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Good afternoon, Dr. Byrd. Hello, Dr. McDaniel. It's Friday again, and I'm very glad of it. I love Fridays, and mostly because of doc talks.

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If we did doc talks on Mondays, Monday would be my favorite day. That's, that's a theory I'm not sure I wanna test, but, but I like the idea. It certainly, it certainly does give us something to look forward to at the end of each week, to spend some time together talking about the work of the Task Force on

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Slavery, Segregation and Racial Injustice, and today is an especially good Friday for a doc talk, because, as our audience can see, as they're filing in, we are joined by some very special guests on today's doc talk. And I think, you know, we, we disappointed our audience a little bit last week because

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we had told them a couple weeks ago that we might have some guests, but we had to reschedule a little bit, no problem, we're all here now, and really excited to have the opportunity to talk some about the research that the task force is doing and has released as progress reports earlier this year.

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So without further ado, I'm gonna turn it over to you, Dr. Byrd, to introduce our two guests, and then they can tell us a little bit about the work that they do before we dive in to our discussion. That's a, that sounds like a great way to start, and I want to join you in welcoming

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Dr. Connie Porter and Dr. Brielle Bryan to Friday doc talks. To our audience, Dr. Brielle Bryan is assistant professor of sociology at Rice.

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Her research examines inequalities and barriers to opportunity in the United States, with an emphasis on racial inequities and the role, and the role of the criminal justice system. Some of her current work examines how incarceration and felony conviction shape

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housing, economic stability, and interaction with the social safety net over the life course. Her work addresses such issues as the impact of felony conviction on housing stability, formerly incarcerated Americans, access to the social safety net, and the life income trajectory of formerly incarcerated Americans.

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This is, I, wait a minute, I'm getting off track. I was about to, I was about to improvise. I was about to go down recent discussions on similar issues in the introduction to African and African American studies, but I have reeled myself in, and I'm just gonna say that

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this is, of course, critically important work, and the, and the subject matter, there is no more important subject matter in the contemporary study of black history and society in the, in the United States. Dr. Connie Porter is Associate Professor of Marketing, and Senior, and Senior Associate

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Dean of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at the Rice University Jones School of Business. Her research focuses on the value of fostering customer relationships in technology-enabled marketing environments. Her work pays particular attention to questions of trust, sustained engagement, and

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value creation in virtual communities. At the Jones School, Dr. Porter has taught courses in marketing and marketing research and customer relationship management. She has also led an experiential learning course, marketing lab, and launched

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and led integrative executive seminar courses in the MBA for Executives program over at the Jones School. Prior to pursuing a career in the academy, Dr. Porter spent several years as a management consultant and as a commercial banker.

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I was gonna improvise some more, but I, but I stopped myself. My mother worked in banking all of, all of her life and my life, and, and it makes the world go round, and it's the subject I know the least about, despite having spent all of my life with the woman who processed loans over in the Heights.

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Shout out to Merchants and Planters Bank. But so glad to have Dr. Porter and Dr. Bryan with us today. And I know, Dr.

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McDaniel, you're going to get us started. Thanks, Dr. Byrd, and welcome again, Dr. Bryan and Dr. Porter, we're just so delighted that you're here, and we thought we'd start, but just giving the audience a note, Dr.

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Byrd has already told us a little bit about the work that you do, your scholarship and your various roles here at Rice, but we thought we'd give you a chance to talk a little bit about that work, especially in thinking about how it intersects, if you see intersections, with the work that we're doing on the Task Force on Slavery,

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Segregation, and Racial Injustice. Dr. Porter, would you mind getting us started on that? I don't at all. Only because your audience might find it curious that a marketing professor is here at

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all. And marketing is one of the, I think, least understood disciplines even within business. So I would love to talk about the connections, because at its heart and soul, marketing actually draws on a vast literature base through many of what I would call the foundational disciplines of psychology, sociology, anthropology,

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economics even. And so, you know, as I read through your work, you never know where you're gonna land. I started out looking at relationship marketing, as you suggested, in terms of what fosters trust and commitment and positive outcomes in a community setting in virtual

