Jana Cunningham: Hello. Thank you for joining me on a new season of Humanities Radio. I'm Jana Cunningham with the University of Utah College of Humanities, and this season I'll be in discussion with professors from across our college about their latest book publications.

Jana Cunningham: I'm currently sitting here with Jay Jordan, professor of writing and rhetoric studies, to discuss his book that describes and theorizes the intellectual, social, and material complexities of cross-border educational efforts called Grounded Literacies in a Transnational Whack Wit Ecology, a Korean U.S. study. Thank you, Professor Jordan, for joining me today.

Jay Jordan: Totally. It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Jana Cunningham: So I feel like this book, before we kind of get into the specifics of it, kind of needs a little bit of a setup, because you, as we were just talking about, you were in Korea for the University of Asia campus opening. You worked there for, or taught there for two semesters?

Jay Jordan: I was there for two semesters, right.

Jana Cunningham: And so let's kind of give a little background to the book and why and when you decided you wanted to start this specific study in Korea.

Jay Jordan: Yeah, I didn't actually go over with the idea, with this book in mind. I knew that I was probably going to do at some point some research that was related to the campus because it's just, you know, an occupational hazard in my field. I knew that I was going to have something to do with student writing, and I've long had an interest. I mean, I'm a specialist in second language writing, particularly in English and among international students. So there were a lot of reasons why going to UAC for the first year made sense. But I didn't necessarily have this book in mind. What I had been doing was kind of, at the time anyway, I thought it was an unrelated project in which I was looking at rhetoric and language as two parts of larger holes. I mean, in some ways, literal ecological holes that humans travel in, whether we're just in our home communities or whether we're going somewhere else, it was a lot more theoretical about language ecologies, for lack of a better term. When I got to Korea, I realized pretty quickly that there was a lot of stuff going on materially. You know, the city was literally being built around us, as I relate in the book. And so I found myself really preoccupied with that. I mean, it was like a daily fact of life that, you know, this island was being built underneath us, while at the same time, my colleagues and I were trying to come to terms with what it meant to be the very first international campus in the history of the University of Utah. And so we had students, we had books that we had to, you know, worry about getting. Our recruiting office was worried about recruiting new students. So the more typical, you know, intellectual or curriculum or administrative stuff about a university campus really became very closely connected to and enmeshed with those other considerations that I had already had on my mind in terms of my own scholarship. And so I pretty quickly figured out it was going to be difficult to tease them apart. So the book is titled Transnational Wackwood Ecology. So let's kind of describe it. So WACC is Writing Across the Curriculum, and then WID, Writing in Disciplines.

Jay Jordan: That's right. Or Writing in Disciplines.

Jana Cunningham: In Disciplines, right. So can you kind of define what those terms mean?

Jay Jordan: Yeah, those terms really refer to the idea that even though, say, in our Department of Writing and Rhetoric Studies, we teach a very large introductory writing course, you know, my parents knew it as freshman composition. It's a really common course to teach at a lot of U.S. colleges and universities. But one of the things we know is that that's not the only place where students write in their college careers. As a matter of fact, most of the writing they do is after they're finished with that course, in whatever they major in. So there's a group of scholars who, for several decades now, have really been interested in exploring how students learn to write and how teachers teach writing in a wide variety of disciplines. I had already done a little bit of research on that, particularly in engineering and some colleagues of mine and I had done some faculty professional development and some teaching here on this campus in, you know, in nursing, in business, and a few other parts of the university. So I was primed to be really interested in that. And it also seemed to me that the fact that that was, and still in a lot of ways is, a small campus, especially compared to the Salt Lake campus, meant that I had an opportunity to get a pretty up-close view of what students writing across the curriculum and writing in disciplines looked like. And it turns out that was true. It also turns out that a lot of people, I mean, I said a lot of writing gets done across the curriculum. We don't always know. We in a department like mine, those of us who are experts in writing studies, don't necessarily know how it's taught. So it's always an opportunity for us to learn. So I focused a lot on students who were majoring in psychology and communication and learned, you know, perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot of writing gets done in communication, but also an awful lot of writing gets done in psychology. So that was a great learning experience. And that's part of what I think is interesting about WAC and WID research.

Jana Cunningham: So walk us through your study and kind of your approach with the students as well and kind of how, just kind of how you went through this whole study.

Jay Jordan: Yeah, I was interested in trying to figure out what it was that students were encountering in different parts of the curriculum after that first year writing course. I kind of knew what that course looks like because I've taught it myself. I've trained teachers. I've helped develop the curricula over the years. I was really interested in looking beyond that. So I recruited students who were finishing that first year writing course or really the first year writing sequence and then who were getting into their majors. At the time, it was a very small number of students. You know, when I started the study, it was probably, we probably had a total student population of around 100 or something like that. I ended up with a very small group of students. And I, my research questions about what is it that they're encountering? How do they negotiate it? How do faculty members respond to their writing? Led me to collect a few different kinds of data. I interviewed students. Primarily, I did that in a succession of research trips I took back over there. So I came back here to return to this campus permanently in 2015. But then I went back to UAC for research visits in May of 2016, 17 and 18. The nice thing about that was the academic calendars for spring are just different enough between the two campuses that I could be finished here but then go over there and they would be in the middle of things. So it gave me a chance to see things as they were happening. So with student interviews, it was some course observations, it was faculty interviews, and I was also interested in examining student writing. So all of those things together really helped form a picture for admittedly a very small group of students. But the fact that it was a small group of students and the fact that I did it for around about three years meant that I think I was able to develop a pretty rich picture of what happens in writing in those curricula between these two campuses.

Jana Cunningham: And I wanted to back up just a little bit because one of the things that I found interesting in the book was that you had kind of talked about how you prepared for a certain type of student but then you found them to be more educationally diverse than you had predicted. And so talk about like kind of what you found and how that impacted their writing and maybe their challenges.

Jay Jordan: I should have expected this, you know, being a scholar in second language writing and having a background in language acquisition among other topics. I should have been able to predict from literature over decades that just because students are labeled quote-unquote international or quote-unquote ESL or second language doesn't mean that all of them are the same. I think though I had been a little bit fooled and maybe my colleagues had been going into Korea because while we institutionally didn't know a whole lot about Korea at the time, one of the things that we had I guess been sort of primed to expect is that it has the reputation of being a very homogeneous country. It is ethnically homogeneous, linguistically homogeneous. And so that meant that I think I was at least at some level expecting that students who were at UAC were going to be primarily Korean nationals, and they were and still are, but that they were going to come from a pretty single kind of a unitary high school background. I knew that they were going to be taking English throughout school, but I was kind of expecting that everyone would have learned English to a very advanced level obviously, but in largely the ways that a lot of students still in the United States learn foreign languages like, you know, French, Spanish, German, Japanese, what have you, which is you go through language classes, you do these dialogues in class, you learn a lot of grammar, you learn a lot of vocabulary, but it doesn't necessarily mean you're ready for, you know, spontaneous speech in a country where that language is spoken. There were certainly some students, even in the very beginning group, and we were just saying a few minutes ago before you started recording that the first group of students was like 14. I mean, it was a really, really tiny group of students initially. Even within that group, there were differences, for instance, between students who had gone to Korean primary and secondary schools in Korea versus students who had gone to those schools but had also maybe done some learning abroad, usually in the U.S. or Canada, versus another category of students who had gone to international schools in Seoul or maybe Singapore or somewhere else, which may have been multilingual. A lot of the instruction may have been in English. So yeah, there were linguistic differences because, you know, that are based on the way they learned English. But there were also differences that were just as compelling and just as important, I think, that had to do with the ways they had come to understand what it means to be a student, where traditionally in a Korean classroom, the idea is you're a student, you're listening to lectures, your job is to take notes as furiously as you can and internalize as much information as you can for very high stakes end-of-high-school testing. In the United States, it's often different. Particularly at a university setting, we tend to value a lot of classroom dynamic interaction, a lot of participation, particularly in like small writing classes like the ones we teach. So I think at least some of what we might have thought would have been, okay, these students, maybe they don't really have a high level of English proficiency. No, they all had. But some students were more familiar with the ways we were teaching than other students were. And I think that had an effect certainly on how long it might have taken them to acclimate to UAC. There were some effects I think I noticed in the writing, but it's sometimes the case that even if a student who isn't as comfortable speaking in class, as another student, that doesn't necessarily mean that student is not going to be a stronger writer. In some cases, that student may be an even stronger writer. It's just that as a teacher, you may have to look for that. You can't judge a student's language proficiency or even writing on the basis of their spontaneous speech in class. So that's one thing, just like a major takeaway I took from that, is that we have to be really careful within any population of students, but particularly where I do a lot of work with international students, we have to be really careful about just kind of equating classroom engagement or classroom participation with spontaneous speech. Students may be highly engaged, but for whatever reason, they're not necessarily going to speak in class because they may still be translating what you're saying or what other students are saying, or because they may not think it is socially appropriate to speak up or ask questions in class, because why would you do that when the very authoritative professor is up at the front of the class lecturing? So there was kind of a culture clash is kind of a cliche, but in some ways it's often more about that than it is about linguistic challenges.

Jana Cunningham: And so did that, when you kind of found that, when you kind of were engaging with those students, did that change your approach to your experiment or maybe change any of your research questions?

Jay Jordan: It didn't necessarily change my research questions. One of the things that I was interested in looking at, and I found this in a lot of the faculty responses, you know, I had identified a group of students who were participating, but then I identified faculty members to interview based on the courses those students took. So I was trying to hold onto that core group of students, but also opportunistically identify faculty members with whom they were taking courses. What that realization I think made me sensitive to was the ways faculty members were adapting themselves. So if you go into that context with a pretty clear idea of, let's say, how to set up a student newsroom or something like that, if you're teaching a news writing course for communication, you may have to modify those expectations for these students because of maybe some of the linguistic challenges, but also because there's already a big shift that may happen from a student's first year writing course into, let's say, a news writing course. In a first year writing course, the idea is very broadly, very generally, you're learning about some approaches to research-based writing. In a news writing course, things get a lot sharper. You have to use a particular style guide. You have to focus on very quick turnaround publications. So there's already a big shift that happens from that first year writing course into news writing. For some of these students, there were two shifts that had happened. There was a shift that happened from their high schools where there may not have been much focus on writing or where the writing, and this is still true in a lot of Korean secondary schools, is still very expressive. It's very poetic into that writing that's required, the research-based writing into a first year writing course. That's already a big shift. But then from that into news writing is yet another one. And there were different kinds of writing that the psychology students were encountering, but it was a similar double shift. So what I found myself doing was focusing, yes, on the students' responses to what faculty members were asking, but I also found myself focusing more on how the faculty members were responding to student writing, but then also how they were talking through the kinds of adaptations they needed to make given the linguistic and the cultural context.

Jana Cunningham: So talk about a little bit about kind of your outcome from this experiment and what you're hoping for or already implementing moving forward.

Jay Jordan: I think one thing that I would, I don't know that we've necessarily seen this, but I would love to see more of is more cooperation and collaboration among faculty members and among departments that are operating at UAC. What I was hoping was that this kind of research would call attention to some of the often very complex expectations for student writing and might create an impetus for faculty members in writing and rhetoric studies, in psychology, in communication, in engineering, in games, and the other majors that are now operating on that campus to get together, I mean, like face-to-face and actually have some development opportunities that are based on my students are doing this in my class, how does that track with what your students are doing, things like that. Even in a small, relatively, compared to this faculty cohort here at the Salt Lake campus, which is massive, especially compared to it, it's small, but there are still some challenges with doing that. It can still be really difficult to get people across different departments to sit together around a table, whether it's virtually or face-to-face. I'm still hopeful about that. And I'm still, I went back last year to do a very brief professional development workshop. I would still love to do more of that, but I would also love to do that on this campus. I know one of the questions that you had shared with me was about my description of writing as a privileged literate activity.

Jana Cunningham: Yeah, so I may be anticipating what you're asking about that.

Jay Jordan: No, but I think that what I mean by that is that I mean a couple of things. First, even though there have been a lot of changes in digital technology, a lot of different ways now that we can all compose that we didn't have access to 20 or 30 years ago. So writing looks different, but it's still writing. There is still a need to create content through writing. It is still more easily circulatable than speech is, even though digital technologies have made things a little bit less expensive to do that. It's still kind of the coin of the realm in a lot of fields. The other reason it is, is it's still in a lot of professions and a lot of fields and a lot of academic disciplines. It's still a thing that really holds the identities of those professions and disciplines together. So learning how to do effective presentations, I would not deny the importance of that. Learning how to use digital media and the implications of that, I would not downplay the importance of that. But I think writing is a thread that you can weave through a lot of those other practices. So that's really what I meant by that. And it's why I wanted to focus on this with the students. And it's why I remain hopeful that this kind of research can call attention to some of the complexities and maybe encourage faculty members to collaborate more.

Jana Cunningham: And kind of going a little bit off topic, have you planned or has anyone planned to kind of do the kind of the same study, but when it comes to the transition from UAC to the Salt Lake City campus, and if the challenges become different when they come here and are more integrated into the Salt Lake City campus?

