Ideally, college classrooms provide students with a comfortable but challenging environment in which diverse ideas and viewpoints are openly exchanged; the reality they experience, though, is often quite different.

In this episode, we discuss how one institution is attempting to identify and address barriers to this ideal.

Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist...

...and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer...

...and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

Our guest today is David Laibson.

David is the Robert I.

Goldman Professor of Economics and a Faculty Dean of Lowell House.

He has published dozens of heavily cited articles on a wide range of topics, including behavioral economics, self-regulation, behavior change, household finance, and aging.

David is a Research Associate in the Aging, Asset Pricing, and Economic Fluctuations Working Group at the National Bureau of Economic Research, member of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and serves on numerous advisory boards.

He has received Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa award and a Harvard College Professorship in recognition of his high quality teaching.

David is also a co-author of popular textbooks on introductory economics and a co-editor of the Handbook of Behavioral Economics.

It’s really an impressive list of things there.

Welcome David.

Thank you.

Glad to be here.

David, are you drinking tea with us today?

Well, I don't actually have my tea cup with me right now, but I do have my preferred tea on hand because I knew you would ask.

So my favorite tea right now is a Korean matcha called Osulloc, and it comes in a very handy format where I can basically take my matcha tea bag, drop it in my water and have my lovely cup of tea, but I don't honestly have one right now.

So, I thought you were gonna ask about what I like to drink, as opposed to what I'm drinking.

And I am drinking a Twinings oolong tea today.

Oh, nice.

Must be the end of the semester is getting a little intense with the black teas, huh?

It is.

I think this is my third or fourth cup today.

I have a decaf Irish breakfast this afternoon.

That's the difference being in the administration.

I have about a week, have about a week.

Well, good luck reaching the endline.

So, we've invited you here today to discuss your work as co-chair of the Classroom Social Compact Committee, which we had read about in an October 6 article in The New York Times.

Can you tell us a little bit about this committee?

Sure, the committee did most of its work in 2024 and issued its findings report in 2025, early in the year.

Maya Jasanoff, another faculty member here at Harvard, is the co-chair of the committee, and our report was both a description of the state of affairs here at Harvard and a set of recommendations for addressing many of the problems that we uncovered or documented.

The committee was charged by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean, Hopi Hoekstra, and the charge, I won't read the whole thing, but it included describing the nature and purpose of the faculty of arts and science classroom and developing practical recommendations for engendering a vibrant learning environment in the classroom.

Can you talk a little bit about some of the primary issues that were raised in the report?

So, there's a long standing recognition that the classrooms here have a aspirational role to play, that perhaps we're falling short on on many dimensions, and let me review some of them that were discussed and documented in the course of writing our report.

So, one thing that we're concerned about is the degree to which students come to the classroom not completely comfortable sharing what they think when they raise their hand, if they raise their hand.

There's a fair degree of self-censorship, an extent to which people, for various reasons, may not feel comfortable speaking up.

It may be that they're shy and don't want to say something that might be wrong or that they don't want to say something that may be viewed critically by other students.

And so one aspect of the classroom that is problematic is the degree to which people are not comfortable bringing authentic voices into the classroom setting.

Another significant issue is the degree to which our students have, in some cases, focused energies outside the classroom, to the extent that it actually undermines the academic center of their lives here.

Now I don't want to imply that that's the fault of our students.

I think in many cases, that's a reality that our faculty are not creating classroom experiences that are sufficiently stimulating and therefore engaging our students’ interest.

And so I think the un-centering of the classroom, which has been occurring for decades here, is a two-sided phenomenon.

On the one hand, it's students that are focused elsewhere.

On the other hand, it's faculty that may not be creating the most stimulating and exciting environment intellectually in the classroom.

And I think we've all agreed, unfortunately, that that's okay, and this report is part of reversing that consensus and reasserting the principles that I think we would agree with, but haven't always been our practice here at Harvard.

And I think what you're describing is something that we've seen at pretty much all institutions, to some extent.

But one of the things that really impressed me about the report was the extent to which you gathered data and the ways in which you gathered data, because that could be a useful model for other institutions as well.