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environments, but a lot of what I found myself thinking about as I read your work was the the relevance of things that we talk about all the time on, on our campus, around the Rice family and the concepts of relationship building and maintenance that occur or potentially get destroyed by, by the history that's embedded, relationships

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are in fact a reflection of a history, a past, between one, two, or more parties. And so as I read through your work, I thought about all kinds of marketing concepts that came up around branding. What it means to have an authentic sense of a, of a story of one's institution and a

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story of one's self, if you're a William Rice. I found myself thinking about all the things that we talk about in terms of the importance of the authenticity of the narratives that, that we want others to look at. And so I think as we go on today and I start to do the same thing, I start to go off on

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one of those adlibbing things that Dr. Byrd says, I'm gonna reel myself back in, but I'll leave you with this notion, which is that I'm just looking forward to this discussion. I thank you for inviting me here, because I think that for the folks who are not actually

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in the room with us today, for people who might hear portions on the podcast, I wanna encourage everyone to do what I took time to do in preparation for the day, and that is to read your reports. I think they were brilliantly and passionately executed. I am more informed as, as a person, not just a scholar, because I read them.

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Thank you for that, and thank you for telling us a little bit about your, your research. I can still recall a panel that you and Dr. Bryan both did this summer as well around Juneteenth, and your discussion then about the concept of entrepreneurship and the stories that we tell around entrepreneurship,

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also seems to me, is kind of relevant in this context too. Who can be an entrepreneur, what does it mean to be an entrepreneur, what does it take to, to build a business? So maybe we'll get into some of that as well today.

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Dr. Bryan, would you mind telling us a little bit about your scholarship and the work that you do here at Rice? Of course. So, as Dr. Byrd already noted, broadly, I study inequality in the U.S., And I mostly focus on

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drivers of racial inequality. And so a lot of my work focuses in particular on the criminal justice system and the legacies of contact with the criminal justice system, both for individuals who are themselves involved, but also their family members and other social ties.

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But I also, with a coauthor of another line of work that's focused really particularly on the black-white wealth gap in the U.S. And so this is how I came to this conversation that we just referenced over the summer, the June, the Juneteenth seminar, and talking about entrepreneurship.

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And it was my background in wealth and thinking about wealth inequality that really was sort of top of mind as I was reading through these reports and thinking about, yeah, exactly this. Who is able to become an entrepreneur, and what, what, even if small, starting

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advantages are necessary for acquiring the type of wealth that someone like William Marsh Rice was able to, which enables the creation of an institute like Rice, but also comes with everything bundled up with, with wealth creation at any point in time, which I think we can't, can basically never extract from exploitation.

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But I can save that conversation for, for later. But yes, anyway, I should also note, I teach a social inequality class for undergraduates here at Rice, and so we spend a lot of time in that course throughout the semester thinking about the stories we tell around inequality and in particular, the

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American dream and, and the way in which it continues to inform so many of our policies and the ways that we approach various problems, and I think that that narrative of the American dream is something that is also worth discussing and clearly deeply tied to the way that narratives have been constructed around William Marsh Rice and his

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origin story, as well as his legacy. Anyway, so I'm very excited to, to talk about all of this today and sort of see where we, see where we land. Wonderful. Well, thank you for those remarks.

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It's interesting to me, both of you circled around the question of storytelling or the stories that we tell. And certainly, Dr. Byrd and I have found one challenge in releasing these updates has been accurately communicating the story of, of what they are and how they came to be and

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what still remains to be done. Because even though we've called them "reports" in this conversation, we've tried to be very deliberate about describing them as "updates." These are works in progress that were snapshots of a moment in time in our own work this summer that detailed what

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we had done to that point, but certainly isn't all of what we are doing or hope to do as part of the research of this task force. But I think what, what they do both hit on, those, those two updates, is this question of narratives and and stories that we tell, origin stories that we tell, both about the

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university, but also about individual people. And so maybe we could start there and talk in a little bit more detail. I hope that our audience is aware that these updates that we're referring to are available on our website, taskforce.rice.edu, and you can download the two PDFs there.

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One, an update on the research on slavery, which is the first part of our title as a task force, and the other is an update on research about the Founder's Memorial, or the statue of William Marsh Rice, in the historic quad here at Rice University. And so those are the, the two documents that we asked Dr.