Jay Jordan: There is some of that in the book. I was really interested in looking at that. I didn't, I don't think I got as much of that sort of data as I might have liked to otherwise. But I did, I was noticing some differences. One thing I noticed was that it's, and this is no fault of anyone's, at a campus like that, the kinds of things that you might think you need to prepare students for at the quote-unquote main campus may not be the things they really need to be prepared for. Okay. Or the kinds of projections you might make about what students will need and will do at that campus may not be what students come over here needing and actually doing. So for example, you know, faculty members or courses over there might prepare students for the idea that, you know, the courses at the Salt Lake City campus are going to be a lot harder, a lot more rigorous, a lot stricter, where students may come over here and discover actually, you know, it seems like there's more of a premium on how to work in a lab setting socially. This is one thing that came up in the project with respect to a student interview and at least one interview with a faculty member, you know, who was saying things like, I run a lab over here in my department and I want students to be prepared, but they were noticing that students from UAC were coming into the lab and really, not that they weren't focused on the work, but it was just as important for these students to feel socially integrated into the lab. Right. And what that tells you, it's not as if the faculty member or the student necessarily using this language, but I think what that tells you is that there is, that's really important. You know, if you are advancing your way through an undergraduate major and you're looking ahead to maybe go to graduate study or maybe into a profession, yes, the content of the learning is really important. Yes, the communication about that content is really important, but you also tend to pay attention to and need to pay attention to what it means to be as a member of that field. Right. And that was something that I think students were, were realizing as they came over here and that faculty members over here were realizing as well.

Jana Cunningham: Okay. So before we wrap up, there is one question I have that I am ending every single podcast with, with all of our faculty members. What does this world know now because of your research that they didn't know before?

Jay Jordan: Well, I hope it's, it's kind of an optimistic question. It's like, here's what, you know, I don't know how many people have read this. But my, you know, our books don't tend to circulate that widely, but what I would hope the world knows is that there is a lot more complexity to the identity of quote unquote international student than it might appear to be on the surface. A lot of universities are used to thinking of internationalization or globalization, whatever term they use as a matter of sending domestic students abroad or attracting international students here. And once that happens, you know, whatever happens next happens. I think that UAC is a great example of a campus that was built maybe with particular things in mind, but then as students have moved back and forth between that campus and this campus, they've had a wide range of experiences that have really thickened the description of what those international student experiences as international educational experiences mean. I also hope that what people learn is that much more about writing that first of all, you know, just because we do have these required introductory courses in writing, that doesn't mean that you can possibly learn everything there is to know about writing in those courses. There's simply no way. So students will continue to learn how to write. I have graduate students who keep learning how to write. I had to learn some things again about how to write to write this book. So we're always learning that because writing is a really, again, social activity, a very contextual activity. And so I would hope that, you know, the world does come away even with this pretty focused set of case studies with a richer idea of what it means to learn and teach writing.

Jana Cunningham: That was a wonderful answer. I appreciate that. Thank you so much, Professor. Thank you. That was Jay Jordan, Professor of Writing and Rhetoric Studies. For more information about the University of Utah College of Humanities, please visit humanities.utah.edu. And don't forget to subscribe to Humanities Radio.

Jana Cunningham: Hello, thank you for joining me on Humanities Radio. I'm Jana Cunningham with the University of Utah College of Humanities, and this season I'll be in discussion with professors from across our college about their latest book publications. I'm sitting with Jake Nelson, Assistant Professor of Communication, to discuss his book, Imagined Audiences, How Journalists Perceive and Pursue the Public. It examines the role that audiences have traditionally played in journalism, how that role has changed, and what those changes mean for both the profession and the public. Thank you for joining me, Professor Nelson. 

Jake Nelson: Thanks for having me. 

Jana Cunningham: So I'm really excited to talk about this book. One of the things I really connected to about this book is that it related a lot to my field, which is marketing. I know we're going to talk about journalism, but it was really interesting on how it aligned with what I do in the marketing world. So just as an introduction, can you provide just an overview of your book and explain what motivated you to write on the topic?  

Jake Nelson: Yeah. Well, first of all, I think that that's such an interesting observation, and it makes so much sense because so much of what journalists are increasingly doing is what people in marketing have been doing for their whole careers, and a lot of journalists bristle at that, but then some of them are really excited about that. So yeah, I'm excited to talk more about that. So the book is basically about how journalists think about their audiences and how their assumptions about their audiences influence what they do to get people to actually consume the news, to trust the news, and to ideally support the news by subscribing to it or becoming members of news organizations or doing whatever they can to make news organizations stay financially afloat. And what got me interested in this project was actually my work as a journalist, which I began right when I graduated from my undergrad. So in 2010, I was working as a journalist covering a small suburb outside of Chicago, and it was at a time when people really had no clue how to make local news sustainable. They still don't know, but it was very clear then that that was a real problem. And that was when I heard the word audience engagement for the first time, and it became very clear that part of my priorities wouldn't just be reporting the news or doing all the things that I've sort of been trained to do as a journalism student, but also finding ways to build stronger ties with the people that I hope to reach.  

Jana Cunningham: So the central question in the book is how journalists who are very focused on understanding and reaching their audiences perceive those people in the first place. So what is their perception and how is it created?  

Jake Nelson: So there are some things that I would say most journalists have in common when it comes to their assumptions about the audience. I would say that the biggest one is that journalists have a lot of control over how audiences feel about the news. The example that I tend to go to is if journalists cover the types of stories that they think their audiences are interested in, then those audiences will tune in to the news. And intuitively, that makes a lot of sense. If you give people what they want, they'll come back for more. Where I sort of come at it from, though, is from this sort of slightly different perspective, which is that in a very saturated media environment that we live in, where there are so many options everywhere, people might not even know that there's perfect news available for you. They may never find what it is that you're putting out there. And so journalists might actually have a lot less agency than they care to think, unfortunately, for them.  

Jana Cunningham: So what is the difference between how journalists perceive their audiences versus how the audiences actually behave? 

Jake Nelson: So I think that I would say, going off of what we were just talking about, the big difference is that journalists see their relationship with their audience as being very straightforward. Journalists, their thinking is like, if we just figure out how to report the story in a way that it's going to be really interesting to the audience, then the audience will be there for it. If we realize that our audience is really interested in this topic and we invest our resources into covering that topic, we'll get the audience. Or if the audience is interested in this topic, but our coverage of this topic has been not exciting to them, and so we do more video or turn it into a podcast or focus on these different people within the story instead of these other people, then we'll get the audience that way. And it's not that simple. And in fact, a lot of what drives audiences to our way from news are things that have nothing to do with journalism. So for example, I'm sure you've had the experience of being on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram, and maybe you click a link to a news story, and it starts loading. And four seconds later, you're still waiting for it to load. And you're like, forget it. Never mind. Never mind. I don't care that much about it. And you close it. Your decision to close the story has nothing to do with the quality of the news story. The interface of the website was so awful that you're just like, I don't have the patience for this. And journalists don't tend to think about that because they have no control over that, and because they would rather not acknowledge that so much of what drives audiences to or away from their content is stuff that is completely outside of their control. And it's stuff that has nothing to do with the content itself. It's just about how quickly did it load.  

Jana Cunningham: So why is this crucial? Why is understanding your audiences crucial for journalists and newsrooms?  

Jake Nelson: So I think it's crucial because I think, for starters, if journalists... Right now, I think journalists are setting themselves up for disappointment by sort of just thinking that they have the primary means by which they can improve their relationship with their audiences. And it's unreasonable for them to have such high expectations for themselves. I think that going back to the example that I was just sharing, the way to get you to stay on that news story is for that news story to load quicker. And that means that news organizations should be investing not just in making sure that they have journalists that are putting out quality journalism, but also that they have a user experience that is seamless, which is not something that a lot of newsrooms have invested a lot of resources. But it's a reason why people... Why news organizations like the New York Times are so popular and The Washington Post are so popular, because they already have a lot of means at their disposal to invest in both journalism and a really great app and a website that loads really quickly. And what we don't tend to realize is that that just perpetuates the gap between sort of like the winners, like the New York Times, The Washington Post, and everyone else. And we think that it's just about quality, but it's really not. It's about this big resource gap as well. And so I think that having this sort of more comprehensive discussion about what drives audiences to certain news organizations over others will not only sort of help journalists have more realistic expectations of themselves, but might also lead to a more productive conversation of how do we solve journalism's problems.  

Jana Cunningham: So is this... You kind of talk about... So just I'm kind of jumping around here. You kind of had talked about how newsrooms such as The New York Times are gaining subscribers while these kind of local newsrooms are losing subscribers. And so other than the digital interface, can you kind of explore that a little bit more? Why kind of these local newspapers, news outlets aren't being as successful?  

Jake Nelson: Yeah. So I think there's a couple of things at play. The first is that local news organizations are, by and large, so cash-strapped at this point that they are laying off their employees. They are cutting back on the beats that they cover. And communities notice that, and they open up their local newspaper, and they notice how thin it is compared to what it once was. They go to the website, and they see that so much of what's there is repurposed from Associated Press or other places that they can get stuff from for free. And they think, I'm not getting my money's worth. Why should I pay for this? Plus the user interface is garbage. It doesn't look good. It doesn't feel good. And you're not getting quality information. So I think that that's a big part of it. I also think that, unfortunately, many news organizations, including local news organizations, at the advent of the internet, decided we would put everything online for free. And we will do that because we'll make the money back in digital advertising revenue. And that never worked out, and it was a really bad decision because it set people up to assume that news should be free. And so I talk to my undergrads, my journalism classes all the time, many of whom are taking journalism classes because they want to go into journalism. And I say, oh, do you pay for any news organization? Do you subscribe? No. No. Why not? Because if I hit a paywall here, I'll just find it elsewhere. It's just this idea of, well, it's out there somewhere, so I can just find it. It's not, to their mind, an individual unique good that only one news organization can provide. And so I think that that's a big part of it. I think that it's a vicious cycle at this point because local news organizations are in such dire straits that they are really, it's like they can't prove their value. But because they can't prove their value, they're still bleeding subscribers.  

Jana Cunningham: Right. And so when you talk about local, are you talking about local, even like you would consider the Salt Lake Tribune local, even though it's the largest newspaper in the state? Or would you say more of like the newspaper in Ogden or the newspaper in Park City?  

Jake Nelson: I would include all of that. I will say that the Salt Lake Tribune is exceptional because they have this nonprofit setup, which my understanding is they made that transition to a nonprofit business model in part to avoid the fate that so many other local news organizations have found themselves in, which is where they get bought out by hedge funds, that the people behind them have no real interest in journalism. They're just basically trying to bleed these things dry. And it's really cynical, and it's really awful from the perspective of anyone who cares about journalism, and I'm so grateful to live here because the Salt Lake Tribune, I think, is actually like a really great local news outlet. I moved here from Phoenix. I was working at Arizona State, which is home to a really great journalism school. And what's somewhat ironic is that despite the fact that there's this terrific journalism school in Phoenix, the Arizona Republic, which is the local newspaper, it's this Gannett-owned local newspaper, and the journalists who work there are great, they do great work, but there aren't enough of them. And the paper is really diminished, and I really constantly, over the four years I was living there, found myself thinking, man, I do not know anything about the city in which I live, and I wish I knew more. Whereas here, I feel better. I feel like I have a place, the Salt Lake Tribune, and then there are some other local news providers out there that I feel are actually doing a pretty good job.  

Jana Cunningham: Yeah, I agree. So what makes up audience patterns when it comes to news consumption?  

Jake Nelson: Do you mean like what are some examples of?  

Jana Cunningham: Yeah, some examples.  

Jake Nelson: Or what are the factors that shape them?  

Jana Cunningham: I would say, what are some examples of their, when it comes to news consumption?  

Jake Nelson: So I think that the ones that I am constantly sort of showing my students and sort of demonstrate to them how much people's audience patterns are outside of journalist control are when people are listening to the news or listening to media, when people are watching news or watching media, and when people are on their computers. So people tend to be listening to the news or listening to media between the hours of like 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. weekday mornings, which I assume that you probably know the reason why, which is drive time. Exactly. Yeah, they're driving to or from work. And what's interesting is that during COVID, that audio time really went down. And in its place, you saw people were spending a lot more time watching TV. And the reason why was because people were locked in their houses. So the short answer to your question is that people's patterns of media consumption are really shaped by the structures that comprise their everyday lives, like where do they work? How long is their commute? Are they working from home where they can watch TV? Or are they working in offices where they can, so they're on their computers? Do they have internet access? Is broadband readily available? Those kinds of things. And the one other thing that I would add to that is in an environment that is so saturated with media choices, the big pattern that we see time and time again is that people tend to congregate around things that are already really popular. So even though there are so many, for example, political news outlets that are available, contrary to this idea that we all just try to seclude ourselves in our echo chambers, people still congregate on CNN, on MSNBC, on Fox News. And we could have a conversation about whether those are generalist or whether they're extremist or whatever, but they're very popular. And the reason why is because people tend to associate popularity with quality. And also because, going back to what we were talking about with the New York Times and Washington Post, these main brands have such rich reserves. They can use the money that they have to, you're in marketing, so you'll know game SEO, make themselves appear at the very top of a Google search. They can do A-B headline testing. They can invest serious money in pushing their stuff out at audiences in ways that others can't. 