Could you talk a little bit about what types of data you gathered and the process of assembling that?

So we did a year of data gathering, and as you point out, it was pretty aggressive and extensive.

We wanted to make sure that we really had our finger on the pulse of the many different communities and the many different stakeholders, so we held well over 30 group listening sessions, and then I would say, hundreds of one-on-one listening sessions, where you sit down with a student and have a one- hour lunch and get a full download from them in the most confidential setting, where it's just a one-on-one conversation, as opposed to someone volunteering an opinion with 40 other people in the room, which can be a little daunting.

We also consulted with colleagues and consulted with many different committees that sit here in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences that oversee our curriculum.

So the Educational Policy Committee, the Graduate Policy Committee, the General Education Committee, a place called The Bok center, that is a sort of mentorship for teachers unit, and we talked with department chairs.

We talked with divisional deans.

So we really went out there and gathered a lot of data.

In addition, we looked at 11 different surveys that were fielded either by us or by other groups inside Harvard, measuring undergraduate opinions, graduate opinions, faculty opinions, alumni opinions, and that is the maximally confidential space for people to give answers, because a lot of these surveys are done without any ability to identify the respondent other than knowing that they are, in fact, a Harvard affiliate, because they got into the survey using a Harvard ID.

So we looked at five undergraduate surveys, three graduate student surveys, one faculty survey and two alumni surveys, and by that point, we had a lot of data that would enable us to, I think, have a fairly precise understanding of at least what the community thought and what they were willing to share with us in these different formats.

So, you mentioned the self-censorship issue that bubbled up across all of these different audiences that you surveyed and collected data from.

What are some of the consequences in terms of student intellectual development?

So there's a lot of adverse consequences.

One is the obvious problem that students don't feel, in many cases, that they belong, because their perspective is not welcome, and that, I think, undermines their ability to thrive.

They're also not developing the critical skill of learning how to speak publicly.

If they're constantly suppressing their voice in these public settings, and the classroom setting, then that's a skill that isn't being nurtured.

I think perhaps one of the most important problems with a classroom where people don't feel that they can say what they really think is that there's this false impression of consensus when in fact there are enormously divergent viewpoints.

They're just invisible because most people that are speaking are speaking in a relatively narrow domain with respect to maybe the most sensitive issues.

So when you have a classroom that is a place of self-censorship, and I want to emphasize many classrooms don't have that problem.

But when you have a classroom where people are self- censoring, you get a false impression of homogeneity.

You get a set of skills that are not being developed.

You get many students feeling that they're just there on a performative basis, and it undermines the whole intellectual enterprise.

We're here to learn and really compare ideas while all that's out the window when you have the impression, and again, this is only in some classrooms, that there's a kind of acceptable viewpoint, and anything that sits outside that viewpoint you better keep quiet about.

But I want to emphasize, a lot of people think that the way the law is laid down is through faculty and graduate student teaching fellows.

Indeed, the students told us that mostly they were concerned about what their fellow students thought.

So, if anyone has the impression that this is a sort of monoculture problem that is driven by or primarily by instructors, I want to, right from the start, clarify that overwhelmingly, the students said that in many cases, it was fellow students and their judgments and what would happen after class in the dining halls that they were most concerned about with respect to saying something that might be unpopular in class, and not the bad grade they might get.

Indeed, I was quite happy to hear that the faculty were the people that the students were the least concerned about.

So I think there's more concern about some of the graduate students that are grading their papers in a big class, but especially there's concern about their fellow students.

Now that's not to say that the faculty don't have any role to play in changing this equilibrium.

Definitely, the faculty need to change norms and need to lead with their voice this new approach to a classroom where more perspectives are sought out and encouraged and welcomed, but it is, I think, important to emphasize that it's not just the faculty that are contributing to self- censorship, it is fear of what other students are going to say in the dining hall after class.

One of the more striking statistics there was that in one of the surveys, 33% of Harvard's college students reported that they felt free to express personal feelings and belief, as you've noted, a lot of students are self-censoring.

However, there were some other statistics based on individual course evaluations that suggested a much lower rate.