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Porter and Dr. Bryan to, to read in advance of this discussion, and are there particular parts of those, those updates that caught your attention, either for telling you something you didn't know, or raising questions about things that you'd still like to know? Dr.

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Bryan. So for me, I guess, well, I will start, maybe I'll go in order of sort of what my thinking was going through these. The first one was this, reading first with the update on slavery, in particular, and the

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sort of beginning portion of it focused on the way that historically William Marsh Rice and his, his fortune-making had been described and sort of how it changed over time. And for me, what it got me thinking about and I had a hard time dropping was this question of why, why we feel the need to tell these wholesome stories about the origin

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of institutions, particularly institutions of higher education. I think that's true of a lot of institutions. There's some desire to sort of create some idealistic history of it that we can tell. But in the case of higher education, it feels almost like something that people fight

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harder to do, to tell these, these kinder portraits of the origin of these sorts of places. And now I'm sort of going down a different track, but what I kept thinking about is, why is that? Is it, do we, do we not buy the continued legitimacy of the institution and its

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modern-day mission if we, if we can't acknowledge the fact that origin stories are not always so pretty, and, and very often the people who are responsible for creating institutions that, perhaps ideally at this point in time, are institutions that do generate equity or at least fight against inequity?

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Is it, yeah, is there a reason that we, we still struggle to, to come to terms with sort of ugly origin stories? Even to this day, I think. Anyway, I was sort of going, going off on a tangent a bit.

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But I will note that, that that idea kept floating around my head as I was reading all of this, and I found in particular that Cram's, I'm forgetting his full name, but Cram's commencement speech in the second report about the William Marsh Rice, William Marsh Rice statue, and then the commencement that followed just a day or two thereafter,

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his commencement speech, which really seemed to pretty directly address a lot of this, I think he was focused very much on the ills of the time with regard to the Ku Klux Klan and, and other things going on, but, but there was one part where he seemed to talk about the sort of narrative about industrialism and the progress of

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industrialism is necessarily a sort of positive thing, and that industrialism would sort of save us rather than being a means of exploitation. Anyway, all of this just made me, yeah, really, really wonder why, for so long, have people gone to what seem like sometimes great pains to, to describe the origin story

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of Rice and many places like it in happier terms than, than they're probably due. I'll pause there. I would love to hear what other people say, have to say. Should I jump in? So I didn't plan on talking about this until I heard what you said, Brielle, but as you were talking, I was thinking about what a potential answer could

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be. So let me just hypothesize what I think is potentially going on as to why over the years and even today, there is a struggle with acknowledging the truth about the histories of some of the places like Rice and other institutions that have these ties that seem to be inconvenient truths.

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I think it has a lot to do with the way many institutions, particularly in higher education, speak to and message to various stakeholders like students, faculty, staff, alumni, the communities in which we find ourselves sitting, we message and communicate; this is all about marketing, by the way; we message and communicate this

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concept of, of familialness, of belongingness, and, and, and the experience of everyone here is not that feeling. And, and so when we think about, there's a construct that we talk about in marketing and management called organizational identification, which I'm certain comes also

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from the psychology literature, which suggests that if one feels a strong sense of identification with an organization, then when a discussion emerges that is favorable toward the institution, I feel a great sense of pride because I almost have become one with that institution. When I hear negative and hurtful things about that institution,

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that's, that's hurtful and painful to me. When I feel that sense of identification, when I have to separate myself from that institution, it causes great pain. And so, and so to acknowledge these things is to somehow acknowledge something very painful

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about oneself, I think, is how a lot of people are feeling. So the resistance is an attempt that one might view as quite natural in, in saving one's own self-perception around having embedded themselves in this community and, and been told that they should identify with it.

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And so that's also the struggle that, I found myself speaking with a number of students over the past few months about, which is the messaging that continues around belonging here. But yet that's not what they're feeling in some instances, and so, so that disconnect

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can be quite painful. So I think, I didn't plan on even talking about this, but, but I think, Brielle, that that resistance to the truth and embracing that has everything to do with what that says about me. Now, I think there's a solution to that.