Jana Cunningham: Oh, definitely. So we talk about how we're so saturated with news outlets now, but that hasn't always been the case because of like, with internet access, social media. So how has a journalist's role evolved over time when it comes to their audience or in relation to how they engage with the public?  

Jake Nelson: Yeah. Yeah. So I think that that's like really the crux of why journalists even feel compelled to talk to their audiences or interact with their audiences in the first place is because for a long time, journalists kind of took for granted that whatever they put out would reach the audience. And this goes back to like the advent of TV when there were just like three channels to choose from. And then at night, people just chose between these three news broadcasts and that was it. The expectation was that you were choosing between three news broadcasts, but you were still watching the news, you know? And journalists can't take that for granted anymore and they haven't been able to for a while. And so as they become more aware of that and the desperation from that becomes more increased, journalists feel like, okay, well then we have to basically market ourselves and then we have to like present ourselves to the audience and persuade them to trust us and persuade them to get their news from us. And so that's where this idea of engagement comes in. And a lot of journalists, I don't know if this is still the case, but when I first started doing this research, really bristled at the idea that they had to engage with their audiences. They were like, what I do is like, is like important, you know, and people should just understand that. And I think journalists, most of them understand that you can't make that case anymore. You can't really get away with that.  

Jana Cunningham: Right. And it's more of, I think, you tell me if this right, the pressure to engage with the audience is put on the individual journalists, not necessarily like the newsroom as a whole, not like their main Twitter feed. It's more of the journalists individually. Like you need to go out and get people to read our news content. 

Jake Nelson: Yeah. Yeah. I think that's absolutely right. And I think what's really interesting about that, I mean, I think it's really unfair. For sure. I think it's really unfair. And I think it's unfair for two reasons. The first is that, you know, the journalist, as I'm sure you know, journalists are not making very much money right now. And they have a lot that's asked on of them, you know, like they have a ton of work to do just in reporting the news at a time when people, many people don't like journalists, you know, so it's like a tough time to just be in the world as a journalist. On top of that, news organizations are saying it's on you to promote your work and our brand, which is a huge added responsibility. And what I think really compounds things and is really makes this so unfair is that journalists, first of all, experience a ton of antagonism in their engagement, you know, especially if they're doing it on social media, they're trying to interact with the public and people are being really nasty. And, you know, what I found in other research that I've done is that women journalists and journalists of color, they get the worst treatment from members of the public and news organizations who are asking them to put themselves out in front of the public are not really giving them much in the way of resources or support to help them navigate those challenges. And in fact, they're actually often getting mad at their journalists when those journalists say or do things on social media that lead members of the public to accuse the brand of being biased. You know, hey, your journalist said something that makes me think that they might be liberal. And therefore, I can't trust your news organization anymore unless you fire this person or punish them in some way. And it's just like a really tough spot to put journalists in. 

Jana Cunningham: Absolutely. So what are some of the key takeaways or I guess recommendations you have or that you state in the book that journalists and news organizations can do to navigate this kind of evolving space they're in? 

Jake Nelson: Yeah, well, I think the big one, the big one really is that like, I kind of, I would love for journalists to like cut themselves some slack, you know, like, I feel like it's been, you know, I graduated from journalism school in 2010. And since then, you know, like, I, when I first graduated, I internalized this idea that it's all on the journalist to solve these problems, you know, like, we need to fix things we need, it's all on us. And I think that that's just really unrealistic and unfair. And I think that journalists would do well to like, acknowledge that, like, there are things that they can do to improve their relationships with the public. But journalists by themselves, you know, just by virtue of doing really good work, that is not going to solve journalism's problems. I think that that high quality work, you know, along with like, an important and overdue conversation about like, what that work should look like, you know, like, how important should objectivity be as a norm in journalism at a point where there's so much polarization in this country, and where it seems many people actually respond better to people being like themselves rather than, you know, and like being like, authentic and genuine as compared to sort of like the buttoned up, like, I am the professional, you know, like, maybe it's time to sort of revisit that. But in addition to all that, I think that there needs to be a serious investment in how news sites actually present the news, you know, like what these sites do to make the experience of being on a news organization's web page, right, better, you know, that requires money. And that means that we need to have another conversation about funding journalism. So there's a book that I point to at the end of my book, that's written by Victor Picard. It's all about making the case for publicly supported journalism, you know, for journalism that is basically taxpayer subsidized, right. And it's one of those things that it's like, 20 years ago, it sounded like an insane idea. 10 years ago, it sounded like still a really crazy idea. I feel like increasingly, it's like, maybe we could do that, you know, like, we're just it's like, we're just desperate enough to try anything, you know, let's advocate for that. I do feel like if we're, if we want to meaningfully improve journalism, then journalism organizations need to have the revenue that they need. And that means that we need to figure out a funding model that actually works.  

Jana Cunningham: And people need to just understand the value of local journalism. 

Jake Nelson: Yeah.  

Jana Cunningham: And how important it is. 

Jake Nelson: Exactly. Yeah. 

Jana Cunningham: So for my final question, a little off topic, the final question that I'm asking everyone this season, what does this world know now, because of your research that they didn't know before? 

Jake Nelson: That's a fun question. I guess my hope is that the world, and by world, I mean, you know, the 12 academics that read this and the half dozen journalists that hopefully read it, know that journalists alone cannot solve journalism's problems. And that the relationship between journalists and the public is not just based on one's interactions with the others, that there are these external factors that play a really pivotal role in shaping that relationship as well. 

Jana Cunningham: Hello. Thank you for joining me on Humanities Radio. I'm Jana Cunningham with the University of Utah College of Humanities, and this season, I'll be in discussion with professors from across our college about their latest book publications.

Jana Cunningham: I'm with Avery Holton, professor of communication, to discuss two of his upcoming books, The Paradox of Connection: How Digital Media is Transforming Journalistic Labor, and Fostering a Culture of Well-Being in Journalism. Welcome, Professor Holton.

Avery Holton: Thanks for having me.

Jana Cunningham: So first up, let's chat about The Paradox of Connection. Before we kind of launch into some questions, can you just kind of give an overview of the book and what kind of encouraged you or motivated you to explore this specific topic?

Avery Holton: Yeah, of course. This is a co-edited book that's been in the works for about five years, and really the central theme of the book is trying to understand and explore how journalists and other media workers have handled changes brought about by social media and digital media, and what it really means today to be burned out, and can you recover from that? Can you do something to prevent that? And some of the strategies that journalists are using can be really helpful now for others, and those include just taking micro breaks, moving across platforms, trying new things every now and again, but really trying to figure out a balance between the personal and professional in these spaces before they become too much.

Jana Cunningham: So how has digital media impacted and changed the way journalists connect with their audience?

Avery Holton: Yeah, you know, when social media really started to grow around 2008, 9, 10, journalists were among the first to hop in and start trying to connect with audiences, looking for sources, looking for video coverage of events that were tough to get to, those sorts of things. But it's moved to a point where audiences expect journalists to be responsive. They expect a conversation, they want to know that they're not talking to a news bot, they expect some sort of opinion every now and again, even though journalists traditionally are supposed to be neutral and objective. Those things have been traded out for engagement, which can be a really good thing to connect with audiences and build community, but it can also be a perilous thing, and it puts journalists in a position where audiences at any given point can harass them, can find information out about them, their locations, and we've seen this happen with online and offline harassment. It also puts journalists in a position where they should be, according to audiences and maybe even their news organizations, covering the news and sort of being on quote unquote, 24 seven, which makes it really tough.

Jana Cunningham: So in your book, you discuss and I know you kind of mentioned this a little bit in the beginning, you address and explore some of the various aspects of journalists connection and disconnection from social media. Can you explore those a little bit further?

Avery Holton: Yeah, of course. So today we see journalists connecting to get to the connection part, to build community on social media spaces, to share maybe their brand, if they're covering sports or politics, to look for sources, even in some cases to help with misinformation or to decrease political polarization. So there's some helpful tactics in connection and some are expected. Journalists are expected to be in these spaces now and expected to be tinkering with technology like the podcast that we're doing right now. The disconnection side though comes when journalists are facing burnout through these tougher work conditions, these work hazards, like harassment, like long hours, like in some cases, low pay, like poor security or trauma measures for journalists covering difficult events like we see right now with the conflict, the global conflict we see. So journalists are having to make decisions on what that disconnection looks like. Do they sort of turn off the lights for a little bit? You know, maybe at nine o'clock at night, the social media goes off and it's family time. What risk comes with that? May they miss something? Do they take extended breaks for weeks at a time from social and digital media to sort of help recharge the batteries and come back? Or is it too late? And do they exit from the profession? We've seen a number of journalists, high profile in some cases, exit journalism and tell us why on social media platforms and sometimes saying it's the very platform itself. Twitter now called X, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, that caused that departure.

Jana Cunningham: So is it more of the feedback they're getting from their followers that is causing the burnout? Or is it just one of the facts that they just simply have to be on and doing it all of the time?

Avery Holton: Yeah, that's a great question. It's a combination of those ingredients of, you know, 15 years ago, journalists didn't have to be on all the time. They could go home and disconnect. The engagement they might have with the audience other than having a source or receiving an image on social media was really the same as it always was. Letters to the editors, call-ins, emails. It's not like that anymore. Journalists have to be on all the time because the global news cycle is 24-7. And they might miss something. Their news organization might fall behind. When they're on in those spaces, though, they put themselves in direct connection with audiences for better or for worse. And audiences are people. Some of them are great and just want to connect, comment, engage. Others have political agendas, ideological agendas, trolling agendas that can really cause harm for journalists. And that harm comes in the form of harassment that often cases starts off small, is what we would call acute, but in some cases becomes chronic. The same person doing the same harassing or the same person making threats that take a toll on the psyche of journalists.

Jana Cunningham: And so what are some of the key takeaways when journalists read this book? What are some of the key takeaways?

Avery Holton: One, that journalists aren't alone. This is a global network. Journalists now more than ever are breaking free of the stigma around issues of harassment and burnout. Just a few years ago, journalists across a multitude of global studies said, well, we don't want to talk about burnout. We don't want to talk about disconnection because we might get fired or we might be seen as weaker than other journalists. That's flipped. And a lot of that has flipped because of the research being done and amplifying the needs and wants of these journalists. But some of it is just for sustainability of the industry. If the industry is going to be sustained, journalism and news organizations want to keep functioning, in many cases profitably, they have to take care of their most valuable asset, and that's journalists. And journalists are saying more and more, pay attention to our well-being, pay attention to our mental health and wellness. And news organizations, like they've always been, are slow to uptake these changes, but to their credit, they're starting to do that.

Jana Cunningham: Right. And this, I mean, this literally leads us into your next book, which is called Fostering a Culture of Well-Being for Journalism. So kind of talk about how this book connects with the one that we were just talking about.

Avery Holton: Yeah, this book is awesome. So this book is, you can tell it's my favorite of the two, though they're both great. Everybody should get a copy. But this one is more about the happiness of journalism and what makes journalists happy. And again, this is a co-edited, co-authored book, and we sought journalists and journalism scholars from all over the globe. So this is a global perspective to explore what safety looks like for journalists, what trauma looks like, what trauma response looks like, what happiness looks like for individual journalists, for journalists working in newsrooms, for journalists who are being creative, coders, hackers, those creating AI. So we get a holistic sense of really what makes people who are deciding to be in this industry happy, what helps them stay, what makes them feel supported. And that's really important because, like we talked about with the Paradox of Connection book, journalists' mental health and well-being is at an all-time low. And if we can understand what makes them happy professionally and even personally in some ways, then we can understand and news organizations can better understand how to support them.

Jana Cunningham: So what's the impact of not addressing these stressors, both for the journalists and for the news outlet they work for?

Avery Holton: The number one impact we've seen is burnout, right? And that's across almost any profession. If you're not happy and you're doing difficult work for either low pay or in difficult positions and you feel stigmatized or othered or on the periphery, you start to feel burnout and question why you're there. So journalists who aren't happy, journalists who feel like their only out is to leave the profession, really is something that news organizations should be paying attention to because with newspapers and other legacy media going online in the early 2000s, then shifting to these digital and social media platforms, we saw a drawback in the number of journalists. But now we're seeing a case where news organizations, including many startups, are looking for journalists, want skilled journalists to come in and they can't find them now because many of the journalists who were part of that exodus over the last couple of decades figured out, well, they can be happier in another profession. They can have a nine to five, not a nine to nine. They can have an HR system that supports them or provides mental health and wellness structures for them. And so they see those things and decide to stay away from the profession. There are other studies now indicating journalists who return to the profession do so not out of a pursuit of happiness, but out of a pursuit of justice or a pursuit of sharing information or truth. And they feel like they're putting themselves in harm's way when they return. And that's something we didn't see 15 or 20 years ago. We saw journalists who might leave because of a family situation for a couple years and return just because it made them happy to be at a sporting event covering that or talking to politicians or working in the community. Now there's this layer of responsibility that has taken over the happiness factor of journalism.