How was that explained in the report, that discrepancy between the reports from seniors and the individual course summaries.

Yeah.

So just to highlight the tension, if you ask people about their overall academic experience, only a third say they were comfortable speaking openly, but when you ask them about the individual course that they just took, so ask them about one course, and you get about 90% saying that they're comfortable speaking openly.

So clearly, what we're learning here is that this is not a problem that people are experiencing everywhere, all the time.

It's a problem they're experiencing in some places.

So when you ask people, as they're leaving after four years, what was it like?

Did you feel the need to self-censor?

They say, “Yeah, sometimes.” But when you ask them about the class they took last semester on 19th century history of Brazil, they say, “No, actually, in that class, I did not feel the need to self-censor.” So, the distinction, I think that's important to highlight, is that it's not a problem that's occurring all the time for our students.

It's a problem that's occurring frequently enough that it's a real concern, but not so frequently that it's affecting every curricular experience.

And I think that speaks to a couple issues.

First, the problem is somewhat contained.

But secondly, there probably is a degree of intellectual self- segregation that is contributing to the sense of, “Well, it's not a problem in my class.” Sometimes I ask students, “Well, what happened in your class?

What was the curriculum?” And they'll describe a relatively homogeneous student body in that class.

And then I'm not surprised that if the classes has advertised itself as having a particular viewpoint, and the students get that message early on, and the students that want that viewpoint stay, and the students that don't want that viewpoint move on, you can easily see how people might say, “Yeah, in that class that I took, I had no trouble saying what was on my mind.” But then one realizes that in parentheses, that's because the class ended up attracting a relatively homogeneous set of perspectives in the student body.

And so I do think all of these considerations make it challenging to know exactly how deep the problem is.

I definitely think we can over-exaggerate it if we just cite the 33% number of people that feel comfortable speaking their mind.

But I think we can also kind of over minimize it by saying if you look at individual courses, 90% of the students say that in the particular course they are evaluating right now, they feel free to speak their mind.

We don't know how much of that is a kind of self- segregation into curricular environments that they feel comfortable in.

What are some strategies, maybe both structural or also within a class, to work against this?

Well, I think you start with awareness as an instructor, I think instructors don't realize the degree to which their students feel pressure from other students to accept a kind of student-endorsed viewpoint.

And I think faculty are trying very hard to have real conversations in their classrooms, and are often working to prevent their own viewpoint from becoming, in some sense, the only acceptable viewpoint.

They're not necessarily jumping out on day one and saying, “This is what I think,” they're creating space for student perspectives.

They're working hard on that front, but they don't realize that it's not just that students are trying to glom on to what the faculty member thinks, it's what the other students think that is a real issue.

And so I think faculty need to be explicit in saying, “Hey, in this classroom environment, we really encourage diverse perspectives, and I'm going to be thoughtful in drawing them out.” And so I'll give you examples of how we do that in my class.

You probably have both have the experience of that wonderful student who is always quick to get their hand up right away, and if we always call the students who get their hands up in the first five seconds when we ask a question, or when we open it up for questions, we tend to get a relatively homogeneous set of answers because it's the same students that we're privileging.

They're the students who get their hands up the quickest.

And if we call them, once there are a few hands up, well, we're going to over sample the same students.

And so one thing that we do in my classes, we, by that, I mean me and my co instructors… we try to let the question settle and not pick someone immediately.

And I have something called the 10-second rule, where once I ask a question, I'll count to 10 in my head, quietly, and only then, when I've allowed 10 seconds to pass, do I finally start picking from the hands that are up.

And at that point there's a lot of hands up, and I have my pick of students, and I can go for students that have not been contributing so far in that lecture, or so far, even in that semester.

So I love the ability to bring in this far more diverse set of student voices by just giving them time to get a question together.

And I think there's lots of ways that faculty can launch a more diverse conversation by not allowing a small set of voices to become the dominant voices, and by looking for opinions that lean a different way than the first opinion you got.