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A way that we can acknowledge that there are no perfect people, institutions, or places, and to be able to authentically reconcile that will allow us to actually have an authentic sense of community. So I'm just gonna throw that out there.

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I'll stop with that, 'cause I can talk about this forever. No, I think that's very, very apt and great. I mean, I'm thinking back to one of our first webinars for the task force, where we were joined by Professor James Campbell, who led the effort at Brown University, one of

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the first efforts by an institution of higher education under the leadership of President Ruth Simmons, to embark on a project like the one that we've embarked on, to understand the institution's history as fully and as authentically as possible. And one of the points that he made and regularly makes is that universities are

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organizations that like to think of themselves as persisting over time. They're communities that persist over time. And so when people join a university, as opposed to some other institutions or organizations they might join, they, they feel that they're sort of taking on board

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this whole story, this, this long history. And maybe that has something to do with the interest in origin stories. So I appreciate your bringing your own disciplinary perspective on that and the way it connects to organizational psychology and management.

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But I also want to give you the opportunity, Dr. Porter, to talk about what you did plan to talk about. I don't mind talking about that. What, what struck you, or what reflections did you wanna share on reading these updates

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from the summer? I had some that were general and some that were quite specific about William Rice's narratives and the statue, but I'll just say in general, before I get specific, that what I loved and found, for myself at least, unique, because this is not the reading that

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I do every day, is that you focus the first of the two reports on the untold stories and the voices of the enslaved, not slavery itself. I found that refreshing, insightful. I found it a powerful perspective to take, as well as the backdrop against what is

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becoming a revised story about William Rice. What was untold about his self-motivations for the choices that he made. And not only because it was connected to being entangled with the slave system, but also, and more directly comes out in your report, choices that reflected what I'll just

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call, I don't know, a kinship, if you will, with the white supremacist movement. And so, so I found both aspects of your report in general to be sort of insightful in that way, and as a non-Houstonian, the other thing that, that I learned was a lot about the names that I see around Houston, all the time in our infrastructure, in our, our

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street names, our schools, and so I don't know if I'll be able to ever look at those names in quite the same way, some of them, again. I'll just leave, I'll just leave it at that. I don't know if you wanna get into the issue of the, of the narratives about William Rice

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now, or the statue now, but I have very specific reflections on that as well, but as far as my general reflections. The last general reflection I'll say is that with regard to the university itself, I think your, your, your work is a much needed reminder to everyone about the recency, not

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only the history far back, the recency of the inequities faced, particularly by black people at this university. I often remind people who wanna say, you know, oh, it was just so long ago, you know, like everything happened, you know, 400 years ago or something.

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But the removal of this "whites only" notion from our charter happened three years before I was born. So that is not that long ago, you know, 100 years after, you know, Captain, the central figure in your report, was imprisoned. That is really not that long ago.

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And as I finished the report, I just wondered, what would Captain think if he saw me here today? What would Captain think if he knew that the next president of our university would be, would be a black male at this day and age and in this time?

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And then I thought, 100 years from now, as I hopefully am looking from my heavenly spot down on this place, what will I see and what will I think? So those are my general reflections, and I'm happy to talk about the statue, I'm happy to talk about the narratives as well.

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That's, that's wonderful. And to be clear to our, to our audience, the Captain that Dr. Porter is referring to opens the update on slavery, and it's the name, or at least the known name to us, of one of the men who, young men, who was enslaved by William Marsh Rice and his brother Frederick A.

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Rice, but who escaped in the middle of the Civil War and was captured and imprisoned by a sheriff in a nearby county. So thank you for that reflection, to look at, look at this history from the perspective of Captain and imagine how he would think about this history.

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And I just wanna echo, before I turn it over to Dr. Byrd for maybe a next question, your comment about recency. I was talking with the, a partner of a Jones MBA alum recently, who had read in the Rice magazine the story of our doc talks, encourage all of our audience to go check

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those out if you have not, but she was reflecting particularly on the photograph of Jacqueline McCauley, which was one of the first documents that we looked at, that told the story of Jacqueline McCauley's enrollment at the university and the year when that happened, and she said, you know, my, my grandmother had already graduated from

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university, from a university at that point, and so just reflect, she was starting to reflect on the kind of generational impacts that it has on a particular family to be able to send her grandmother to university, and that beginning for, for McCauley at that particular moment, at least with respect to Rice.

