Elizabeth Wardle on Political Action and Faculty Engagement

On season 4 episode 1 of the agile academic, I chat with Dr. Elizabeth Wardle, professor and director of the Howe Center for Writing Excellence at Miami University of Ohio. Liz and I talk about the political situation in Ohio, its impact on higher ed and ways to be politically active. 

Transcript

Rebecca Pope-Ruark: On season four, episode one of the Agile Academic, I talk with Dr. Elizabeth Wardle, professor and director of the Howe Center for Writing Excellence at Miami University of Ohio. Liz and I talk about the political situation in Ohio, its impact on higher ed and ways to be politically active. Welcome to the Agile Academic, a podcast for women in and around higher education. In each episode, we tackle topics from career vitality to burnout and everything in between. Join me as I chat with inspiring women about their experiences pursuing purpose, making change, and driving culture in the academy and beyond. I'm your host, Dr. Rebecca Pope Ruark.

Hi Liz. Thanks for being on the show today.

Elizabeth Wardle: Thanks for having me.

RPR: So why don't you just tell the audience a little bit about yourself and the work that you do?

EW: Sure. So I currently direct the Howe Center for Writing Excellence at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. This is a largely faculty development position. So, um, our center actually works directly with writers, but also directly with teachers. And most of my day-to-day work is helping faculty with their teaching. It's really the best job I've ever had in terms of stress level because I get to work with people who are excited about teaching and love students, and I don't really have to deal with any of the parts that are harder. Before this, I was a department chair where I spent a lot of time thinking about policy and procedure and bureaucracy. So I really enjoy what I'm doing now to, to work directly with really innovative faculty.

RPR: So, on the show, I like to focus on some of the, what I think are some of the positive aspects of academic culture. So I like to talk about things like purpose and compassion, connection, imbalance. So what would you say is the purpose that drives you in higher education and and where does that come from?

EW: Yeah, I mean, I am, I, I was thinking about that question ahead of time, and I think I'm, I'm really driven by systemic level concerns. I really am interested in what higher ed can be and could do to be transformational beyond one assignment, beyond one classroom, beyond one teacher, beyond one student. And so I'm really driven by thinking about what could we be and what's it gonna require for us to be that, and how do we actually make that happen? And I know you will ask me later about where we are and maybe are not, you know, accomplishing what we should be accomplishing. But I'm, I'm really, I'm very interested in education as a public good higher ed, as a public good. And I think we've just really lost sight of that. But every faculty member that I know, every faculty member I work with is really committed to that.

And I think that for the most part, people don't know how to push that agenda forward in a larger system that's really sort of about efficiency and accountability and, you know, return on investment. And so what what really drives me every day is thinking about what could higher ed be and how do we really empower our faculty and our colleagues in order to, to get to that vision. And some days it seems like an impossible vision, but I'm still here. So I still think that it's, you know, maybe possible for us to do what we could be doing.

RPR: Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. What do you think are some of the things that we've lost in losing that concept of, of higher education as a public good? What are some of the things that, that we're missing?

EW: I think we've lost so much. Tyler Branson has a, a great book called Policy Regimes of Writing, where he talks about the policy regimes in which higher ed functions. Um, and he borrows that idea of policy regimes from political science. And he talks about how we used to be in a policy regime that was more of the equity regime, where sort of the federal government's role was to say like, make sure you're serving all the students you should be serving. But now we're in an accountability regime. And so it's really just about demonstrating a quick return on investment using measures that, by the way, were borrowed from agriculture and in a real capitalist society that measures everything by how much does it cost, how could we make it cost less? How could we help students get jobs and make as much money as possible? And I'm not against jobs, I'm not against making money.

I think those things are good. I have a job. But I think that the purpose of higher ed is about learning and helping students really inhabit problem exploring dispositions that can help us solve hard problems together. And as long as we're talking about things like, you know, a neat linear path to get through as quickly as possible to get a credential, and we're using proxy metrics like time to graduation, as the only measure, I think we've just completely lost sight of why we're all here, which is that we need to learn things together because the world is full of hard problems. And so I really worry that we've lost sight of the idea that it's a public good, that the public should pay for, because if it's a private good, then it's an individual responsibility to pay for it. And that's how we get to a place where we are now.

Where at Miami, for example, we're, we're a public institution, but the state only gives us 8% of our operating budget. And I think that really illustrates what happens when you start thinking of education as a private good, is that, well, you should have to pay for it, and if you can't afford it, too bad. But we all benefit if our students are really getting an education because they're solving the problems of the, that we're all gonna have to live in. So I think higher ed is a public good in the same way that roads and parks and libraries are public goods. And I think we've just completely lost sight of that. And also as a rhetorician, I think we've completely lost sight of how to we explain it to people and it's not good for any of us Students or faculty.