So you can ask a question, and some student says, “Well, I think A,” and you can ask, “Well, who thinks not A?” And then you can draw in the range of opinions, rather than allowing the first student to say, “I think A” and then the second student to say, “I think A too,” and then the third student “I think A three,” and everyone thinks a.

And that's pretty much the herding effect you don't want.

And you can be very intentional in creating an anti-herding effect by only asking for questions or perspectives that create the heterogeneity that you're trying to engender, rather than allowing students to herd on the first answer that comes out of the room.

So I think there's a range of strategies, and they had to be launched on day one to get the equilibrium right in the classroom.

Students need to hear the message early on and hear it repeatedly, that this is a place where we're looking to hear from different perspectives, and we're not trying to all agree on something.

I am very disappointed when I hear faculty telling me about how much agreement there is in their classroom and how excited they are by that.

I think when everyone's agreeing on something, it's probably a mundane thing, or they're observing false agreement.

There's enormous disagreement among our students, and if you know how to draw it out, you'll get it.

And if you get everyone to agree together that something is true, well, I ask you, what does everyone agree on that isn't something that's utterly trivial.

One of the things I've done in my classes is I do a lot of polling, but also I have a Catchbox, one of those little cubes with a microphone in it.

And when I'm asking questions where there is likely to get a lot of diversity, I'll wander up to the back of the room because that's where the students are most likely to sit who are least likely to volunteer and either hand it to them or toss it down the aisle a bit, because the same students always sit up front with their hands raised all the time, and students in the back, at least in my class, are much less likely to ever raise their hand, no matter how many other people have done so.

I think one of the things you recommend perhaps using the Bok Center to have people work on alternative teaching strategies to draw out some of these things.

Yeah, we do some of the things that you just described.

We also sometimes kind of insist on questions from the back of the room.

And we also have something called a pre-lecture activity where we get everyone to anonymously answer polls or play games or do something that we've created before the lecture.

And it's amazing how much variation you get on these pre- lecture activities.

And then everyone in class is astounded when we show them the histograms of responses, and they realize, “Wow, I thought everyone agreed with me and now I realize half the class has a totally different viewpoint.” And it's not just now a hand or two, they're seeing data that represents the entire distribution of people in the class, and everyone says that's the thing they remember the most from the semester, seeing their own data and realizing how different their own perspective is from that of everyone else in the class.

And it's an eye opener.

One of the other things you mentioned earlier was the self selection into classes.

Do you have some strategies to encourage folks to explore more things?

Yeah, so certainly that's advice that I give all my students.

I'm not sure that that's the best way to get that advice to be accepted, just sharing it.

I certainly take the view that if you are taking a class that's just going to tell you what you already believe about the world, you're less likely to be learning than by taking a class that might challenge your preconceptions.

That said, I think one thing that instructors should do, in my view… of course, they have academic freedom, so they're free to decide whether they want to do this… but I would encourage it as good pedagogy, is to offer a range of perspectives in a class and to, themselves, offer the alternative view on an issue, as opposed to the view that is the maybe main thrust of the course.

Indeed, I do this myself, I'll give students the range of evidence on an issue, and I'll say some scholars think this, and here's why they think this, and some scholars think this, and here's why they think this, and here's the body of evidence that we have, and you can see all the different empirical estimates that have been generated in scholarship in the last 15 years, and so we're going to be very candid with you about the limitations of what we know and how scholarship has yielded different answers, rather than picking the study that I most like, that is most aligned with my personal viewpoint and teaching it that way.

I think good pedagogy goes hand in hand with acknowledging the range of viewpoints that exist in the scholarly community and being forthright that there isn't a single viewpoint that happens to match my own that is the right approach.

And we even have a lecture in the introductory economics class on epistemics, where we talk about the limits of our knowledge and all the ways in which our own views have evolved as we've professionally been exposed to more data, seen new research, changed our minds, and so we try to model for our students this concept that there isn't a set of truths carved on stone that we're going to hand them.

And I would recommend to colleagues that they teach their classes that way.

And I think students should also think about learning that way.

If they think that they have already discovered the truths carved in stone at age 19, well, they're in for a big surprise about how the world works.