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So I think that's the kind of reflection that hopefully historical work inspires in all of us, is an awareness of the contingency of our moment in time and our relationship to the recent past as well as the distant past. So thank you for those reflections.

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Dr. Byrd, do you wanna follow up with anything there? Yeah, I will. Why don't we just do all the doc talks like this? That's one of the things I want, I wanna say.

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But, but, but we don't have to answer that question, we'll just continue. And so a similar start for Dr. Bryan, to, to give you the opportunity to reflect on some of your reactions to, to both reports and with an invitation to be as, as broad or as specific as you, as you

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like, there really are no, are no constraints. Yeah, so as I noted before, most of what I thought about kept coming back to this, this question of sort of narratives and the storytelling we do about origin stories and the continued storytelling we do about this, the American ethos of individualism and the

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American dream, and "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" and all of that. But one thing that I also kept thinking about, especially in reading some of the stories about the social events on campus and sort of the way that students and the early decades of Rice, as the monument was being put together, thought about race, had a

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lot to do with this, this idea of exploitation, the extent to which exploitation was necessary to, to amass this relatively vast fortune at the time of William Rice's, but then also continued exploitation on campus after the university was founded, particularly this story of this Southern-themed party or ball, and the, the

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fact that there was a white student who portrayed a pickaninny at this event, which at the time was not so shocking, but is shocking to read now nonetheless. And then also the discussions of the athletics trainer, trying to find his name, Jack Shelton, and the loving way in which, allegedly loving way, in which a quite

00:29:38.480 - 00:30:01.280

hurtful term was used for him amongst the student body on campus. And anyway, it's just, it's sort of it drove home for me the lasting legacies of exploitation, both in building wealth, but then in just, in continued power dynamics. And I will note, it did make me think and want to discuss the extent to which we still

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see exploitation on campus at the university and the extent to which we need to talk about it, and in particular, how far we get in this massive amount of work that you're doing in unearthing all of this, if we are not also really thoughtful about the extent to which we still have problems that are of a different scope and, and look different now,

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but, but problems that exist nonetheless, that in my experience talking to students, I think might somewhat relate to, to something that Dr. Porter had mentioned earlier, about students who feel they are, they are meant to be part of this Rice family, but do not feel as though they are succeeding in feeling like

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they're fitting here. Anyway, in particular, I guess just to get to the point of what I'm thinking about, is this . I've had conversations with students repeatedly about the, the college system at Rice, and who, who it's really designed to serve, particularly to the extent that, that

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students from marginalized populations, like including black students, who make up a quite small share of our undergraduate population, the extent to which distributing them randomly across the campus, across colleges, the extent to which that is beneficial, and, and thinking about when we design processes like that, who are those processes meant to

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serve? It's not clear to me that it's meant to serve those, those students who come from marginalized populations. Anyway, so obviously, reading these reports, that they were historical in nature, just got my mind turning in a lot of different ways about things both historic and, and

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concurrent. Thank you for that. And go ahead, Dr. Byrd. Thank you, and for me, listening to your and Dr.

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Porter's general remarks about the update brings, brings to mind the power of charters, right, and the relative power of the disruptions that require a change in those, in those charters. So when, when you, when you bring up stories about, why do we tell the stories we tell

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about our institutions? And I think back to some of the research that the task force has done, right, I can locate a kind of response to that in, in the charter's stories about the institution, what it would mean to be a white Texans, a white Texan of slender means, provided

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a aspirational, first-rate education in Houston, Texas, for free or for nothing, right. How that would inform a certain type of story about the philanthropy that ostensibly made that possible, right, hiding the exploitation behind it. But, but equally as powerful, as both of you bring up, is the perspective from which those

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stories originate, and then what type of disruptions necessitate a change in those charter stories, but also how those changes, right, and the charter, move at a kind of uneven pace, right, even after the disruptions have taken place, after integration, for example, after the nature of the community has begun to change, the

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charter stories persist. And, and I guess we are at a moment where one of the things we are now doing is aligning and realigning those, those, those charter stories, and paying attention to things that, that had been ignored for so long.