Jana Cunningham: Is this kind of trickling down to students? Like are students, are your journalism students aware that this potential burnout could possibly come their way if they go into journalism?

Avery Holton: Yeah. We talk about, I mean, it's one of the first things that we talk about with our students are the precarities of journalism or any media job so that they're aware, right? Because sometimes the profession can still seem shiny and big, and there are some difficult layers to go through. What's really cool about students, both college students, high school, and even middle school students that we've engaged with, is one, they're really interested in picking apart misinformation. They're very interested in working with new technology like AI. They're highly engaged civic citizens, meaning they want to cover hard issues like politics, like global economics, like climate change, and they're excited about those issues. And that's a fantastic turn in journalism. So all along the way we're talking about these precarities. We have other journalists come and engage. Our students have multiple internships and experiential opportunities so they can feel that. But what we also talk about is figuring out what will make you happy in these positions, much like the happiness book, that you now have agency as a student or as an incoming journalist to help news organizations understand what is going to work for sustainable journalism. You can also work for yourself. You can work for our alternative media outlets. You don't have to just be a reporter, right? You can be a data analyst. You can be an AI creator, a tinker of sorts. And these are jobs too that we're seeing more and more happiness in that allow creative control, a level of autonomy that journalists used to experience 30 years ago and currently don't. Our students now can return to that, if not demand that, and that gives them power and agency when they go out into the journalism market.

Jana Cunningham: Okay. And so is that something you explore in the book about what current journalists can do to benefit their well-being?

Avery Holton: We do. We talk, or I should say the authors of the book, because again, this is 20 plus chapters in the happiness book from other global journalists. This curated collection, almost every chapter talks about a prescriptive. What can be done? What can you do? Some of that are those disconnection strategies we talked about, but others are making sure that you're pursuing topics that are of interest to you. Why cover politics if your passion is food? Why cover food if your passion is automotive? Really pursuing those passions and then being able to tell the story you want to tell on the appropriate platform, so if you're telling a story about Taylor Swift, is the appropriate platform a print article or is it creating a cool podcast? Is it streaming? Is it creating some sort of visual series? What will help you get there? And that's what we teach our students here, those skills and critical thinking. But in the book, these journalists and these journalism researchers say, yes, do all those things, but don't forget your identity. So when you're in these social media spaces, don't just become a journalist. Make sure that you're finding a pathway to be who you want to be, whether that is a father, a son, a mother, a daughter, a hobbyist, a volleyball player, a runner, whatever that is, make sure you're embedding that identity in these spaces too, so that you don't get lost.

Jana Cunningham: And have you seen within this book or within, I guess I should say, within your research or your co-authors' research, have you seen any news outlets who are approaching this successfully, who are actually very considerate of their journalist's well-being? Have you found that yet?

Avery Holton: What we found more are centers and institutions that are amplifying these messages. So one is called DART, and it's a center institution that really is focused on helping journalists who've experienced trauma and war coverage or safety issues, but they've taken up the task now of mental health and wellness and getting information out to news organizations to say, hey, beyond HR, telling somebody who is clearly going through a crisis to take a breather or to go have a glass of wine or go do some yoga, to really help coach these journalists and connect them with one another. And while that's happening, and while news organizations are sort of figuring out ways to work in this space, something really cool is happening on the inside of journalism, and it's journalists, both in the book and beyond, are telling us that they are connecting again with one another in these social media spaces. They're forming what would amount to support groups, where they talk about ways to combat trolling. They talk about ways to handle harassment, both from other journalists and audiences. They talk about disconnection strategies with one another, so they can feel that they're not alone. They can be autonomous and set some of their own boundaries and be creative, but they also have a connected community that's out there and really is just a click away on Instagram or Threads or X or Blue Sky or whatever it might be.

Jana Cunningham: And so have you found any of the journalists that after kind of engaging in these different, like finding a community or looking for other resources, have you found some journalists that actually decided to stay in their profession rather than calling it quits?

Avery Holton: Yeah, we have an ongoing study right now that hopefully will be part of another book, an extension of this, where journalists, specific for the study, journalists covering sports in major markets, so think about Major League Baseball or the National Football League or the National Basketball Association, that these journalists are experiencing harassment, that they're thinking about disconnection strategies, they're worried about burnout, but because they have one another, they're able to talk about how to handle harassment. Because they have one another, they might have Zoom calls or local meetups when they're in town to just decompress and to feel that community. And they've also come up with strategies on their own that work around, in some cases, the policies of their news organizations that include, in many cases now, confronting harassers online. So as an example, if someone receives an awful message in their DMs, instead of just letting that go or trying to report it to the news organization, in these cases, they're taking screenshots of that, sharing it and calling out not only the harasser, but sending it to their family and friends, saying, this is the person that you love, look what they're doing. And that sort of shaming technique is just one approach that's working, but at the same time, it puts journalists in this really precarious position, right? When you share information like that, that comes to you from someone, what are they going to do? What is their reaction going to be either online or offline? And how is your news organization going to respond to this? Are you going to get fired because you took up for yourself or because of the approach you took didn't align with the values of the news organization? So it's always still this kind of precarious balance between what journalists can do, what they should do, what they shouldn't do. But that community structure that started building back up is extremely important for journalists.

Jana Cunningham: So it sounds like it's really kind of at this point, up to the journalists themselves to find their path to well-being. What advice or I guess, what recommendation do you have for the actual news organizations to for their journalists in order to keep their journalists in order to support their well-being? And so journalists don't have to go out and find it themselves.

Avery Holton: Yeah, it's beyond time to step up, right? And that's one of the conclusions that both of these books draw is that news organizations have begun to do some work, but it's not enough. Acknowledging journalists and their pleas for help with mental health and wellness, with hours, with pay is a good step. Developing policy is a good second step. Now long-term sustained action and accountability should follow that. And some organizations are beginning to do that and signal to journalists, this isn't a individual issue. This is a systemic issue that either our news organization needs to fix or all of journalism as a profession needs to fix. And we see these calls coming out from the Society of Professional Journalists and other groups that advocate for journalists, and we're starting to hear it more from the journalists themselves. News organizations should be next.

Jana Cunningham: Okay. And so kind of jumping a little bit off topic, my last question, the same question I ask every single person at the end of each podcast is, what does the world know now because of your research that they didn't know before?

Avery Holton: These books combined really help us peel back the implications of social media use in our everyday lives, right? Just like journalists, most of us are using, whether forced by our jobs or our friends or peer pressure, or just because we want to, we're using social media and we're on our phones and we're in front of computers and other devices more than we ever have been. In some cases now kiddos are in front of these devices 10 or 12 hours a day. It's part of our lives. It's braided into our lives. What does that mean for our personal wellness? What does it mean for our emotional well-being? What does it mean when we want to disconnect? And ultimately, what does it mean to be happy with these digital and social media spaces in our lives?

Benjamin Cohen:

So this was the sensation of the moment. And so people in not only in Hyderabad and Lucknow, were following the story, but in Calcutta, which was then India's Colonial Capital and in London were reading verbatim transcripts from what people said each day in the trial. And so that spread the rumors and the testimony, whether true or false, about Ellen, all the way back to London and all across India.

Jana Cunningham:

Hello. Thank you for joining me on Humanities Radio. I'm Janet Cunningham with the University of Utah College of Humanities, and this season I'm in discussion with professors from across our college about their book publications. I'm currently sitting here with Benjamin Cohen, professor of history, to discuss his book, An Appeal to the Ladies of Hyderabad: Scandal in Raj, which tells the dramatic story of an elite couple's fall from society in 19th century India that set the benchmark for Victorian scandals. Welcome Professor Cohen.

Benjamin Cohen:

Thank you.

Jana Cunningham:

So first, I want to say as I'm reading this book in my head, I'm picturing the Netflix series of this book because it has all the makings of like a limited series drama.

Benjamin Cohen:

Thanks. I agree. I hope that maybe someone from Netflix is listening or from Hollywood or Bollywood would be lovely.

Jana Cunningham:

Because it has all the things. It has scandal, it has elites of society, it has lies and bombshells and just anything that could make you just draw you into this series. I can just picture in my head every single series or every single episode just ending with this massive bombshell that we'll talk about in this.

Benjamin Cohen:

Okay.

Jana Cunningham:

So just as an introduction, I want to hear from you about what fascinated you enough about this scandal and this story that motivated you to write the book.

Benjamin Cohen:

I think when I first came across the story, it struck me as a very human tale of love and also of the rise and fall of this couple in colonial India. And it was also a story that historians of India had ignored or had swept under the carpet. And so I wanted to bring back the story and the voices of Mehdi Hasan and Ellen Donnelly.

Jana Cunningham:

When were you first introduced? When did you find out about this story about Mehdi and Ellen?

Benjamin Cohen:

So I was a graduate student in history at the University of Wisconsin Madison, and my advisor was retiring while I was still at Madison. And he was cleaning out his office and he gave me a bundle of xeroxed pages and he said, "Oh, you're working on Hyderabad. This might be interesting to you." And I eventually read it and was introduced to the story of Mehdi and Ellen through that bundle. Those pages were the court transcript. And so from that I worked backward to understand how we got to that court case and then forward after the court case to find out what befell Mehdi and Ellen.

Jana Cunningham:

So give us just a brief kind of overview and then we'll kind of get into these more specific questions. So just to familiarize everyone with who Mehdi and Ellen are.

Benjamin Cohen:

Yeah, so this is really a love story and it's between a relatively poor North Indian Muslim man named Mehdi Hasan and an Indian born Christian woman of British heritage named Ellen Donnelly. And they met in North India in the City of Lucknow, midway through the second part of the 19th century. And they got married and then they moved south to the City of Hyderabad where Mehdi Hasan enjoyed a just skyrocketing career. And they became quite the social couples circulating both within Indian and British circles in Hyderabad. They then went off to London and met the Queen. And when they got back the people of Hyderabad, a few people were fed up with Mehdi Hasan's success and wrote a very nasty short pamphlet, unable to say anything bad about Mehdi Hasan, they went after Ellen and said quite terrible things about her. And then there was a court case and then that led to the last part of their lives.

Jana Cunningham:

So let's kind of start from the beginning. When Mehdi and Ellen got married, their marriage was seen as a bit controversial, right?

Benjamin Cohen:

Right.

Jana Cunningham:

And so why was that?

Benjamin Cohen:

If Mehdi and Ellen were here, they would say that it was a love marriage and there was nothing controversial about it at all. At this time in India, interracial marriages were not uncommon, especially amongst sort of the lower stratum of the class society, that is people who are not elites. And neither Mehdi nor Ellen were elites. And so they got married and she converted from Christianity to Islam, which again was not that uncommon and proceeded to live as husband and wife for a few years in North India before their luck changed and they moved to the South.

Jana Cunningham:

So what motivated them to move from Lucknow to Hyderabad, and how did this choice contribute to their future problems?

Benjamin Cohen:

So at the time, we have to think of India, there are really two Indias at this time, in the latter part of the 19th century. There is directly controlled India, which included Lucknow, and that is that the British, that part of India was directly administered by the British. And then about a third of the Indian subcontinent was indirectly controlled by the British. And this is where the native princes and chiefs still held some degree of sovereignty over their states. These were the princely states.

Hyderabad, where Mehdi and Ellen end up in the middle part of their lives was India's largest princely state, 82,000 square miles, which is about the same size as France, and also happens to be the same size as Utah. So it's not a small place. And the prime minister of Hyderabad was on tour in North India and was recruiting young men who had been educated in British run schools to come to the South and to help him administer Hyderabad state. It was felt that those individuals with that British inflected education would be better bureaucrats. And so Mehdi Hasan was recruited to come to the south and he and Ellen got on a train and that's what they did.

Jana Cunningham:

And you said a little bit earlier that he quickly rose through the ranks and they became part of this kind of elite society. So can you talk about his quick rise and how it may have angered a few people?

Benjamin Cohen:

Yeah, that's exactly right. He starts as a low level bureaucrat. He becomes like a local city judge and eventually works his way up to being chief justice of Hyderabad's high court. And after that goes even onto one administrative position higher. And from everything that my research showed, he was a pretty upright and competent administrator and practitioner of the law. And while he is coming up in Hyderabad circles, Ellen comes out of purdah. She had maintained the Muslim tradition in South Asia of staying in purdah. She comes out of purdah and she sort of wanders away from Islam and seems to have gone to church a few times and comes back into a Western Christian mode. And so the two of them are this power couple. He's a young Muslim man on the rise, and she's circulating now with the British women and British men who are living in Hyderabad, who are part of the British presence and Hyderabad.

And they cross-fertilize each other's social calendars. So because of his background and his position, they're invited to the Nizam of Hyderabads palace and the prime minister's palace. And they're circulating on the one hand in that Indian milieu. And because of her British heritage and sort of wandering back to Christianity, she and thus he, are invited to the British residency, which is where the local British official, the seat of power is. And they go to the club and they circulate in that circle and they rise up the social ladder. And then when he's called to the bar in London, and so they go off to Europe and it's when he gets back that the local Hyderabadies are frustrated with his success. And so they circulate the pamphlet.