They're never going to find those truths carved in stone, and they certainly don't have them already at age 19.

So I think we need to message that more in our classrooms.

One of the things you've mentioned is that students don't always feel free to express their opinions, but there was also in the report a discussion of student motivation, student engagement, and the relative emphasis that students put on the classes versus the social life and extramural activities.

In the report, there's a number of recommendations, one of which you've already discussed in terms of changing how we teach in the classroom.

But what are some of the other recommendations of the committee relating to these two issues in terms of getting more students engaged in class and putting more of an emphasis on class, as well as perhaps being more free to express their thoughts in class.

I don't want to create too strong an impression of certitude here we are saying in the report that recentering the classroom, recentering academics, is an important goal going forward, and indeed, we're already making progress this year where I'm seeing tangible changes in this current academic year, which is really giving me a lot of encouragement That said, the extracurricular life is rich and serves many purposes.

So we're not trying to convey the message that all of that should be shunted aside and people should focus exclusively on their academic lives.

I think it's about finding the right balance, and for some students they’re already well balanced, and for other students, maybe they're unbalanced with a search for courses that ask very little of them.

They're called gems here at Harvard, g-e-m, and that means low work, high grade, and so maybe not so many gems should be offered, and maybe students shouldn't seek out a course that is called a gem, and if people feel that they're so busy out of class extracurricularly and they're searching for gems, that that's a sign that maybe the balance hasn't quite been found for that student.

So I think that we should, as a community, ask ourselves, “Well, what courses are famous for having a low lift of work and a very high grade distribution?” and then sort of ask, “Is that the sort of course that we want to be offering?” And that means that for that kind of curriculum, maybe we ask more of our students.

Maybe the readings are more demanding, maybe the grading is tougher.

So I think that there's some suggestion to the community of instructors that we might think about raising our standards.

And there, we're thinking about what we ask our students to do out of class, what we ask our students to do even in class.

So there's the cell phone that's inevitably taking the student's attention away from what's happening in the classroom and then 75 minutes have gone by, and you ask the student as they're leaving the room about what just happened, and because they were parallel processing through the whole thing, they actually didn't get very much out of it, and 75 minutes were spent kind of scrolling some social media app, and the student might think they got a lot out of that 75 minutes, but in fact, it's very hard to do two things mentally at the same time.

So I think we need to create more stimulating classrooms, more demanding classrooms with respect to assignments, we need to not create a classroom where there are so many A's that the student can essentially only distinguish themselves by joining the consulting club outside of class and putting all their energy into that.

So I think that there's a lot to be done by instructors in creating a more exciting classroom, a classroom where excellence is acknowledged with higher grades, and it's not that the norm is an A.

I think students might also ask themselves, is the best use of their four years here to focus on things that are happening outside of our classes rather than inside our classes.

And if the answer from the students is, well, actually, it's better outside the class, then I think the faculty need to double down on making the in-classroom experience better.

So a lot for us to think about as teachers, and our obligation to create an exciting curriculum that makes students thrilled to come to class.

That should really happen.

I mean, students should not come to class grudgingly.

They should come to class with excitement because something interesting is going to happen, because there'll be a conversation that will be memorable, because they'll have an insight that they'll take with them for the rest of their lives.

I mean, classrooms are some of the most remarkable, extraordinary experiences one can have in a lifetime.

And if it's not that, then it's on us faculty to up our game and create these experiences that are so memorable, that are so transformative, that are so important in the development of our students, that students are actually eager to be there and are not going only because attendance is being taken.

Though I might take attendance if that's a problem too, but for sure, the goal is a classroom that is a wondrous experience, that is the highlight of one's life, that is sad as you leave it behind and graduate from college.

Graduating from college should be, on one part, an exciting moment to move on with your life, and on the other hand, a very sad moment when you're leaving behind this incredible opportunity to sample intellectually four courses that are life changing every semester.

Well, let's create those courses together.

I think a life changing course, seems like some faculty might have some imposter syndrome around being able to achieve that.

Can you talk a little bit more about some of the strategies in the class to make that engaging experience where students maybe don't want to interact with their phones and they want to fully participate in class.

