense of community that people have and organizations where people have a sense of community do well. They outperform those where that is lacking. I sometimes say that, you know, part of Berkeley's secret sauce is that in so many departments we have such a strong sense of community and that's lacking in a lot of our competitor departments and that's in part what allows us to attract and retain the world's best faculty if people enjoy the community that they have here. And as I said earlier, community and a sense of community is vital for people to thrive. They need that and they can't be successful in the classroom and their research in their day-to-day job without that. So that's why it's so important. Ben, I'm gonna go on in just a second to a question we received in particular about our Latinx community. But I also wanna note, we've received a very large number of questions about some named and specific employees. And I just wanna note that we are strictly forbidden by California law from talking about personnel issues. And we are completely committed to protecting the privacy and confidentiality. So we just can't answer in any specificity about any specific employee past or present. So just to note that, but I can read this part of the question. Dear Provost Hermelin, what is your plan for retaining Latinx faculty and faculty from other underrepresented groups? It's a great question. So we've been doing a lot of things to work on that. It encompasses many things. First, we've worked very hard to improve our recruitment faculty from underrepresented groups. We've had over the last few years a sharp increase. Again, it's not as fast a pace as we would like, but it is an improvement in the recruitment of people from underrepresented communities. We've had a number of initiatives like the Latinx and democracy initiative that's a cluster higher, that's very exciting. We've not only hired faculty interested in this area, but provided a lot of funding for research for them. We are working on making sure that a number of other initiatives, such as those in the African-American studies department continue to thrive. There was a wonderful program going on in the Collaboratory that the grant is running out. We're gonna make sure that the funding stays so that can continue to be successful. We know that a big challenge for many faculty is the housing market, which is very tough. And so we also know that, again, because we live in an unequal society, often people from underrepresented groups are also people who don't come with a lot of inherited or family wealth. So we're trying to do everything we can to improve access to housing. That's such a challenge, but we've put in place a number of programs to facilitate that, whether it's the zero interest forgivable loans, whether it's raising the minimum off-scale component in faculty salaries. So a number of things there. We've worked very hard on retentions. We have a very high success rate in retaining faculty from underrepresented groups in fact, I think are pretty sure our success rate with that group is higher than with other groups. So we're working very hard. And I also note that the Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion, Don Yamatos, has a number of thriving initiatives, one of all of which together are going to help a lot. And there is one specifically around Latinx issues as well. So continue to work on it. Moving on to a somewhat different subject, question that's come in from the audience. I hope you will update the audience on the status of PAC-12 negotiations. And for those who may not know, even though the amount of coverage has been absolutely mind-boggling, there's major realignments going on in the conferences which formed the foundation of intercollegiate athletics. A lot of speculation about where Cal and Stanford are going to land. What can you tell us, Ben? Well, I can't tell you very much in part because I really don't know very much. I said earlier that Carol has a model of two in the box for many things, but there's some things that don't report to the box. They report only to Carol and athletics as one of them. So I do know that the chancellors work remarkably hard along with Jim Nolton, the athletic director, to try to resolve the conference realignment issues negotiating with other conferences and trying to come up with the best possible outcome for Cal. What little bit I've heard, and I think everything I've heard has probably been in the press too, is promising that we'll land or remain in a top five, power five, conference, thank you. But things are still ongoing. So we'll have to wait and see. And should any future agreement create budgetary challenges, what happens after that? What's the process that the campus uses in that regard? Well, we'll have to see what it really entails and how we can best tackle any problems that arise. Not knowing even what the scope of that may be, it's a little bit early to begin to say what we would do. There are many different possibilities. Also keep in mind that we're supposed to get some money from UCLA to make up for their abandoning the PAC-12 and precipitating all of this. So we'll have to see what happens. We remain right now committed to continuing to field the teams that we're fielding in our collegiate athletics. The chancellor's made clear that she sees in our collegiate athletics as playing a vital role for this campus. So we're gonna have to figure it out. But until we know exactly what's what, it's a little bit early. Makes sense, thanks for that. We're gonna bounce into another subject, picking up a question that just came in. Thank you for addressing the faculty and also for answering our questions. My question is, this person wrote, would you consider helping to improve the situation for faculty who do research internationally? Though our research is often more costly, the university provides us with the same amount of funds as faculty whose research allows them to remain inside the United States. Might there be some way to enhance the university support for faculty doing international research? Yes, this way I'm sure there might well be. We haven't looked into it as many people know, although we provide funding for faculty research, it's principally in terms of startup for faculty when they join or sometimes in retention cases to help induce them to remain here. We have some other limited funds that we provide through for