Jana Cunningham:

And so then in 1892, this seven page, eight page, pamphlet gets distributed to kind of all the elites in society, titled An Appeal to the Ladies of Hyderabad. And it's passed around. And so kind of discuss everything that it details, which is a lot, and kind of the chaos that it created for Mehdi and Ellen.

Benjamin Cohen:

Yeah. So there's one copy of this pamphlet left in the whole world, and I was very privileged to find it.

Jana Cunningham:

Oh my gosh.

Benjamin Cohen:

On the last day of a research trip overseas. And when I found it, I knew I could write the book because this was the keystone for the whole story. So the pamphlet tells or makes about five accusations. First it says that as a young woman, Ellen had been a prostitute in Lucknow. Second, it says That Mehdi and Ellen, or that she had been, after working as a sort of common prostitute, she had become a kept woman, sort of an advanced prostitute and was kept by several local men in Lucknow.

Third, the pamphlet says that Mehdi and Ellen in fact never got married. And in the court case there was some controversy about who was actually at the wedding. So that the accusation there are the insinuation is that this was an illegitimate couple and they were passing themselves off as respectable and as married.

The fourth accusation is that once they got to Hyderabad, that Mehdi Hasan no less than pimped his wife to some of the local Hyderabad officials where she bestowed her services for them. And then the last accusation was that some of the local Hyderabad officials who had also come from North India knew about this and they covered the whole thing up. And so there was a coverup as well as the accusations about what she had been and what she had done.

Jana Cunningham:

And so through your research, what are the intentions of this author or authors of this pamphlet? Was it just to take the couple down?

Benjamin Cohen:

Yeah, I think so. There is a strong sense in Hyderabad and in that region of India called the Deccan, of being a local. And being a local and being part of that local community, that sense is really strong and Hyderabad in particular. And the locals were threatened and annoyed and irritated with this North Indian, who was not a local and his white wife who showed up and then rose through the ranks. And they wanted to bring him down. And since they couldn't find anything that he had done wrong, no bribery, no corruption, seems to have been a fairly competent administrator and judge and whatnot, they went after Ellen and that was what did them in.

Jana Cunningham:

And so what do you know about the authors? Because they have some very specific detailed information that not a lot of people... I mean either if it's a rumor, if it was true, not very many people are going to know. So what do you know about who authored the pamphlet?

Benjamin Cohen:

Yeah. It was never clear throughout, over a decade of research if there was one or in fact multiple authors. And what I think happened is that a small group of people who knew Mehdi and Ellen from their Lucknow days got together in Hyderabad this time and wrote up the pamphlet and different people probably contributed different ideas or bits of information, whether true or not. And they stitched it together in a narrative and that was the pamphlet.

Jana Cunningham:

And so now Mehdi is mad obviously, and he can't figure out who has written this pamphlet. So he goes to the printer of the pamphlet and pursues legal action against him. And there's this huge drawn out, what was it, nine months?

Benjamin Cohen:

Yeah, it's a over nine month trial.

Jana Cunningham:

... of this trial. And it is full of just bombshells and witness information. So tell me, what were some of the key points and what were those most turbulent moments?

Benjamin Cohen:

I think one of the witnesses who came to Hyderabad and testified against Mehdi and Ellen was a man named James Lachlan. And Lachlan takes the stand and in a bombshell moment announces that he had in fact been married to Ellen when she was younger, in their Lucknow days, and that which no one seemed to have known in Hyderabad. And not only had he been married to Ellen, but he broke off the marriage when he caught her in an incestuous act with her father. At that point the marriage was dissolved. I think that moment was one of the bombshells. As I read through the court transcript, it was an oh my gosh moment.

Jana Cunningham:

Absolutely.

Benjamin Cohen:

I think the second moment that was more moving was at the very end of the witnesses after nine months, Ellen herself takes the stand, and she of course denied all of the accusations and talked in really loving terms about her marriage to Mehdi Hasan and what that looked like. And so it was so gratifying to hear her voice in that court case. And you can imagine that when she entered the courtroom, everyone's head turned.

Jana Cunningham:

Silence.

Benjamin Cohen:

And there must've been a lot of whispering and pointing. And then she takes the stand and the trial transcript, you really feel the moment when that happened. And I think that was for me, a really special part of that document.

Jana Cunningham:

As you're reading through the trial, it is just all about her and witness after witness just dragging her through the mud and nothing really about Mehdi.

Benjamin Cohen:

Right, right. And this was for the purposes of the pamphlet. This was about her as a way to get to him. And so you do have witnesses, not only James Lachlan, but other witnesses who testify to making love with her on the roof in Lucknow and then exchanging money and gifts for that experience.

Jana Cunningham:

This is also being recorded dail,y as in printed in the news outlets daily on the updates of the trial. So everyone's following it.

Benjamin Cohen:

Absolutely. At this time, newspapers in India and courtrooms in India were open. And so this was the sensation of the moment. And so people in not only in Hyderabad and Lucknow were following the story, but in Calcutta, which was then India's colonial capital and in London, were reading verbatim transcripts from what people said each day in the trial. And so that spread the rumors and the testimony, whether true or false, about Ellen all the way back to London and all across India.

Jana Cunningham:

And so what was the result of the trial?

Benjamin Cohen:

Well, at the end, the judge, after sitting for nine months and listening to everyone's testimony, basically said to Mehdi Hasan and the prosecution that they hadn't proved their point and he dismissed the case. But as you pointed out, with the testimony being broadcast everywhere, their reputations were ruined. So that was the end of their... any hope for them for redemption in Hyderabad.

Jana Cunningham:

So they move out of Hyderabad.

Benjamin Cohen:

Right. Within days of the trial ending, they're back on a train heading north.

Jana Cunningham:

And what becomes of them?

Benjamin Cohen:

Well, Mehdi Hasan goes back... they both go back to Lucknow where their lives as a couple had started, and Mehdi Hasan practices law for a while, and near the end of his life gets involved with the Indian National Congress. And the Congress party is a political party and a movement that eventually Mahatma Gandhi leads, and it's the party that takes India to independence. But Mehdi Hasan, earlier in his life was dead set against India's independence and thought that the Congress and the idea of getting rid of the British Empire in India was a terrible idea. And so you see him change over the course of his life to come around to being a tepid supporter of Congress. He dies relatively young and they had no children. And so Ellen is left alone in North India. She slides deeper and deeper into poverty. I found letters from her where she's trying to sell her jewelry, which is an indication of how bad things got. She has sisters who are scattered around the globe and she's trying to go and stay with them, but she's never able to. And finally she dies alone from the flu.

Jana Cunningham:

And it's so sad. But this couple who they kind of in the beginning, oh, their marriage is false and they're this and that, and they stay together this entire time.

Benjamin Cohen:

Right. It was interesting to me to think about that, that either one of them could have walked out. They could have said, "This is too much." Or if Mehdi Hasan believed the accusations, or if Ellen thought that Mehdi was the problem in the marriage, or if there had been a problem, they could have walked away. It would've been possible, but they stuck it out. And to her dying day, she signed her letters, Mrs. Mehdi Hasan, which I thought was a remarkable testament to love, which I think what this is really about.

Jana Cunningham:

Because I can't imagine having to go through that trial and just sticking it out and staying together because they faced so much, and they were like the top of society for a while. And then at the very, very bottom.

Benjamin Cohen:

Right.

Jana Cunningham:

So one question that just, I know you're a historian and it is based on fact, but I would love to know, who do you think wrote the pamphlet?

Benjamin Cohen:

I think it was a man named Vasu Devarao, who is a local Hyderabady who had friends in the circles that were opposed to Mehdi Hasan. And I think he was the most likely person to have written it, but I think it was co-authored by him and some others. But there were some newspaper accounts after the trial was settled that pointed a finger pretty clearly at Vasu Devarao.

Jana Cunningham:

So with every podcast, I end with the same question, so it can be related to the conversation we just had. It can be unrelated. What does this world know now because of your research that they didn't know before for?

Benjamin Cohen:

It's a great question and I'm happy to take a stab at answering it. I think at one level, this was a story that had been either forgotten or intentionally hidden away by those who were involved or those who were affected by the story of Mehdi and Ellen. And so it was an opportunity for me as a scholar and as a historian to give them their voice back. And I tried very hard to bring their voices through the narrative and let them speak.

At the same time, it was also, as an academic, a contribution to scholarship on race in South Asia. It's certainly a story of class and that both Mehdi and Ellen started from very humble origins, and as you said, went all the way up and then all the way back down the arc of financial success, is a story in some ways, much about gender and about what it meant to be a woman, an Indian born white woman who was fluent in Urdu, the language of Lucknow and of Hyderabad and the attack on her position as a woman and what that meant. And also, his manliness was questioned. There were a lot of questions about his virility and his manliness. So it's an intervention in gender studies in some way. And then stepping back, their lives are set in colonial South Asia, which is a story about power. And then at the end of the day, like at the beginning, this was a story about love. And so I think that it's a love story that it was worth telling.

Jana Cunningham:

I think we were talking about this before we began recording, and that this book... you're a historian and you're an academic, but this book is really targeted towards anyone because the story just goes on and on and on. But everyone can understand it. I personally loved the book and I followed it word for word. And I would encourage anyone who's interested in this scandalous love story to really pick up this book and learn about this, because it also offers, at least when I was reading it, thinking about how would this scandal play out today? What parts would happen, what would not be allowed, what would I be reading about on Twitter or X as it's called?

Benjamin Cohen:

Yeah, thank you for that. I very much wrote the book for a popular audience. I had enjoyed a lot, success as an academic historian. But this story and the story of Mehdi and Ellen seemed too good to bog down, if you will, with academic jargon and heavy theory. And I published bits of the story and other things elsewhere. But when sat I down to write, I envisioned my ideal reader. And that was not a fellow professional historian or a university professor. It was a much bigger public that I was targeting. And so if it made sense to you and anyone else who read it, then I'm really happy.

Jana Cunningham:

And it obviously feels very research academic because there's a lot of transcripts from the pamphlet from letters and from the court trial. And so I think that's one of the things that makes it so interesting, is actual fact. But it's put in a story that is just so interesting and engaging that I think anyone can really enjoy.

Benjamin Cohen:

Yeah, thank you. I traveled the world to do the research for this book, and holding the letters from Ellen in my hand, written in sort of a shaky black fountain pen ink on light blue heavy stationary was really one of the highlights of my professional research career. And so I feel really honored and privileged to have had the chance to find the story, courtesy of my advisor, and then have the opportunity to tell it and share it with the bigger public.

Jana Cunningham:

That was Benjamin Cohen, professor of history. For more information about the University of Utah College of Humanities, please visit humanities.utah.edu. And don't forget to subscribe to Humanities Radio.

Elijah Millgram: 

I said these answers were going to be incompatible. The first answer was, all the different styles are because Nietzsche is out of control and he can't help it. 

Jana Cunningham: 

Right. 

Elijah Millgram: 

And the other answer is, well, it's this exercise of imitating other genres that requires an enormous amount of control. How can those both be true? 

Jana Cunningham: 

Hello. Thank you for joining me on Humanities Radio. I'm Jana Cunningham, with the University of Utah College of Humanities. And this season I'm in discussion with professors from across our college about their latest book publications. I'm with Elijah Millgram, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, to discuss his book, Why Didn't Nietzsche Get His Act Together?, which argues for a new framework for making sense of Nietzsche that transforms the way we read him. 

First of all, thank you for taking the time to chat with me, Professor Millgram. 

Elijah Millgram: 

Thanks for having me. 

Jana Cunningham: 

So I would like to just start off with you providing us with an overview of your book and what motivated you to explore this topic. 

Elijah Millgram: 

Okay. So I have the view that philosophers should engage themselves with the question of the meaning of life. And in my world, I have to acknowledge that's a minority opinion. 

Jana Cunningham: 

Okay. 

Elijah Millgram: 

And at some point I found myself thinking that what a meaning for your life does for you, I mean, what use it is to you, depends on how you're put together. If you wanted a fancy phrase for that, you could say the architecture of your personality. And so I started looking around for, okay, I also think that if you're thinking about the meaning of life, you should do it by looking at actual lives. 

Jana Cunningham: 

Okay. 

Elijah Millgram: 

So imagine you've got somebody who is very, very tightly wired. He's all top down. He's the kind of person who makes decisions, decisions with far out horizons, and he executes them come what may. Actually, Nietzsche has a phrase for people like that. He calls them sovereign individuals. 

Jana Cunningham: 

Okay. 

Elijah Millgram: 

Well, you might think somebody like that when he decides what his life is about, it functions to direct him, his actions, right? And you would sort of expect that someone like this, the meaning of his life would turn out to be some very large project smack in the middle of it. And I went looking around for someone like that. 

I found John Stuart Mill, who was the Victorian philosopher and also political activist. In his case, he really was tightly wired just this way, and the huge project was utilitarianism, which at the time wasn't just an ethical theory, but also a political project. And then I thought, okay, we need to find someone on the other extreme, someone who's really discombobulated, who doesn't make decisions and then execute them, who couldn't possibly do that. And I found Nietzsche. 