RPR: One of the reasons that we wanted to make sure we had this conversation now and, and get this episode up is, is based on the, the current political situation in Ohio. So can you tell us a little bit more about that and how that's impacting higher ed?

EW: Yeah. Uh, I always thought of Ohio as a very, you know, common sense middle of the road, kind of Midwest state. And in the past year or two, our legislature has just really taken on, well, I mean, they've been informed by lots of outside interests and really just attacked higher ed. They've attacked all sorts of rights around democracy and in just absolute, almost like a, an an automatic, you know, rifle kind of fashion. It's like one thing after another, so you can't even, you don't even have time to fight back. So the thing that they did last year was they in, in introduced SB 83, which was sort of the Florida version of anti DEI, except on steroids. There were about five to 10 more things in that package beyond what Florida had even done. And so it not only wanted us to do away with anything related to, to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and not just in our courses, but in anything, right?

So student clubs like that, but also it did away with it, it was gonna say that, uh, student evaluations of faculty were gonna be 50% of our annual evaluation, and that certain questions had to be on the student survey of faculty. And so that's just one small thing that sort of illustrates, like, they were just really deeply micromanaging and in a way that was so outta line with everything that we know about teaching and learning and the, you know, and the world in which we live. And so they did that. There's, there's something else currently going on, which we can talk about in a minute. But I think what was interesting was that maybe for the first time since I've been higher ed in higher ed, I saw faculty and students unite in their response against this. Sometimes I feel like academics are our own worst enemy.

We nitpick over things and disagree over things to the point where we don't have a united front in order to respond to something. And in this case, faculty and students across Ohio really united our organizations, our our faculty unions, all of 'em sort of united, and we went to the State House together, but they're not finished. Like, they, they didn't get it through the Senate and then they just took it out of the budget on Friday. So it won't be in effect in the fall, which we all thought it was going to be, but they made it clear that they're not finished. And so we, we still have a lot of, a lot of work to do ahead mm-hmm.

RPR: So what is the responsibility of those of us in public higher education? Uh, what, what responsibility do we have to be politically aware and active? You've taken a real active role in, you've taken a really active role in responding to these, the political situation in Ohio. So, you know, what, what are some of the ways that we can get involved in our own states?

EW: Well, I guess I have a couple things I wanna say to that. And one of them is that I take a lot from one of my mentors, Elaine Maimon, who was a longtime college president, has a really great book called Leading Academic Change. And one of the, a couple of things she says in that book, one is quoting someone else know the hill you're gonna die on and don't die on every hill, right? And then also she says, uh, you know, a vision without a strategy is a fantasy. And I think about her a lot because she was the president at an Illinois public institution the year that the Illinois legislature did not pass a budget. And she writes in her book about how they had promised all this financial aid to these first gen poor students. And she said, you know, they didn't pass a budget, but we'd promised these students this thing.

And so we had to find a way to make that happen because that was our, you know, that was our principle that we were gonna stand on, and that was the hill that we were gonna die on. And so I think about her a lot when I'm trying to figure out, is this a place where you, you need to take a stand? And I think as a faculty developer, a lot of times I think I shouldn't, because my job is to support all faculty, and sometimes there's fights I just shouldn't be in. But it's very clear to me, given what we talked about earlier, that if higher ed is a public good, then I think that the hill to die on is not allowing our legislatures to overtake higher ed and to force us to be sort of a, an an arm of the state, which I feel like is what's they're, they've been trying to do here in Ohio and elsewhere.

And so then I guess the question is how do you do that? Because I don't think it's what we're used to doing. I think faculty tend to work as independent contractors. We just work on whatever one thing we're really excited about. And I don't think that we're very good at figuring out how to work together and respond. And I think that we also learned from what happened in Florida, you know, like maybe just a couple months before it happened in Ohio, the AAUP did a report on what happened there, and they said that the higher administrators in Florida were complicit in the governor's attempt to overtake higher ed, and that they did not fight back, and that they did not stand up for what needed to be to be done. And that, that's part of why DeSantis was able to do what he was doing.