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So I was thinking a lot when I heard both those comments. I don't know if, Dr. McDaniel, you want to talk now, but I'll start with the end versus the beginning. I was gonna go back and start about some of the social events and things that, that you

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mentioned, Brielle. But let me just start with that end. So, so the misalignment that you spoke about, Dr. Byrd, between the, the, the change in the charter and the persistence of the stories, I just really wanna say that I think that it, it reflects literally the painful process

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that I was talking about before, where, where if you think about a community and a place as, as being a living organism, you've just been told you have cancer, and that takes time to digest. Some people don't wanna hear it, they wanna just keep going on with their lives as though

00:35:15.100 - 00:35:32.980

they didn't just hear that they had cancer, and they just keep going. I'm a cancer survivor, so I kind of know this story really well. And so it does take a bit of time, I think, for, for people and communities to adjust to their realities as opposed to what they thought was going to be their reality.

00:35:33.250 - 00:35:49.630

So I just wanna sort of put that out there, that I was finding that analogous to the process of becoming a brand new person that will never be the old person ever again, because I had to go through that process. Even going back, Dr.

00:35:49.630 - 00:36:09.010

Bryan mentioned the social events on campus, exploitation, the, the pickaninny event, the, the, the Jack Shelton event. I read those too, and I can tell you that I, I had to, I found myself pausing at this report, because I was just upset at reading it.

00:36:09.130 - 00:36:33.880

I felt like maybe there should have been some kind of a trigger warning on this entire report for, for some people reading it, because I just really, I, I already knew that this was taking place, so this was not new news to me, but still, I found it...just taking me aback on a personal level that, that, that this was the way of things at that

00:36:33.880 - 00:36:52.050

moment. There were other parts of the report as well that I was flipping to as I was reading, and, and the notion, for example, some of the facts that you brought out about the choice that Rice made to stay in the South being a defense of white supremacy and then to read the words, right, of the secessionist convention that, you know,

00:36:52.120 - 00:37:07.090

talked about how, if I get my quote right, that the African race had "no agency in their establishment," that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race. I mean, I literally found myself pausing, you know, as I read this report, just digesting what I already knew was a reality.

00:37:08.350 - 00:37:27.190

What struck me as also, Dr. Bryan, you mentioned the college system. I am not a Rice alum, but we had a very similar system where I taught at Notre Dame, and you used the words that were used to describe the process of the coming to be of

00:37:27.190 - 00:37:54.190

this statue. You said, who was it designed to serve? In the report, it was emphasized over and over that, at the beginning, throughout, and at the end, you emphasized how this was a well thought out thing, this statue, right, it was designed, it was contemplated, it was intentional in its size and its massiveness.

00:37:54.190 - 00:38:17.560

The words you use, I believe, you said it "commanded the space." There were words of dominance in how you described what it, what its presence meant, that the location being so central to the student experience and the desire for this to represent a place where it was a place to be enjoyed.

00:38:19.000 - 00:38:41.870

And I thought, oh, my goodness, if, if only, if, if only everyone could, like, have the informed nature that we all have, having read your reports about the genesis of all of this, and then you would ask yourself the questions I asked myself. How in the world is everyone supposed to feel a sense of joy, a centrality of the

00:38:41.870 - 00:39:03.100

experience, standing at that space, knowing the true essence of the story and the authenticity of, of the desire of William Rice to embed himself with the slave system and, and with white supremacy? People take pictures there upon graduation, they walk their families through this space.

00:39:06.310 - 00:39:17.800

If everyone knew, we might cry while we were there, while we were taking the pictures, and we wouldn't necessarily have the joy. So I was thinking all of these things as I, as I read what the intentions were, and it was quite intentional.

00:39:19.840 - 00:39:39.530

And I, like I said, I link this to, I don't want to ramble, but I link this to the way we intentionally craft our brand identities. I teach a lot about branding in marketing. Brands are reflected by symbols, iconery, we call it brand iconery.