Here's the level of discombobulation. He's the kind of person who, when you ask what does he really think, what does he really want, what is he doing, there's no answer. Now of course, we actually do run into people like that in our day-to-day lives, but we don't really bother mostly I think trying to figure them out. We kind of shrug and we deal. But Nietzsche, he shows you that you can be like that, that discombobulated, that much of, okay, I'll use the jargon phrase from my field, that much of a disunified agent, that there isn't an answer to what you think, and still be really smart and really perceptive and really thoughtful and really intelligent. And also, but it's not a coincidence, really desperate. 

And so I started looking at Nietzsche first as an object lesson. Nietzsche didn't just figure out one meaning for his life. He went through a series of them as he, I'm sure many of our listeners know that Nietzsche was quite sick and the sickness had a psychiatric side to it. People argue about what it was, but now a lot of people think maybe it was a tumor in his brain. 

At each lower plateau, he comes up with a different meaning for his life as a way of life management. It's self-help. So it's an object lesson for what a meaning for your life can do for you if you're that fragmented, that discombobulated. But also it turned into an exercise in trying to understand and make sense of somebody like this. And that has two sides to it. For the philosophers, we don't really know how to do that. If you read a book by a philosopher describing the opinions of some dead famous figure, normally they'll tell you what he thought. They'll give you his arguments, they'll give you his theories. They don't know how to read somebody who's so all over the place he doesn't have properly theories that he owns and [inaudible 00:05:53]. 

And it's not just a problem for the philosophers. People who are interested in Nietzsche, they mostly don't know how to read someone like this. Normally what you see, and it's not just non-academics, but people who count themselves as Nietzsche scholars, people have ideas from somewhere and they come to these texts which are little fragments and all over the place, and they kind of project those ideas onto the text. 

And so what I ended up doing in this book, it ended up being kind of a how-to guide. Here's how you read someone like this. And my classroom experience, because I have worked through the material in classes, is it's orientation. And once you have the orientation, you can read each for yourself and find your way to things that maybe I don't discuss and make sense of them and things come together. 

Jana Cunningham: 

Okay. So let's see, I'm trying to think of the first question I want to ask. Why did he write in all of these different fragmented styles? And did he write in the fragmented styles just later in life when maybe he was suffering from an illness, or even before his illness was he writing in these fragmented styles? 

Elijah Millgram: 

Well, let me address that last part of the question first, and then I'll give two answers to the first part, which will sound like they're incompatible. And I think that is interesting actually. So earlier on, people kind of describe these writings as middle period. Nietzsche wrote in fairly fragmentary form, but he was working in a tradition of people like [inaudible 00:07:44], people who would write books of maxims. So it's actually quite controlled, even though it does come in little bite-sized chunks. 

But then, well, let's see, I think I can ... Nietzche addresses the question of why there's so much stylistic variation. And I can find the passage for you. Give me a moment. Yeah, here it is. So Nietzsche's autobiography, the last book he wrote, is Ecce Homo. And the chapter in this book is called Why I Write Such Good Books. And this is the beginning of section four of that chapter. He says, "This is also the point for a general remark about my art of style. To communicate a state in the inward tension of pathos by means of signs, including the tempo of these signs, that's the meaning of every style. And considering that the multiplicity of inward states is exceptionally large in my case, I have many stylistic possibilities, the most multifarious art of style that has ever been at the disposal of one man." 

Here's what Nietzche is telling you in this passage. Remember, he's out of control. He's discombobulated, he's all over the place. He ricochets from one state of himself to the next, at the end of his life when he's writing this book, almost from moment to moment. The stylistic variation is because he can't help it. So that's one answer, but here's a different answer. In the later period, the books I'm mostly discussing [inaudible 00:09:31], each of these books is a very contrived artificial exercise. 

Here's a way to think about initial directions for reading one of these books. They're all positioning themselves in some literary tradition or literary genre. So the first question you ask is, okay, what genre is this book supposed to be in? And there'll be an answer that's given to you right then. And then you're supposed to ask, okay, what kind of person is supposed to write books in this genre? And again, you'll be given the answer right then, and that will take you to the main or one of the main philosophical points the book is making right there. 

And so each book is written in a different style, in the style of that genre. So for example, Zarathustra, which is one of the, it's probably the most widely known of Nietzsche's books to the general public, you ask, what genre is this in? It's obviously holy scripture. It's a book of prophecy from a non-existent religion. So a parody of some kind, right? And sure enough, when you open it up, it kind of reads like it's riffing on maybe it's the Old Testament, maybe it's the New Testament. That's one style. 

And now, I said these answers were going to be incompatible. The first answer was all the different styles are because Nietzsche is out of control and he can't help it. And the other answer is, well, it's this exercise of imitating other genres that requires an enormous amount of control. How can those both be true? 

Okay, so here's why I think it's interesting to have both of those in the same place. We know how to read people who write very controlled work. We know how to understand people who are controlled. And we think if there's no control, you can't get stuff done. Nietzsche is an occasion to think about how can it be that somebody who is that out of control is able to produce the collected works of Friedrich Nietzsche? And that we just assume it can't be both ways is telling us what it is we need to understand. 

Jana Cunningham: 

Wow. So he's writing in all these different forms and all these different styles. So who was the Nietzsche who was writing each of these styles? Was he taking on a different idea persona? Was he kind of a different person, each of these styles? 

Elijah Millgram: 

Okay, once again, I think I need to give you two different answers. Maybe this will be how this conversation will just go, two answers for everything. Okay. So there's this psychiatric answer. Sometimes philosophers who read Aristotle will talk about the form and the matter. So Nietzsche, there's later Nietzsche, right? Think of it as the matter. He's got ideas and they're pretty much, it's not that he doesn't invent new ideas, but they're pretty much constant and he's got arguments and there's different variations on them, and he's got, that's the matter. 

And then as he sort of collapses psychiatrically from one plateau to the next, the configuration, the form changes. It's like a new personality is organized out of the same stuff. Sometimes the personality is dominated by, I'll talk in terms of the way he thinks of it, which maybe we wouldn't fully accept, but there's a single drive which is controlling it all. Sometimes there are a handful of drives which are having, they're fighting over the steering wheel. Sometimes he's so far gone that there's not even that much organization. 

So what you're seeing is, with the exception of Zarathustra, for which there's a somewhat different story, a series of versions of Nietzsche, each of which is the state he collapses into, and then each of which is trying to manage his disintegrating life by philosophical invention. Part of that philosophical invention is crafting a personality, which is the shape. He tells himself stories about who he is, and he presents these persona that he's coming up with as the authors of these books. So in each of these books, he's showing you a new version of himself. And of course at the very last one, he's so disintegrated that you're pretty sure there couldn't be another one. And sure enough, as I'm sure some of the listeners know, he spent about the last decade of his life, it wasn't exactly all in a coma, but he might as well have been in a coma. So that's one answer. 

Here's the other answer. If you think about it, there are two traditions in philosophy that go back a very long way, which are distinguished by what they think the product of philosophizing is. So I was raised in one tradition, which is the dominant tradition today, which goes all the way back to Plato, in which what philosophizing produces is philosophical theories, opinions about subject matter that's philosophical in one way or another. And then there's the other tradition, which goes back even one generation further to Socrates. 

Okay, so I taught some Plato this semester. You read The Republic or whatever. Here's somebody laying out a theory. You go back to the early Platonic dialogues, which people tend to think represent Socrates as he pretty much was, Socrates talks to people, he argues with them about questions like, what's this virtue or that virtue? What's friendship, what's beauty? But they never resolve those questions. There's never an answer. The product of philosophizing is Socrates. And that tradition kind of continues. Well, there's a complicated story about the Hellenistic period, which isn't my space. So anybody who wants that, I'll send them off to Martha Nussbaum. 

But [inaudible 00:16:09] is like this, [inaudible 00:16:10] essays present himself and his writing his way, his presentation of himself is a way of changing who he is, of reworking himself. And there's a book that's almost done. It's on its way out the door, soon I think, about this by Lanier Anderson at Stanford, which I think will be really good. And then there's Nietzsche, Kierkegaard I think is one of these people. You can argue about whether Vichtenstein was one of these people. 

And so when the product of philosophizing is the person, of course there's going to be either a presentation of one person or in these books that Nietzsche wrote, a series of here's me, here's me again, here's me again, because that's the output. 

Jana Cunningham: 

So in all of these different forms and philosophies and everything he's discussing, are there any sort of connecting threads that go through each of his writings? Or are they completely fragmented and different? 

Elijah Millgram: 

So what I was calling the matter, there's a lot of continuity in the matter. This is why philosophers who are not me, who work on Nietzsche, will try to tell you what Nietzsche thought. There's a book out there called What Nietzche Really Said, because they think you can say that. And what lets them think that is the ideas come up again and again. So there is that kind of continuity, but they're all rearranged and they're okay, each time the personality, Nietzsche's personality gets reconfigured, it gives him a new perspective. 

Perspective is actually a technical term for Nietzsche. People have heard that he's a perspectivist. He sees these ideas from a different angle, as it were. And so although there's a lot of continuity, one version of him will see something that the other one didn't notice and is critical and correct something that the other one overlooked. And so although there's a lot of continuity, it's not as though there's one coherent view, which is Nietzsche's theory of this or that. 

Jana Cunningham: 

So would you like a person who's not familiar with Nietzsche, could they read one of his writings, not knowing that it's by him, and then read another one of his writings, not knowing again that it's by him, and see that they're written by the same person? Or would they just think these are two completely different philosophers? 

Elijah Millgram: 

Sometimes it's clear that there's overlap and it's the same person. But I'll give you an indicator of how, okay, so there's a book which remarkably is still sold in bookstores called My Sister and I. This book purports to be by Nietzsche. It's about a third antisemitic rantings, about a third, I guess this must have been what pornography was like in the late 19th century or turn of the 20th century. And about a third of it is announcements that sort of sound like this. Today, I talked to my sister Elizabeth, who was the only one who truly understands me. 

This was accepted as one of Nietzsche's genuine writings until I think sometime in the fifties or sixties when Walter Kaufmann showed it was a forgery. That people could read Nietzsche's books and then read this, which to my eyes looks nothing like anything he would've written, and just said, "Oh, yeah, that's another thing by him," it's hard for people to see the sort of connecting style. 

Jana Cunningham: 

Wow. So he has in his writings, since they're so fragmented and so different, do his philosophies, because he's writing about a lot of different things, do his philosophies align with his own belief system at the time? And are his belief systems changing, or are these not necessarily his own personal belief systems? 

Elijah Millgram: 

Okay, let me, I'll answer that question not quite as you asked it. So if you have somebody who is so discombobulated, so fragmented that there's no answer to what does he believe, he's not going to have a belief system. But now going back to something I was mentioning a lap or two back, okay, there are these two traditions in philosophy. If you're in the theoretical tradition, well, your life might not have a lot to do with your theories because the theories don't have anything to do with life. And anyway, even if they do, it's surprising how often you encounter philosophers, moral philosophers. I won't name any names, but they have views about what's good and what you should do. And then you look at how they live and you go, seriously, this person who said this is doing that? For the theory people, if the life lines up with the ideas, with the views, it's just a coincidence. 

But now in this other tradition, what you're trying to do is create a persona who is yourself. The beliefs, the belief system, if there's a system, but if there's less than a system, then the ideas or whatever, they're not something outside, they're part of the life. So of course, they're crafted or shaped as part of the life. Now, in Nietzsche's case, that's a little bit overstated because he doesn't have enough control to craft his life the way that some of people in this tradition do. 

Rather, he's managing the disintegration of his life, which is maybe a less, and then of course, you expect to find that the views and the ideas and the beliefs, they have a home in the life and they matter because in this case, they're made up, they're produced as a way of keeping himself semi-functional, keeping himself together, getting things done. Of course, they're tightly folded into the life. 

Jana Cunningham: 

So why do some people characterize or view Nietzsche as dangerous? 

Elijah Millgram: 

Maybe I'll give more than two answers to this one. 

Jana Cunningham: 

Okay, perfect. 

Elijah Millgram: 

Well, there's actually a really uninteresting answer that I'll mention to get out of the way, but then there's some interesting answers to that. The uninteresting answer is that Nietzsche is famous for saying, "God is dead." So back in the day, late 19th century, the idea that somebody was an atheist was kind of shocking. And there was a presumption that if you didn't believe in God, you were probably also an anarchist and maybe badly behaved in other ways. And now we're used to people who don't believe in God, and we don't find it shocking and whatever.  

So then there's another historical reason, which is that Nietzsche was appropriated by the Nazis as their philosopher. And when philosophers in the United States after the Second World War wanted to start working on Nietzsche, they kind of had to sanitize him and rehabilitate him. And they did it by, you got him off the hook by saying, well, the Nazis misunderstood him, and they misread him, and they misrepresented him. 

One of the things I do in this book is point out that you can't get Nietzsche off the hook as easily as that. It's a complicated story. So people who want it, I'll just send them to the book. 

Jana Cunningham: 

Okay, perfect. 