And so I really felt like here, you know, we needed to clearly state what are our principles? What's the hill we're gonna die on? And then decide that we're gonna speak out whatever the consequences may be. And I think a lot of faculty did that. So, um, we wrote testimony, we went to Columbus, Andre gave our testimony, we wrote letters to the editor, we called people, but honestly, our students were far more impressive. They were the first year students at Miami were organizing out front of our student union. They were, you know, really, really acting out in a way that I thought was, was really important. So I think there's a lot of things that we can do. I don't think as faculty, we've been very good at doing that over the past few decades. So I think we have a lot to learn about how to do it,

RPR: And where do we look for those models, right? Where do we look for the models for, for that active engagement? And we can be looking to our students who, who, who have that just kind of innate push to make their environment better. Um, you know, how do we learn from them as well? So, so where do we look, where do we look for models for how we can do that kind of work and figure out what, what's appropriate in that terms of engagement? Well,

EW: One of the things that I have been, I myself have recently joined the League of Women Voters, and that's where I've been learning some, some strategies to use. I was not comfortable joining a partisan group because I did feel like as a, you know, as a faculty member at a public institution where my job was to support all faculty, I was sort of uncomfortable joining a, a partisan group and speaking out only for one party. And so I joined the League of Women Voters right after the pandemic, right after Roe, uh, v Wade was overturned because it's a non-partisan group that has been committed to democracy rights since 1920. And it has been very interesting for me to learn from them because they, they really enact a sort of a system that I think that academics could appreciate, which is that they do have a national league, but all the work gets done in local leagues.

And so the local leagues here, we have one in Oxford and it just works for Oxford and our school district. And so we get together as state members once a month on calls. The nationally does stand up for things, but most of our work is at the grassroots level, responding very quickly to whatever's going on locally. So we have people observing the Board of elections, we have people observing all the city council meetings and the school board meetings, and then letting us know if there's something that we need to respond to. And so that's been very helpful to me to see what happens when a bunch of people are actually leading from the bottom up. Because I think that that's what faculty need to be doing right now, is figuring out how to work together in order to move from the bottom up. Since I think our, you know, upper administrative leaders are often sort of not acting out of the same principles that we would want them to.

So the other issue that's happening here in Ohio is around what's now called issue one is that our legislature in December outlawed special elections, they said summer special elections cost too much money and only 8% of the voters show up for them, so we're gonna outlaw them. And then about a month ago, they decided to overturn their own outlawing of special elections in order to have one to take away a basic constitutional right that we have in Ohio for citizen democracy, which is that any of us in Ohio, if we think that there's something that our legislator, legislators are not doing, can gather signatures from half of the counties and get an issue on the ballot for Ohio voters to decide for themselves. And they're trying to take that right away from us. And so I've been working really hard as the co-president of voter services for the Oxford League to get people out.

And it's been a really interesting experience figuring out how do you talk to people from across every political persuasion, every walk of life in an engaged way given the current climate. And so I'm learning a lot about what I think academics need to be doing in order to respond to what our legislature is doing that affects higher ed. But I also can see that a lot of the other things our legislatures are doing that are not directly about higher ed, still affect us because they affect our students, they affect the people that we're living in community with. So I feel like there's a lot for us to learn as academics, but to do that we've gotta sort of cross the, I guess, the town gown divide and, and work with others in our communities to figure out how to respond when our legislatures are doing these kinds of things.

RPR: As a rhetorician, what skills have kind of been coming up to the, to the forefront in that work that maybe, you know, others not trained the same way you and I were trained might wanna develop some skills in?

EW: I'm so glad you asked that because I think about that every day that I'm doing this work for the August 8th special election is, you know, thinking about what do we, what do we learn as, as rhetoricians that we're thinking about? How do you communicate effectively with people and ethically, and I know that we don't all agree that Aristotle was right when he said rhetoric is about finding, you know, thinking about the available means of persuasion. But I do think there is some merit to that and thinking about, given the case in front of you, how do you communicate with people? And so it's been very, very interesting to me to think about how do you go out, like Saturday, I was at the Freedom Parade in Oxford, Ohio for the July 4th weekend, and I was just walking the crowd and asking them about did they know about the election?

And all I was thinking about the whole time was everything I have been trained to do as a rhetorician, which is think about my audience, their context, the, the purpose of our conversation and what might engage them in an ongoing conversation. And I actually volunteered us today to do a little bit of a training for people across the state because I, I was watching other people go up and all and start with a divisive issue, whereas what I was thinking about was, given who I'm talking to, what do I think might be common ground for us and how do I start a conversation with common ground and how do you engage with them? And so a lot of people have been starting the conversation by saying, well, this is really about abortion, and I already know that about half of our voters are not gonna respond if that's the way in.