example, the Bears Grant program and so forth. We can certainly look into whether there are other ways that we can support faculty who are working internationally. We've tended I would say with our programs to be somewhat egalitarian in our funding and perhaps we can also think about whether we wanna have programs that are a little bit more tailored to specific needs of the faculty requesting funding and if you have thoughts or send them to my office. Great, thanks. Another question from the faculty. I'm an assistant professor under review for promotion to tenure. My case has been stalled. I've heard from others that their cases are also delayed. Can you please share what has caused the delay and when we can expect to hear about our decisions? Sure, so first of all, obviously, it's very hard to have ones tenure case delayed. It's a very anxious period. So I wanna recognize that. I do also wanna mention that having your case delayed is not a signal of anything. So people shouldn't try to read into it, some hidden message. Unfortunately, this year was somewhat of a perfect storm in terms of academic personnel matters. We have a wonderful new vice provost for the faculty, but everyone has a learning curve. So that is a factor. We also, and a much bigger factor is we had a lot more retention cases this year than we ordinarily have. Retention cases always jump to the top of the queue. We've also had a lot of late appointment cases and faculty appointment cases also jump to the head of the queue. And if they come in late, they come in right around the time that we're trying to wrap up all our tenure cases. I know that the vice provost is working very hard on the tenure cases. I know the academic personnel office is working very hard on them. I've received a number of them recently for my review. So for those who don't know, once the case gets through the budget committee and the vice provost, it comes to the provost and then to the chancellor. So I've tried to expedite every case that's come to me, turning around in a day or two, because I know people are eager to hear. Right, so it sounds like help is on the way to some degree. Yeah, and that's a good point, Dan. I should have mentioned that. We have added staff in the academic personnel office to try to deal with that. One of the economies that we made and maybe a false economy is that we have a very lean academic personnel office, our academic personnel office, I think is roughly half the size of UCLA's. It's one of the smallest in the system. And the academic, people having worked with them for many years of people in the academic personnel office are fantastic. They're so fortunate to have them, but they're only human, they're only 24 hours in any day, only seven days in any week. So when we have too few people, things sometimes take longer than would be ideal. Thanks, before I go on to the next one, I'm gonna read another question that came in from the audience, just reminding people, we do have a number of questions we're working through that came in before, but if you have a query that you'd like to see if we can answer, that you'd like to have answered today, please post it to our Facebook live site and we'll do our best to respond in the time that's remaining. Ben, this next question, what is your opinion on remote work, working from home, they explain, especially in the context of maintaining and building our community? Okay, well, since you're working from home, Dan, I've got to be really careful here. There are trade-offs. I think for a lot of jobs and a lot of people's situations, particularly people who face long commutes or family issues, having the flexibility of working remotely is a real godsend and we wouldn't wanna take that away. On the other hand, as I said earlier, I think community is really important and Zoom technology, at least in my humble opinion, hasn't replaced in-person communications. There's something to be said for conversations around the proverbial water cooler in the hallway and so forth. And so I think we need to figure out a way to balance these things. I really think we want people to have a sense of community. I think they'll feel better if they have a sense of community. And so we need to promote that sense of community in what's clearly going to be some kind of hybrid environment going forward. You know, Ben, speaking of community, I've talked to a number of people who've expressed some trepidation about the fact that we have, obviously, a presidential election coming up. Those have been times of where a lot of passions are expressed on the campus, issues about free speech come up and some of the inherent tensions that might exist between free speech and some of our communitarian aspirations. Talk to us a little bit about how you view that issue, the importance of free speech and diversity of perspective on a campus like Berkeley and how we can hold the community together in the face of passionately held views that can be highly divergent. Yeah, I think this is obviously a huge challenge, been a challenge for society forever in a day. So, you know, I'm everything great and brilliant to say about it. I think a few things. One, I think each and every one of us has an obligation to give some thought to how what we say will be perceived by others. This isn't to say we should censor ourselves or we shouldn't speak about things we feel passionately about, but we should think a little bit about how we convey that message. Second, I think everyone should, I believe as a society, and my personal view is not the view of the university or anybody but my own view, I think we as a society have lost a considerable amount of goodwill for others, tolerance, and instead of assuming that someone has said something out of malice or because they're a bad person or, you know, they're a jerk or whatever to try to give them the benefit of the doubt, you know, try to hear what they have to say.  