Elijah Millgram: 

But now here's another reason that Nietzsche is seen as dangerous, and this is a better reason than both of those. Okay, think about that tradition of philosophy where you create a persona. It's normal, when people do this kind of successfully and charismatically, that they develop groupies. And it never looks good. We remember that when Socrates was put to death by the Athenians, the main charge was corrupting the youth. That's how it looked to people around. 

And it doesn't look any better with Nietzsche. So I've taught Nietzsche for many years in classes, and you'd be surprised in how many classes it turned out that there was someone, always a boy, who had decided that he was the overman, not good. So people see this and they think, okay, Nietzsche is a bad influence, but then worse than that, there's another reason he's dangerous. 

One of the really big ideas that Nietzsche has, Nietzsche thinks values have always in fact been invented. But they've been invented inadvertently or by people who weren't very thoughtful about it. And it's always been one size fits all, same values for everyone. Nietzsche thinks, okay, from here on out, you can in a very self-aware manner produce bespoke tailored values to suit your own life. And there are ways that you can look around and find examples where it comes off looking kind of good. I'll give you two of them. 

If you think about Impressionism, the Impressionists made up values that governed painting in their brief tradition, standards that specified what paintings had to be like, and sort of an ideal they tried to live up to and a taste that went along with it. Or again, Deborah Madison, she's the overman, my hero, right? This is the founding chef of Greens. It's a restaurant in San Francisco. It's a vegetarian restaurant, and Madison, along with a few other people, produced a new cuisine. Again, there's standards, ideals, a taste, things that are ... This is Nietzsche's conception of value. 

But then people who see that this is what Nietzsche is about, they realize that, okay, I guess there's a line you hear in Silicon Valley, "Move fast and break things." People who invent values are liable to move fast and break things. And people think, okay, we need to watch out for this. 

And now there's one more reason I think that Nietzsche is seen as dangerous. I regularly have to remind myself when I'm doing philosophy that there are two things in philosophy that are the hardest things. The second hardest thing is not to anthropomorphize your fellow man. And the hardest thing is not to anthropomorphize yourself. Here's what I mean by that. We have a sort of Saturday morning cartoon version of what a person is, which is, it's the kind of thing I gestured out a little bit earlier on. There's things that people believe, they really believe those things, and then there are things they want. They really want those things. And if you want to understand what they're going to do, what they believe and what they want kind of explains what they're doing. 

Nietzsche's not like that. He can't pretend that he's like that to himself, and he's trying to figure out how to manage himself. When he thinks psychologically about himself, the psychology makes it vivid that no one is really like this. And what's there behind the cartoon version of people is not always nice. When Nietzsche looks inside himself, he thinks of what's inside himself and mostly his drives. That's the big things. These drives are ugly, and he's upfront about it. 

For example, in Beyond Good and Evil, let's see, some of the drives are German nationalism, antisemitism, which he thinks of as a drive, and misogyny, which he thinks of as a drive. So people who encounter Nietzsche, they see that he's got a picture of human beings, of humanity, in which people are dangerous. The people are dangerous. But because Nietzsche is the one reminding them of this, they think, okay, Nietzsche is dangerous. 

Jana Cunningham: 

Right. I can see that. So for my closing question, the question I ask everyone that I interview, what do we know now because of your research, because of your work on this book, what does the world know now that they didn't know before? 

Elijah Millgram: 

Well, let me back off from the world. It would be unrealistic to expect that enough people are going to read this book for the world to count as knowing anything from it. But, okay, so Gilbert Ryle was a philosopher who was kind of prominent in the early and mid 20th century. He was at Oxford, and one of the things he's known for is the distinction between knowing that and knowing how. So if you know that, you know various facts or theories or whatever, but knowing how is skills. So things, I'm going to have a plumber coming over to work on the pipes because he knows how to do stuff that I don't how to do.  

So what I hope people are getting out of this book is some knowing how. First of all, this is the lowest key side of it, knowing how to read Nietzsche, but then knowing how to read Nietzsche is a special case of something I was suggesting we philosophers don't know how to do, how to understand and make sense of someone who is as much of a disunified agent as discombobulated as Nietzsche is. So hopefully I'm contributing to that. 

But then also, there's knowing how to work up an answer to the question of what your life is about in a way that takes account of how you're put together, of what the architecture of your own personality is. And that's a skill, that's a talent that would serve people well in their lives. So that's what I'm after. 

Jana Cunningham: 

That was Elijah Millgram, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy. For more information about the University of Utah College of Humanities, please visit humanities.utah.edu. And don't forget to subscribe to Humanities Radio. 

Kendall Gerdes: 

Often students who are advocating for some kind of transformation are accused of being too sensitive as a way of deflecting their demands, and that shuts down the conversation. 

Jana Cunningham: 

Hello. Thank you for joining me on Humanities Radio. I'm Jana Cunningham with the University of Utah College of Humanities, and this season I'll be in discussion with professors from across our college about their latest book publications. I'm with Kendall Gerdes, assistant professor of writing and rhetoric studies to discuss her book, Sensitive Rhetorics: Academic Freedom and Campus Activism. 

Thank you Professor Gerdes for joining me today. I really appreciate it. 

Kendall Gerdes: 

Sure. 

Jana Cunningham: 

So just as our first bigger overall question, can you provide an overview of this book and explain what motivated you to explore this topic? 

Kendall Gerdes: 

Yeah, I like to say that the book explores sensitivity as a term of art in rhetoric. People often think of rhetoric as oratory, or an art of writing and speaking to other people. And I like to think of rhetoric as a structure of address where you might be writing or speaking to another person, or communicating in another way. But to receive an address, to be spoken, to read somebody else's writing, we have to be open to that address. We have to be able to receive it. And to me, that's what being sensitive is. 

So what does that have to do with campus activism? Well, all the claims in the recent years about students being too sensitive, pricked my ears as a rhetorician. What was the work that sensitivity was doing in those public debates? And again and again on student activist issues, claims that students were too sensitive occurred with claims about academic freedom. And that students were infringing on academic freedom or it was going to be the end of academic freedom. I started to see a rhetorical alliance between issues about sensitivity and issues with academic freedom. So I wanted to explore what that relationship was and how we could understand it better with rhetorical theory. 

Jana Cunningham: 

And so through this book, you go through very specific types of debates. Talk about which debates you examined and why you chose those ones in particular. 

Kendall Gerdes: 

So each chapter of the book focuses on a different contemporary student activist issue or campus issue, and they all look at a slightly different arrangement of the arguments. So the first chapter is about trigger warnings, and that has to do with students who have suffered some trauma and maybe have a disability as a result of it. And were 10 years ago or so, asking their professors to consider using trigger warnings to help them prepare for difficult discussions. So really my analysis of trigger warnings looks at the accessibility issues, so trauma and accessibility, those are the trigger warnings issues. 

The next chapter focuses on Title IX, and that has to do with sex inequality in education. It also has to do with trauma because it's looking at sexual harassment primarily, as well as sexual assault and the procedures for processing those claims at a university. 

The third chapter is about safe spaces, which works through a specific example of the student occupation of the University of Missouri in 2015. So it specifically looks at Black student activism as an example of a response to racial trauma on campus and the claims about safe spaces as deflecting those activist requests. 

The final chapter is a little bit different because it looks at campus carry debates, specifically the debate in 2016 in Texas when the law was first being changed to allow campus carry. And the consolation of issues is different because faculty are the ones there that were said to be too sensitive, not wanting to allow guns in their classrooms. That's one where you can see how there can be daylight between who cares about academic freedom and who's too sensitive when the issue is different. So each issue emphasizes a slightly different student population and different aspects of public arguments about sensitivity. 

Jana Cunningham: 

And that's why you chose these ones in specific to go over the realm of the sensitivity. 

Kendall Gerdes: 

So each chapter looks at something that's a little bit different, but together makes an argument that's really about how sensitivity works as a rhetorical concept. 

Jana Cunningham: 

Right. The central question you pose in the book is how rhetorical theory of sensitivity can equip scholars and teachers to meet student activism with more ethical response and scholarship and pedagogy. How is that? 

Kendall Gerdes: 

Yes. So it's a big complicated claim. 

Jana Cunningham: 

Yes. Yes. 

Kendall Gerdes: 

And in fact, listening to it, you might want to replay that last 15 seconds and hear it again. So my central argument in the book is that everyone is sensitive. Because we have to be in order to be affected by each other in language. So students are sensitive, but institutions are sensitive too, maybe in different ways or to different things, donors or financial incentives rather than classroom issues. But all of those are types of sensitivity. 

Student activism most often presents the campus community with a demand for change. Not always. Sometimes it's conservative and doesn't want change. But often students who are advocating for some kind of transformation are accused of being too sensitive as a way of deflecting their demands. 

Jana Cunningham: 

I see. 

Kendall Gerdes: 

And that shuts down the conversation. So embracing a rhetorical theory of sensitivity would let us hear those demands differently and understand them as about justice and ethics at our institutions. 

Jana Cunningham: 

So it definitely changes the whole way the conversation is viewed and the way the conversation is had. 

Kendall Gerdes: 

That's the hope. 

Jana Cunningham: 

So you discuss in the book, sensitive rhetoric can conflict with freedom of speech. Let's talk about this a little bit more and why that is, and how if the two can become aligned. 

Kendall Gerdes: 

Yes. So freedom of speech is often thought of as the umbrella right under which academic freedom resides. Actually, academic freedom has a pretty thin basis in case law in the United States. I like to call it partly folk doctrine because there's so much of our beliefs about academic freedom inflect the way that we talk and argue about it, but not actually the way that it's legally implemented. So freedom of speech and academic freedom aren't the same, but they are related concepts. And student activism is often criticized, though it is occasionally defended with appeals to either academic freedom or free speech. 

As we're recording this in mid-November 2023, the University of Utah is really trying to thread this very needle with allowing reactionary student groups to post transphobic flyers on campus, while on the other hand procedurally punishing those who are protesting against gender policing and state violence. We're watching this unfold right now on our own campus. 

The rhetorical question is, how does the argument work? How does the argument about free speech or academic freedom work? What work does it do? So for whom is free speech a shield and against whom is it used as a club, or a way of enforcing an interest? So every community regulates speech, every university, every organization, your local book club, sometimes with law and policy, sometimes with student code of conduct, sometimes with just norms and taboos. But none of those ways of regulating speech are ever value neutral. They all have values that motivate how they're written as well as how they are enforced. So rhetoric is a way of helping us pay attention to the underlying values and see what interests and motivations they're connected to. 

Jana Cunningham: 

Right. Interesting. And so when you are exploring these different debates in each of these chapters, do you go into this as well in each of these chapters? 

Kendall Gerdes: 

Yeah. So each chapter looks at what's at stake in the claims about sensitivity. What does that claim that students are too sensitive seem to be protecting in the case of trigger warnings, or in the case of Title IX? Because those issues do shift a little bit. Although there is a major recurring theme across the chapters that has to do with trigger warnings, which was chronologically like the first of the student activist issues. We're talking 2013, 2014 where claims about student sensitivity really caught traction. 

So looking at the way arguments about trigger warnings and sensitivity migrated into other student activist issues is also part of the work the book does. Because safe spaces were argued to be the live action trigger warning. Or students who are advocating for better Title IX procedures are viewed as being triggered. And obviously there's kind of low hanging fruit in the campus carry debate about triggering as a gun term as well. 

So each chapter does trace some of the ways that arguments that developed around trigger warnings about a decade ago migrated to other issues. And you could go further outside of higher education to look at the way that arguments about sensitivity have circulated outside of higher ed. But in the last 10 years, they really began on student issues. 

Jana Cunningham: 

So a main argument in your book is, excuse me. Critics of sensitive students are missing the way that sensitivity is a condition of possibility for the work of teaching and learning that's central to the purpose of higher education. Can we explore that and what do you mean by that and why is that? 

Kendall Gerdes: 

Yeah. So I begin from and defend this premise that we have to be sensitive. It's a condition of possibility, meaning without it, none of the other structures of teaching and learning can exist. So without it we couldn't be affected by each other in language. That is to say teaching and learning depend on affection in language, our ability to move each other, challenge each other, and also wound and hurt each other. And that can happen just with words or representation. 

So genuine learning especially in the humanities is not just adding to what you already know, elaborating on the things that you came in believing or understanding. But genuine learning often challenges your structures of understanding and pushes you to transform the way you think about something. So higher education should not just be about the transmission of specialized knowledge from one set of experts to students, that kind of banking model of education. 

But really education I think is a common good, and equipping students to be good citizens and good neighbors is part of the work that the humanities has to do in higher ed. That means teaching students to negotiate across their differences and to deal with people that won't share their perspectives. That means that we have to do that work for ourselves too. 

Jana Cunningham: 

Right, right. Absolutely. 

Kendall Gerdes: 

I think that higher education is being targeted in culture wars and student activists targeted with claims of being too sensitive, in no small part because of the role of higher ed in shaping a healthy democracy. 

Jana Cunningham: 

So my last question which takes a turn a little bit, is a question I ask every single one of my faculty at the end of our podcast. What does this world know now because of your research that they didn't know before? 

Kendall Gerdes: 

This is a great question. It really challenges faculty to get to the point. 

Jana Cunningham: 

It definitely does. 