Well, I think students, by and large, do want to participate in class.

I think the phone is sort of like a drug and everyone says, “Well, I don't want to be a heroin addict in five years.

I'm going to quit between now and then.” And of course, it's very hard to quit the addiction.

I think phones have a lot of those addictive properties.

You enter the classroom thinking, “Gosh, I really need to focus.” I mean, this is my own experience as a student.

There weren't cell phones, but there were plenty of things that one could let one's mind wander to.

So I always enter the classroom intending to take good notes and really focus and not get distracted and learn intensively, and often I found myself drifting off.

So we're all easily distracted, and the cell phone is easy distraction on steroids.

So I think students want to learn, and I think we need to create environments that facilitate that learning and make it easy.

There's so many classes that I've attended where literally, I was on the edge of my seat through the whole thing and excited because there was something important being said, some conversation with students, among students, between students and faculty, that kept me engaged.

And I think students want that.

I don't think they are eager to spend these four years blowing off their courses.

I think that is something that happens as a unintended consequence of all the other things they're doing, like the conversation with a roommate that starts at 11pm and doesn't end till 3am and after four hours of debating every single philosophical issue under the sun, you finally go to bed, and then, for your 9 am class, you're very sleepy, and you get to the 9 am class having not gotten enough sleep, and you're barely awake.

That student was excited to be debating philosophy at two o'clock in the morning, and unfortunately, got to class in a drowsy state because of it.

They're not intellectually unengaged, but they're still not going to really thrive in that classroom because of the sleeping that they didn't get.

So my sense is that students want to learn, and we just need to help create environments where it's conducive to learning, where being in class isn't going to put you to sleep, it's actually going to wake you up, because so many exciting things are happening with respect to what is being said, debates that are taking place in real time, opportunities to ask questions, moments where we're all on the edge of our seat because a student is actually pushing back on a faculty member on some issue and there's a interesting dialog happening, maybe students also interacting with each other on some issue that is being discussed in the class, and so there's a conversation, there's issues that are surprises, there's intellectual turns that were unexpected, there's data that's surprising, there's ideas that are engaging.

I mean, these are all aligned with what our students want.

And I think the problem is often they come to class, and actually it's a pretty boring lecture, and that's not their mistake, that's ours.

And along the lines of mobile devices, one of the things recommended in the policy is that mobile devices be either banned or discouraged, except in the cases of documented disabilities or when they're being used actively for some component to the class.

And in your class, the article mentioned that you had a device- free zone, but many people chose not to sit there.

How can we encourage students, perhaps, to not use mobile devices?

I want to be clear, the policy in our class is no cell phones anywhere, so that's a universal ban across the entire classroom, but we do allow students to use laptops and to use iPads if they want to.

Though we also have a iPad and laptop free zone, I struggle with the question of laptop and iPad use, because for many students, they, I think, legitimately view it as an aid for learning, just a regular academic experience, I like to take my notes on an iPad, for example, as opposed to any need to use an iPad.

So, I'm open to students doing that.

I do warn them that it's a slippery slope.

Once you have the laptop open, you're one click away from all the distractions and temptations of the internet, and that will really undermine your teaching.

And what we do in our class is we actually hand out photocopies of the slides so they can commit to keep their laptop closed by simply using our photocopies and taking notes with a pen on our photocopies.

And most of our students do that.

That said, I think there are students that want the hybrid experience, and probably some who are taking advantage of being in a laptop allowed zone or iPad allowed zone to occasionally check out and check into their email or everything else that's happening.

So I'm torn about exactly how to handle the classroom environment.

I'm open to professors that are going to do a complete ban.

I think that's fine.

Obviously there's accommodations, and we, I think, need to be mindful of that, but a complete ban outside of accommodations.

But I'm also open to saying, “Hey, these young people need to learn how to develop this skill of living in a distracting world, and maybe part of developing that skill is realizing that after 75 minutes in the classroom, they have gotten nothing out of a lecture because they found themselves doing one thing after another on their laptop.” And so there is an upside to the distraction, which is a little bit of growing self awareness, which emerges as people begin to discover that we think pretty serially and cannot think consciously on parallel streams, and consequently that skill set of learning how to operate in this distracting world is developed in a room that allows them to use these electronic devices, though I think the cell phone is just so obviously destructive that I'm happy to nix that.