And so I think we, as a people, just need to rediscover our abilities to be tolerant and so forth. This doesn't mean we should put up with people who are behaving poorly. We shouldn't put up with hate speech in the sense of saying it's fine. It certainly is not fine, but just simply saying that we have to figure out ways to be a little bit more calm because as you say, Dan, I imagine there'll be a lot of people who'll be trying to incite a lot of anger and emotion over the course of the next year plus. All right. And it's, and we're a target for it because, you know, Berkeley is a name and, you know, getting your protest on TV is gonna be easier if you do it at Berkeley than if you do it at, you know, Wichita State or, you know, Texas El Paso or something. Uh-oh, now we're gonna get all kinds of letters from alumni from Texas El Paso who won't be pleased with that one bit. Okay, I apologize in advance. Yes, but I've long thought that they should adapt that song to say, you know, for Berkeley, for certain activists and people who love attention, if I can make it there, I can make it anywhere. Anyway, I'm gonna bounce around, go back to a question we've received from the audience. Can we expect to see enterprise systems related to graduate student fellowships slash private awards and fund management? Currently, units use Excel spreadsheets, CADs and ledgers to figure out balances and other items this person lists. And as we create more and more funds, the administration, management and stewardship of those funds has become increasingly difficult. So it sounds like a call for help here. Yeah, so I don't know all the issues that this questioner is raising in terms of the specifics. Obviously we wanna make things better. I believe that UDAR is looking into improving its systems. We're looking into improving all our systems. I think if you have specific concerns or questions, again, if you can direct them to my office, we can try to think about what we might need to do. Maybe we're already working on it. Maybe it's something we're not aware of. Sometimes it can be, you know, we have too many people involved in things. Where can we streamline and so forth? So happy to look into that. Great, another issue that you and I talked about last week before this conversation was the issue of digital accessibility that you raise as something of importance, a particular area of attention. Can you unpack that a little bit for us? And what exactly that means and what we're doing in that regard? Yeah, I mean, there are a number of things. So one, we have to make sure that whatever we present in a digital format, particularly online, is accessible to everyone who wishes to access it, particularly our people in our community. So that means that materials have to be accessible by those who have vision impairments or have hearing loss or hearing issues. So we have to think about that. That's, we're under a consent decree with the Department of Justice in part to improve accessibility. And we should be doing that anyway, but we're even more obliged to do it than we would otherwise be, perhaps. So that's really important. And I think people should also think, people teaching classes or other things, make sure they think about, are they doing things in ways that everyone can access, can access them in ways that work for them? That's obviously important, as well as not relying on people necessarily having access to certain technology, which in our unequal society may not be true. You know, Ben, one of the things that caught a lot of attention over the summer was the Chancellor's message that she'll be stepping down next July. Can you just really broad brush strokes? How does the search process, is the campus run the search process, as the office of the president? How involved are we? Where do things stand? How is this gonna unfold over the next few months? So the office of the president runs the search for any Chancellor, any of the campuses. They do so under a very scripted set of procedures. There's a regents order that describes what they do, and then there's a 19 page detailed thing that specifies exactly what that means and how that's implemented. We have no say or very little say in who serves on the search committee. Different groups are allowed to make nominations of slates from which the office of the president may choose. So I know the Berkeley staff association would be able to submit a slate. The students will be able to submit a slate. Let me just interrupt you for a sec. What do you mean by slate? Like a list of names? Yeah, list of names. So for people, the one I know best is the office of president asked the academic senate's committee on committees to submit the names of nine to 12 faculty. Then the system-wide committee on committees will narrow that down to that list of nine to 12 down to six. And then the president will choose three to serve on the search committee. The committee is made up of the president of the system and under a regents, some people from our community, the chair, vice chair of the system-wide academic senate, faculty member from another UC campus. So we're not the drivers of this. There is opportunities to give input to the search committee. So on October 10th, there'll be what's called Campus Day when the search committee comes to talk to invited guests to provide input. There'll be other forums for people to provide input as well on the search process. Got it. Last question before we wrap up. Can you give us sort of a summary about construction on campus, about where things stand? Any major projects that we stand on the cusp of beginning right now? Well, certainly people who've been on campus notice that we're doing a fair amount of construction. The most notable new construction is anchor house on Oxford, which will be a dorm for transfer students. It has 760 beds. It seems like it's almost completed, although I know they have a lot more to do. I think it's like another year or something, which yeah. So right now it's a little bit of a Potemkin building in the sense that the outside looks all done inside. I guess that needs to be taken care of. I think the next major thing that people will notice is the building of a new classroom building and also home for LNS advising that will be built on what is now the Ronell parking lot. So between Valley Life Sciences and the Ronell fall. I believe that's slated to begin sometime this fall, but I felt the top of my head, I don't remember when. The Bechtel construction is underway. This is to improve Bechtel for students. You mean an engineering center there? Yeah, yeah. So there are a number of things that are underway and that number of things are planned as well. So we continue to build and change. And of course, everyone's seen the gateway building, which will be the home of CDSS and the School of Information. I noticed the legislature just passed a new bill, a statute that addresses some of the issues in the