Kendall Gerdes: 

So I hope that readers of my book who are interested in higher education, who are interested in claims about academic freedom, will also get interested in rhetorical theory and will see how it can help us address ordinary everyday problems. 

I also hope that my book will help readers to see the pattern of arguments that invoke academic freedom against students, and to see how those arguments about sensitivity in the wider culture were first developed and test-driven in the microcosm of higher education. And I think we don't have to concede that criticism. So I hope that being sensitive can mean being open to being addressed, to learning, and ultimately to transformation. 

Jana Cunningham: 

Thank you, Professor Gerdes. I really enjoyed learning more about this book and about your research. 

Kendall Gerdes: 

No, thank you. 

Jana Cunningham: 

That was Kendall Gerdes, assistant professor of writing and rhetoric studies. For more information about the University of Utah College of Humanities, please visit humanities.utah.edu. And don't forget to subscribe to Humanities Radio. 

Leandra Hernandez: 

I hope readers, if they don't know what feminist mentorship is, will see the complexities and the multilayered nature of not only how feminism is defined, but how it's experienced in mentorship context. 

Jana Cunningham: 

Hello. Thank you for joining me on Humanities Radio. I'm Jana Cunningham with the University of Utah College of Humanities, and this season I'm in discussion with professors from across our college about their latest book publications. I'm sitting here with Leandra Hernandez, Assistant Professor of Communication, about her book, Feminist Mentoring in Academia, which contains a collection of personal accounts of support, struggle, and resilience in higher education. 

Welcome, Professor Hernandez. 

Leandra Hernandez: 

Thank you so much. 

Jana Cunningham: 

Before I launch into some questions, I would love to just get your take about what this book explores and what motivated you to explore the topic. 

Leandra Hernandez: 

The book looks at feminist mentorship in higher education, broadly defined. If you look at what mentorship is, you'll get all kinds of definitions of lateral, horizontal, vertical, women of color, mentorship, and so on and so forth, but for us, and with my co-editors, doctors Jessica Pauly and Stevie Munz, the book was, of course, a collection of analysis of different mentorship accounts from women in the communication discipline in higher education. But as qualitative feminist scholars, we three like to talk about how it was a love letter to ourselves that helped us get through some struggles we had in past years. 

Jana Cunningham: 

And then the first question I am interested in asking you about is that there are a lot of definitions of feminism and a lot of people take it a different way. And so I'd love to understand what your definition of feminism is. 

Leandra Hernandez: 

Yes, that is so true. First wave, second wave, third wave, and on and on and on. For me, as a Mexican American woman, I tend to gravitate towards Chicana feminist definitions or the larger Chicana feminist area, which looks at a very broad and base level, lest I oversimplify it, really breaking down issues of racism and sexism for Chicanas. But really in addition to that, I also think about feminism through an intersectional lens, which draws upon Black feminist principles that help us think about breaking down systems of power and oppression through the analytic of the intersection of our identities, class, gender, nationality, race, so on and so forth. It's really thinking about our experience as not as single issue experiences, but thinking about all of the different parts that make us who we are. 

Jana Cunningham: 

At the beginning of the book you talk a lot about the Fire Squad. And so I would for you to walk me through what the Fire Squad is and how they shaped your views on mentorship, but also how they helped impact your career. 

Leandra Hernandez: 

In the book, as you mentioned, we talk about the Fire Squad. When I started at a previous institution as a tenure track faculty member, I was the only Latina on the tenure track in the department, and I was also the only openly out queer faculty member on the tenure track in the department. When I got there, there were four other women who were also assistant professors in our track, and we became very close very quickly. Some of them were on my hiring committee, so I got to know them before I got to the institution. I was in frequent contact with them over the summer as I moved here to Utah. And then when we got a few weeks into my very first semester, we discovered that there were a few struggles, a few inequities that we were all facing collectively. 

I don't want to say it was trauma bonding because I know there are a lot of debates out there about that, but all five of us really had to band together very closely, very quickly to address some of the inequities that we were facing collectively. We are all still very close to this day, even though two out of the five of us are now at different institutions or different stages and phases in our lives. But the mentorship there was informed by so many different views on equality, on friendship, on feminist social support, and feminist anger, especially in terms of being really angry at the gendered level of the inequity, but also being mindful of feminist joy and mentorship that comes from building really strong relationships on feminist principles and seeing how the friendships and the solidarity and the collective can really change your everyday experiences. 

Jana Cunningham: 

And so outside of the Fire Squad or maybe with the Fire Squad, what are some of the feminist mentorship practices that you have been part of, and how did they impact your life, your career? 

Leandra Hernandez: 

Yeah, so I think about it at micro and macro levels. At macro levels, especially in the wake of COVID and the murder of George Floyd and a lot of our other sociocultural moments that we're seeing now, we see the book clubs, we see the mentorship groups, we see the writing groups, and even just dinner outings, all different moments of support that come together to help inform what a feminist mentorship practice might look like. And some of those structural level factors work really well. But then when I think about the micro level practices, it's also utilizing your privilege in faculty meetings or in national organization meetings to speak up on behalf of others who maybe don't feel like they are comfortable speaking up. Maybe they don't tenure yet, or maybe they are multiply marginalized or minoritized and are fearing retribution if something happens. So it's using the power and the privilege of having tenure or maybe being in a certain level in your life that someone else isn't to say, "I can speak up and make a difference now in ways that maybe my close colleagues aren't able to." 

If we go back to the Fire Squad, I was the youngest in the group in terms of being most recently on the tenure track. And then when you intersect that with the different identities that I was the only woman of color and the only queer one in the group, a lot of my colleagues stepped up in really powerful ways, I think, when I was too worried about being pre-tenure to be mindful of what was happening. And those are just, again, some of the micro level practices of how mentors at a similar level or also higher levels can step up and come through. 

Jana Cunningham: 

Do you think the micro is just as important as the macro or vice versa, or do you think they should be used in combination? 

Leandra Hernandez: 

Great question. Yeah, I think they should be using combination because they're both really important, especially if there are feminist mentorship structures that we are not allowed to create by ourselves for ourselves that sometimes come from the top down. Even with the best of intentions, but maybe not the best outcomes, the micro level practices can also be where the magic happens. 

Jana Cunningham: 

Okay. What are some of the ongoing discussions happening in higher education regarding feminist mentorship? 

Leandra Hernandez: 

Oh, great question. So first and foremost, it's struggles that we're seeing between faculty members and staff members and the institution in terms of thinking about resources that are available for mentorship structures, what's the best way to go about creating them, what sorts of models should we use? But then it's also thinking about how mentorship is even categorized if we take a few steps back. Even in Utah, there are current conversations about diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education, spaces of belonging, DEI statements and things of that nature, and oftentimes if it's, say, a woman of color mentorship group, that can get categorized in the DEI practice category, depending on how you define it or where you place it in the academic totem pole. And then given current conversations, now faculty members and staff members and administrators are trying to figure out, where do we put the mentorship groups? Who runs them? Is it best to have a faculty fellow or an administrator or a staff? How do we figure out budget so that if state legislature budget cuts or restructuring is passed that the program doesn't get cut itself? 

And then also it's thinking about how best to support faculty members and staff members in these mentorship programs. Sometimes they're book clubs or luncheons, which are wonderful, but sometimes faculty and staff need more than just that to really feel like being mentored. So it's logistical, it's definitional, it's occupational, and so much more. 

Jana Cunningham: 

So what are some of the ways that faculty are engaging in mentorship practices, and not just necessarily here at the U, but some of the practices either you've explored in your book or that you've seen be really successful in higher education? 

Leandra Hernandez: 

Yeah, great question. One example just off the top of my head that I can give you is a mentorship program that I helped co-found in the mid-2000s, so like 2015, 2016. It's the National Communication Association La Raza Caucus Mentorship Program. There are four of us on the coordinating board for the mentorship program, which started as a few idea sessions. We're trying to figure out how we can best help members of our division and caucus feel connected, feel supported at all levels of the academic experience. And it went from a few sessions to a formal meeting to now a program where folks are connected both at our national convention and then outside. 

We are also very intentional about connecting faculty members all the way from undergrad... or not faculty members, but individuals from the undergraduate level all the way to the senior scholar level, and then connecting folks where they need mentorship, whether it be teaching, research, service, community organizing and activism. It's been running strong for the last several years. We also have a budget through our national organization to help sustain it, which is really important through the organization recognizing that it's important and that we need it. 

And then also, even outside of some of the more traditional models we might see with a book club or a luncheon set up, even faculty members here at the U do such a wonderful job of informal mentorship, whether it's welcoming new faculty members in the department, offering to take them out for lunch or tea or coffee, offering to read drafts of manuscripts before submission, offering to bring folks in to research areas or research labs, or even if you just say, "Hey, I need a break from academia for a night," going to the gym together or just going out to eat. 

And going back to your question about the micro and the macro practices, I think you can see there how you really need all of it to feel like you're part of the community. 

Jana Cunningham: 

So when a new faculty member arrives at their institution of higher education, is it really just up to them to seek out those mentorship opportunities, or are they automatically in place? How does that work? 

Leandra Hernandez: 

Great question. The research on that is really fascinating too, because it comes down to whether or not systemic practices are in place to support new faculty members and what the new faculty members preferences are, and trying to find some sort of connection or synergy there. As a new faculty member myself, I am all about community gatherings and making friends and having meetings, so having a structure in place like that for me worked really, really well. But then the question becomes, how can institutions or universities really do a good job meeting new faculty members or even staff members where they're at if that is not their jam, if it's a little too overwhelming or if it's not the best? 

Because I remember when I first got here to the U, I was notified of college level and university level mentorship programs, which was wonderful, because the university level one focuses on a variety of different aspects of your academic identity, and then you get to meet other faculty members and go to lunch with them. And then the college level one includes some other sorts of opportunities for you to meet with faculty members in research and social settings. I know a few other faculty members who are like, "That is a lot." So they take a little bit from here and there and maybe make connections a little more informally. But the good news is, at least in my past experiences, there were always at least one or two programs in place, whether at the department level or the university level, to help folks feel part of the community. 

Jana Cunningham: 

Does it just organically happen where you take part in these mentorship programs and then you become the mentor? Is that an organic process or is it just a given that you eventually become a mentor? 

Leandra Hernandez: 

That's a great question. It depends on so many factors too, like personality, whether or not you jive with the other person and what the strengths and... I hate the word offerings because I can't think of a better word, but something along those lines, because that really comes down to the question of horizontal or lateral or vertical mentorship, top down versus more equal based. But I think if you talk to different faculty members, just even in our department, they would tell you how they mentor some and are mentored by others even regardless of tenure status or publications or any of those things, because it's really about how the relationships play out and being able to identify like, "I feel comfortable with this person. I feel supported by this person. Here are ways that we can mutually work with each other." 

Jana Cunningham: 

In your book, what are some of the struggles you discuss and explore through these different perspectives about mentorship? 

Leandra Hernandez: 

One of the hard things is reconciling being assigned to a mentorship program that doesn't work for you. Some of the scholars in our book talked a little bit about that and how they took matters into their own hands and found mentorship structures that worked for them that evolved more organically. Other questions come up about funding. So one of the struggles is, what happens when you have a really wonderful institutionally-supported mentorship program, and then funding is no longer available? So how can the center or the department or even the individuals facilitating it keep it going if they don't have the resources available or even perhaps the recognition for tenure portfolios? 

And then another one of the struggles is how to break up with your mentor or your mentee when it's not working anymore and trying to figure out some of the communicative dynamics that exist when conflict arises. 

Jana Cunningham: 

Wow. What do you hope readers will gain after reading your book? 

Leandra Hernandez: 

Yeah, so I hope readers, if they don't know what feminist mentorship is, will see the complexities and the multilayered nature of not only how feminism is defined, but how it's experienced in mentorship context. For individuals who are hoping to create formal or informal mentorship programs, we hope that they'll see different examples that have worked in the past, maybe some models or programs that could be of use. If individuals have maybe struggled with finding a mentor or something along those lines, they are not alone. If nothing else, our book has wonderful personal accounts and also research stories from women in the communication discipline who have lots of insights to share about some of the complexities as well. 

Jana Cunningham: 

My very last question that I ask everyone on the podcast is, what does the world know now, or the community, the country, know now because of your research that they didn't know before? 

Leandra Hernandez: 

I think it helps humanize the academic experience by removing the curtain from one of the parts of our lives that we don't always talk about. We always talk about our research and our impacts and those more formalized parts of our experiences that also line up with our teaching and our service, but we are whole beings who also do research on our teaching experiences and our mentorship woes and our wins. And yeah, if nothing else, I hope it goes to show how diversity, equity, inclusion, and also feminist theory can be used in academic context that impact our lives both inside and outside of academia. 

Jana Cunningham: 

Perfect. Thank you, Professor Hernandez, for answering these questions for me today. Appreciate it. 

Leandra Hernandez: 

Yeah, thank you so much. This was great. 

Jana Cunningham: 

That was Leandra Hernandez, Assistant Professor of Communication. For more information about the University of Utah College of Humanities, please visit humanities.utah.edu. And don't forget to subscribe to Humanities Radio.