The policies that completely ban all devices except for accommodations… are we kind of skirting or dancing around issues of privacy when it comes to students’ disability status and things like that.

Yeah, so that's a real issue.

I mean, I think I'm still comfortable with having that policy, but I think you make a good point.

So we certainly encourage folks to read the full report, to dig into the details, but we always wrap up by asking, what's next?

You don't change the momentum of a university overnight.

So I think writing a report is a great step, and now there's lots and lots of work to be done to both evaluate the merits of the arguments in that report, and to the extent the arguments have merit, to change our culture, and some of those changes come with legislation, which indeed, Harvard has passed.

There's new language in the undergraduate handbook, which is in the report and mentions a lot of the things that I've discussed, including other things that I haven't discussed, like Chatham House rules in class to give people more comfort speaking authentically.

Chatham House rules, as I think your listeners know, is a policy of non-attribution so people can say things in class, experiment with new ideas without being afraid that it's going to show up on a social media post five minutes after class ends with their name attached to it.

So legislation, policy making, culture change, rules that align with the messages that I've said, like, how much do we allow pass/fai… Harvard is restricting the degree to which students can take pass/fail courses, not eliminating it, but reducing the freedom to do that as frequently as students did so in the past… finding ways to implement and enforce policies that ban electronic devices in the classroom or at least limit their usage, figuring out where the sweet spot is, and all of that, changing the norm so students get comfortable with difficult conversations, not just in the classroom but also in the dining halls, creating a classroom culture where we're excited to talk with people who disagree with us, rather than horrified to interact with someone who doesn't share our viewpoints.

I'm seeing all these things actually happening in real time.

There's more and more willingness, just in the last year, for people to say what they think, and we have a lot of work to do.

It's not that culture change happens overnight, but we're, I think, broadly, moving in that direction, even though there's individual instances where I'm quite unhappy and still concerned about the freedom of speech on our campuses.

So it's sort of two steps forward, one step backward.

But we didn't get here overnight, and we're not going to get out of the place we are in overnight.

Let's keep working on these issues and thinking about how we make our academic environments healthy and productive and engaged, and how we create classrooms that people are super excited to have the opportunity to enter and sad when the 32 courses are over and they're off to the rest of their lives.

College should be an extraordinary privilege and an academically delightful one, and getting back to that place, if we were ever there, is going to take some work.

Well, all the things that you've discussed, I think, pretty much all colleges are facing and it's nice to see the actions that you're taking.

And I think a lot of institutions could benefit from exploring these approaches.

Thank you.

And we will include a link to the report in the show notes, as well as a link to the New York Times article that provoked our interest in this topic.

Yeah.

In the New York Times article, I will say one thing, it puts a fair bit of emphasis on the students.

I don't think that's the right balance.

I think we need to put a lot of emphasis on what the faculty are or are not doing to create a stimulating classroom environment that will, in this dance between the student and the instructor, create a combined commitment to all the things that we've discussed, and just saying the students need to be more academically inclined, I think, is the wrong message, and the New York Times article seemed to have a little bit of that tone.

I appreciate your emphasis on actionable items, and as members of our institutions, we can only control the actions that we can take.

That's right, we're going to make all of this better by creating classrooms that are exciting to be in.

And at least move in that direction as much as we can.

Yeah, I'm pretty optimistic, actually.

I think there are some people that are just brilliant, charismatic teachers, and it's impossible to copy and paste that.

But there's also a bunch of low-hanging fruit that doesn't involve being a charismatic instructor, that can create the classroom environment that's exciting to be in.

I actually think that we can create experiences that are very meaningful for our students by sort of working down a long list of check boxes for classrooms that have the right ingredients for engaged learning and active learning.

Well, thank you.

We very much appreciate you joining us.

Thank you.

Great to meet the two of you.

Thank you.

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Music by Michael Gary Brewer.