00:39:41.030 - 00:40:03.710

Brands are reflected in the stories we tell, and what we choose to celebrate about ourselves in terms of attributes. The words you use, here they are, you said it "commands the courtyard. It's a dominant feature by design, achieving a mastery in and over its surroundings." I

00:40:03.710 - 00:40:32.690

mean, that just sort of reeks of, of dominance, mastery, and slavery, even in the wording there. I was, I was struck by the the irony of the wording along with what was going on with the building of that statue, and so, so I reflected on that and the location, as I said before, where many of us probably just walk by this space and don't

00:40:32.690 - 00:40:51.420

even think about, like, all of this. So I'll stop there before I make everyone cry on the Zoom. Well, thank you, I think we could, we could continue on this vein for, for the rest of our time. I do wanna give our audience an opportunity, if you have questions that you'd

00:40:51.420 - 00:41:08.390

like to contribute to this discussion, don't forget that you can use the chat or you can use the Q&A function at the bottom of the webinar if you'd like to ask a question to our guests or share some of your own reflections on the discussion or the updates, we'd welcome that.

00:41:08.390 - 00:41:28.620

One, one of the places my mind went as you were talking, and Dr. Byrd's comment about the misalignment of the stories we tell, and the, the, the changes that are made, the kind of legal or procedural changes that are made to the charter, and the kind of lag between those things, I think one of the things that's

00:41:28.620 - 00:41:52.410

meant, as we've, as we've moved in our research into the more recent past, as I said, these updates were, were progress updates, but we obviously need to understand a much longer history all the way up to the, the college system and, and the mid 20th century. One of the things I think you see is that when, once excluded students begin to

00:41:52.410 - 00:42:18.840

arrive at the university, it means that those stories are still around, and it then falls often on, on those students to have to point out this misalignment. And I was just reflecting, as, as you were talking, about a recent, literally yesterday, I was looking at an old magazine, Sallyport, an issue of the Sallyport Magazine, which is

00:42:18.840 - 00:42:43.410

the predecessor of the Rice magazine, the alumni magazine. And it was an issue from 1988 that was reflecting on the 20th anniversary of the class of 1968 and the, the events that took place on campus kind of between '68 and '70, which were very eventful years on college campuses around the country, but also here at

00:42:43.410 - 00:43:03.810

Rice. And 1970 was the year when the first African American students graduated, undergraduates graduated from Rice. And so there was coverage in the press about Theodore Henderson and Linda Faye Williams receiving their degrees at commencement.

00:43:04.560 - 00:43:29.510

And this Sallyport article profiled professor Linda Williams, who by that point was a very highly and internationally renowned political scientist, social, she had become a social scientist, studied here at Rice, and reflected in this interview on what she got from her time at Rice, which was meeting sociologist Chandler Davidson, who

00:43:29.520 - 00:43:49.980

set her on the path to her graduate work in the social sciences and her long and distinguished career. But she also talked about the feelings of isolation and the challenge of interacting with white students who were unaware of some of the misalignments that you were just

00:43:49.980 - 00:44:07.140

referring to, either unaware or intentionally blind to. And she talked about having to explain, for example, to some of her white friends, who she says she considered friends, why it was not okay to hang a Confederate flag in their, in their college rooms.

00:44:07.140 - 00:44:25.680

And their response, which I thought was was interesting, was that they didn't see a problem with it because she was a Southerner too. And so it was this rhetoric of belonging that was clearly understood very differently by Williams and some of her classmates.

00:44:25.680 - 00:44:42.150

Right around that same time in 1971 as well, there, there were the first beginnings of what became the Black Student Union. And I know we have people in our audience who could probably tell us much more about this history, having lived through it, than, than I could, but one of the comments that

00:44:42.150 - 00:45:01.320

was made in 1971 in a Thresher article announcing the formation of an organization for black students was this comment that I'll just read. "During the past years," this is in 1971, "many pressures have increased and finally culminated in this particular action.

00:45:01.320 - 00:45:17.490

Rice's college system has become another type of fraternity, basing their ties on more basic and stronger environmental levels. Members of one college admit there does not exist as tight or as good a communication intercollege as intracollege.