And so given where we are, I usually start the conversation by saying, you know, are you an Ohio voter? Do you know that there's a special election that is, and that we in Ohio have a very special constitutional right to hold our elected officials accountable when they are not serving us. And so across the political spectrum, people have been very interested in that and it's helped us engage. And a lot of them have responded with really good questions that I think if I was working with a partisan organization, I would've walked away. Like one of them said to me, well what about George Soros or someone else said, well, will this help me impeach Joe Biden? You know, and my response in every case was No <laugh>. But this is about if you don't trust your government, if you don't trust your elected officials, if you think they're not representing you locally and in this state, we have a way to hold them accountable and take it to the people of Ohio.

And that is a right, that's being taken away from us. And so I feel like what's been important about this is my training as a rhetorician has really forced me to think, how do you open a dialogue and how do you keep a dialogue going even with people that you might not agree with at all? And it's actually been very effective. Like the, a guy talked to me for about 20 minutes about whether or not you could trust the voting machines. And I said, you know what? Our Board of elections in Butler County is amazing, and you can go up there right now and they'll show you how they do it and they'll show you how they count ballots and you can watch them count ballots and in fact, you can work as a poll worker. And he hadn't voted, he said, in years. And by the time we were finished having a conversation, he said, well, this was really interesting. I think I might go up there. And I, I really think that as rhetoricians and academics, it's really easy to sort of get in our heads and just think about sort of theoretical issues. But we've learned a lot of stuff about how you talk to people and now really is an important moment in history where I think that we could use that to engage with other people in our community with whom we might disagree and not do it online. Cuz I don't think that's getting us anywhere,

RPR: Just, we just steeple over into harassment and really, um, lots of challenges when we, when we move that online, having those one-on-one conversations with a person, having those, those be really a person to person kind of conversation can be compelling in ways that we can't be online.

EW: Yeah. Yeah. And I think we need to get back to that. I mean, it's easy to just sit on Twitter and hit like, or share, but it, it was a totally different experience to go to the car show two weeks ago and talk to all the guys on their Harleys and find common ground with them. And I don't think that we would've ever spoken if we had been in an online environment. Um, and we, you know, I have, people have asked me some things that I think are pretty strange, but every conversation has ended with Thank you for talking to me. Thank you for listening to me. Maybe we've built goodwill and I'm not sure how you do that in the current online environment.

RPR: Yeah. Yeah. What are some specific things that you would invite faculty members to consider or to do to get politically active when they feel like maybe especially in states where things like this are happening, but where it's really, it's really touchy, right? It's a, it's a really touchy position to, to be in, to exercise your political rights as a faculty member. So what are some maybe tips for engagement?

EW: Well, I think that I was really sort of moved by, um, the book called, I think it was called 20 Lessons in Tyranny or something like that. And, and one of the things that he says in there is institutions are what keep democracy going. So find one institution that you can get behind and support it with your time and talents. And so for me, that institution turned out to be voting rights and democracy rights. And that's why I joined the League of Women Voters. I think it's very easy to say, oh my gosh, it's overwhelming. Everything is so bad, there's nothing I can do. Um, and just throw up your hands in despair. And so I like to tell my students in my, my graduate classes that despair is not a strategy. Pick one thing you can do and just do that one thing. We don't all have to do everything, but each of us can do one thing.

And so if you can find one institution or one group that you think is worth your time and is fighting a fight that you wanna fight, you can get involved with them, even if it's just being a poll poll worker, right? That's not, not partisan. The poll worker population is aging. They can't find younger people to be poll workers. We could go be poll workers. So you, you don't have to get, you know, on board with a, a particular party, but you could find some group that's working on an issue that really matters to you that, that you think is important to the future of democracy or higher ed and put your time and talents. And the other thing I've realized recently is every time I give a talk to a community organization, I try to leave by saying, here's five things you could do.

Pick one of them and do it next week. And so there's organizations like Vote Riders that helps people get the ID they need to vote in Ohio. There's organizations that help you that you could give people a ride to the polls. But also a lot of those organizations for look are looking for people who are good at social media or design or people who like you don't wanna talk to anybody, but you'd be willing to do some design work or some social media work for one of those organizations. They all are looking for different kinds of volunteers. So I think I would just really encourage people to figure out what's the hill that you're willing to die on? What's an institution that's supporting that hill? And what talent do you have that you could bring to that organization? Even if it's one hour a week and then that's enough. You don't have to do everything but pick one thing that you can do and then do that thing. Yeah.

RPR: How do we do this kind of advocacy work with our colleagues? How do we invite our colleagues into these conversations and into, into action as well?