People's Park lawsuit. My understanding is that we still need, we're waiting to hear from the Supreme Court. The administration, does the commitment remain the same as it's always been for that particular project? It does. So as you say, the legislative action that just passed and obviously needs to be signed by the governor, but assuming his signature, then that doesn't immediately give us a green light. We still have to continue with the process in the State Supreme Court, as you mentioned Dan, and all legal technicalities are not something I know or understand, so I can't talk to them. But the chancellor has remained clear that she wants to move ahead, that the need for student housing is incredible. We house the smallest number of our students of any of the UCs. And particularly if we all wanna maintain access and ensure that everyone who wants to come to UC Berkeley and gets in can afford to be here, we are gonna have to address the housing issue for our students and People's Park, along with construction and Channing Ellsworth, along with construction in your former home on Fulton and Bancroft, and so forth, all gonna be part of the solution to this problem of ensuring adequate housing for our students. So we've reached that point for the hardest question, which is wanna share some closing thoughts. Just as we embark on another academic year here and face the challenges and opportunities, many of which you've addressed today. Sure. I would like people to try to channel the enthusiasm that I see in our new students and our new faculty. I had a wonderful opportunity before the semester started to meet with both new faculty and new students, and their excitement about being here is just amazing. I mean, they are just grateful to be here, excited to be here, enthusiastic. And they remind you, again, to go back to what we talked about with gratitude, what an amazing place this is, how wonderful it is to be at Berkeley. And yes, we have many challenges, and I'm not trying to sugarcoat anything. I'm not trying to deflect from those challenges or to say we should ignore them. We can't ignore them. Yet at the same time, we have to remain aware of just what a great place this is and how fortunate we are to be here. So those will be my closing remarks today. Not bad. Ben, I wanna thank you so much for your time. Thank you. I wanna thank everybody for tuning in to this, the first campus conversation of the academic year. We have all kinds of great conversations lined up in the future, and we hope we'll see you down the road. Have a great day.


I often like almost every day in same similar situations get like a pressure from inside in in German you would say a zwang and zwang to do something and it almost every time has to do with security somehow like for example if I close the car I have to like check three four times the doors if it's really locked if it's really close before I go to sleep I have to check four times the door if it's really closed and I have to push the key to the end and things like this and I just wanted to ask how to get rid of this because it's like really like I see myself doing this or even though I don't want to do it I have to do it and yeah how to how to get rid of this Hannah I think the issue here is that there is not enough as yet trust in your own strength you know trust in your actual inner strength and power when you develop that trust slowly and that trust comes as you know very well and you've heard it since you were a child actually that that trust comes from tuning in the process of tuning in tuning in tuning in tuning in tuning into the truth of your being to the soul to the source that trust in who you are and that that trust in who you are comes from being as much as possible in the present in the here and now so what happens generally is that a person who has these swing at these forced actions is because they have to convince themselves that what they are doing is the thing to be done in that moment and that only happens because the thinking is always moving all over the place it is not present strongly solidly present so one thing you can do if you want to stop this strange behavior if I can say I'm sure that you'll be smiling about that is to train yourself to bring yourself to this moment so when you get out of the car that's when you bring yourself to this moment you immediately say come to this moment presence presence presence and you stop for a second then you walk into the house you do what you have to do and as much as possible try to bring yourself to this moment the truth is in this moment and anyone who brings themselves to this moment and who's a lot actually in this moment don't have to to go and repeat things and check themselves because they're aware of what they're doing when they're doing it very few people succeed in that on a 24-hour basis that's not the point but to start with train yourself especially for example when you close the door at night remember to train yourself to pull yourself to the present moment to start with you can even say to yourself now come to this moment now I'm locking the door I know I've done it and when you're doing all this you're in this moment and then you will be less likely to go there three times and turn the key three times in anybody who does that is a person who is not present when they are doing that at least for the important tasks in life one has to be present because you maybe you're thinking oh what will my boyfriend say if I don't call him in the morning or something like that you don't think about your boyfriend when you're closing the door you think about your boyfriend when you're opening the door that's much better so always bring yourselves to this moment and you can decide from tomorrow I'll do it five times a day or six times a day I'll do it for the six most crucial actions of a day and then you do it and very soon you won't have that kind of behavior it'll be gone and last but not least do you want to change it there are people who just want to live in that sort of messy crazy life so first you have to decide if you want to do it and I think you do because you've asked the question so you do want to do it then you also will do it take up six tasks in a day that you know that cause you to repeat actions and when you're doing those tasks bring yourself to this moment be aware of what you're doing and then it'll work is thank you Maya Namaskar Namaskar Anna