EW: Yeah, that's an interesting question. What I started doing was, at our faculty senate, uh, you can ask for two minutes before Senate starts. And so I started getting out before Senate and just saying, here's some things you need to know about what's currently happening in the legislature and here's one thing you can do today. And so I would just say like, write a letter to the editor or call this number and tell them, you know, to vote no. And what I realized was that a lot of faculty and staff are very interested but feel overwhelmed. And so to say like, find one thing or if you know something and you wanna give them something else, like give people opportunities to get involved, I think we've gone so deep into online life that we don't actually know how to get <laugh> get involved really in like the actual like human to human stuff. So I would just say like if you are involved in something or you are aware of something at fine venues to educate your colleagues, you can also start reading groups or we had an act now to save Democracy Night in the writing center where we just had democracy stations and one person was teaching everybody how to make a phone call to their rep. And it, we weren't telling them what to say, we were just teaching them how to do it because a lot of people are afraid to do that. And so she said she had a young man come in and he said, I don't care about any of the current issues that you all are talking about, but I'm very, very, very concerned about support for mental health. And so she said, oh, well let me teach you how you make a phone call about an issue that matters to you, even if it's not currently up for evoked.

And then he did it and he made, made three phone calls. And so I think that we all need something to do that's very practical and that's doable and it's not overwhelming. And if you know, whatever you're involved in, you know what some of those things are, let your colleagues know. And I guess I would say, this is a question you haven't asked me yet, but I know you were going to, which is, you know, what's the thing that you wish that people knew or practiced? And I think it's related to this, which is don't accept the world that you inherit. If you think something can be different or you think, why isn't there a reading group about this? Why isn't there a support group about that? Why isn't there a club that does this? Well then start one. Right? I think half the time there isn't one because nobody's thought of it or nobody knows how. But if you think, hey, we all need to know more about, I don't know, d e i laws around the country, then start a discussion group on Monday nights at your coffee shop and people will come because they wanna do something, but a lot of times they just don't know what or how.

RPR: Yeah. And that, I think that's so important to think about how we get those conversations started in multiple ways. Cuz people need multiple access points, right? People may be comfortable reading a book together and having a conversation and not comfortable starting with phone calls in a call bank, right? So, so how do we, how do we pick those, those issues and pick those, those avenues for engagement as well,

EW: Right? And if is something maybe really comfortable for someone else and not comfortable for you, and that's fine because it takes all of us doing the thing we're we're okay with and good at in order to make big change. And so if you're a super introvert and you don't wanna make any phone calls, have a reading group <laugh>, right? And it can be an online reading group, you don't even have to meet in person, right? But do some pick one thing that you feel like you can do and invite some other people to join you.

RPR: So one of the questions that I didn't ask that I wanna kind of go back to as, as we're thinking about higher education, the role of higher education as a public good, what in higher education brings you the most joy?

EW: Well, right now for me it is faculty and students who really want to make big change and who are really committed to, to learning and making change in the world. And I see a lot of them in the job that I have, which is why I know I'm so lucky to have this job. Faculty call me every day and say, I want this class to be better. Can I talk to you about how to make it better? Or students will, like student wrote me like two weeks ago and said, we wanna start this new organization. It's not partisan, but we wanna make sure that students know how to contact their legislature, legislators, could you be the faculty advisor? Those things bring me a lot of joy because I think as much as despair as I feel, there's a lot of people who really care about learning and about doing the right thing, and it's really fun to support them and to work with them. Awesome. Um, and so that, that helps me day out of the whole like embracing too much despair.

RPR: So wrapping up our conversation, um, I like to ask one question. So what's one thing you wish all women associated with higher education knew or practiced?

EW: What I wish they knew or practiced or knew how to do is find strong women who will support them and find them by finding people who are consistently acting from their principles. And so not listening so much to what people are saying, but watching what people are doing and finding those women who are consistently making hard choices out of a clear set of principles because those are the people who will have your back and those are the people who are gonna have the back of our students and stand up for us. When our legislatures try to do the things that they've been doing, I would say they're few and far between, but when you find one, reach out to them. I think several times in my life I have reached out to some people and said, you are a person I wanna know. Can I get to know you? And they're usually very willing, but I think that we need to be looking for those people. And there's a whole lot of people who just say a lot of things and don't actually know what their principles are and act from them even when times are hard. But I think we should be looking for them and as women should not be afraid to reach out and say, I wanna be mentored by someone like you who's driven by principals. Would you be willing to have coffee with me?

RPR: This is a wonderful point to end on. Thank you so much for the work that you're doing in your state and broadly and for sharing that wisdom with us, um, today. And good luck in the coming elections.

EW: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

RPR: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Agile Academic Podcast for women in higher ed. I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. To make sure you don't miss an episode, follow the show on Apple, Google, or Spotify podcasting apps and bookmark the show. You'll find each episode a transcript and show notes at theagileacademic.buzzsprout.com. Take care and stay well.