00:45:17.490 - 00:45:36.170

The separation and breakdown of interchange between blacks must cease. Therefore, an organization of Afro-American members was established." I was thinking about that article because of your comments, Dr. Bryan, about the college system, and just reflecting again on, on both how recent that

00:45:36.170 - 00:46:03.350

article was, 1971, but also about how, how longstanding these sets of problems are, and some of the, the pressures of belonging on campus, and then the question of how to, how to form solidarity and community within the college system is one that has concerned students at Rice from the very beginning.

00:46:04.250 - 00:46:18.890

And so I wanted to bring up that doc, since it is doc talk, I'm cheating a little bit to bring in a new doc, but, but it's where my mind went as I was listening to your, your, your rich reflections. Yeah, that, can I, I'll just jump in and say, that's fascinating to hear, because I mean,

00:46:18.890 - 00:46:37.520

that, that is almost word for word, the sentiment that I've had students share with me recently, students who, their parents may have been born in 1971, honestly. So it's remarkable to hear. We can think about how much has changed, but how much maybe has not.

00:46:38.300 - 00:46:55.740

So thank you for sharing that. We do have a question from our audience that I wanted to pose. Someone asks, "Do you see the resistance to telling more accurate stories regarding the history of segregation and racism at universities as different from or similar to

00:46:55.740 - 00:47:18.630

resistance that we see in the public sphere to the teaching of critical race theory, or the teaching of more accurate versions of history?" So any reflections that you see on, on the connections between conversations universities are having and maybe more general conversations in our society about how to, how to reckon with "brands," if I

00:47:18.630 - 00:47:35.940

could use that word, that don't seem to, to hold up in ways that we might have expected them to in a variety of different contexts. Any thoughts on, on that from our panelists? My view is that it is indeed quite similar, if not the same.

00:47:37.560 - 00:48:11.040

We have an informed set of people in a generational cohort that we might call in marketing Gen Z or even Gen Y, slightly older than them, who are informed, who view themselves as desiring of authenticity and being desiring of change agency in their personal and professional lives, which they view as

00:48:11.040 - 00:48:26.810

being melded in a way that other generations did not. We wanted to separate those, but that generation wants to see them together. And so, so everything that we are experiencing within these hedges is a reflection of what is happening outside these hedges.

00:48:26.820 - 00:48:45.600

I say that all the time in my classes. The thing that makes it uniquely challenging for us inside these hedges is that for some reason we didn't expect that. I don't know why we expect for some reason this to be special, unique, untouched, and

00:48:45.600 - 00:49:06.480

untouchable. And that's just not true. And so I think it's particularly shocking, hurtful, and all of those things to us, but it really should not be. We have a permeable border, and as soon as we understand that, then we can begin the

00:49:06.480 - 00:49:32.010

painful process of reconciling what is inconsistent between what we say and in reality, the same way that I talk about in a marketing class, that there is always going to be a gap, except for very specific moments in time, between what you project as a brand identity, but you have designed the, you know, one of the very quick definitions

00:49:32.010 - 00:49:49.080

of a brand identity is that which you designed to be internalized by others about your company or about your brand. The image is actually what is perceived. The gap between the two is where the problems begin and where companies have to

00:49:49.080 - 00:50:00.760

constantly struggle to reconcile that. The same is true about this historical context that we're talking about, so I see them being quite the same. Yeah, I think...

00:50:00.760 - 00:50:23.530

You can, oh, I was just gonna say that I had, I was thinking very much the same thing as this question that the audience member raised while thinking about all of this. Thinking about this, yeah, I think part of it is this, I think this is very similar to the general conversations about critical race theory and concerns about it.

00:50:23.530 - 00:50:42.520

And as a sociologist, I'm inclined to think in terms of institutions. It's what we do, social institutions and structures. And from my perspective, I think a lot of it, I think it has to do with basically exactly what Connie's saying, but I'll use sort of sociological terms to say the same

00:50:42.520 - 00:51:09.910

thing, that I think the, the fundamental fear is that if we unearth and address these sort of parts of our major social institutions or major social structures that are not, do not align with the story we like to think about, the current modern day intents of those systems and institutions, in particular with regard to higher-ed

00:51:10.900 - 00:51:36.640

institutions as being places devoted to meritocracy and to allowing people to achieve their own individual mobility goals, in unearthing these sorts of things about institutions that are allegedly designed to or at least currently functioning to increase people's ability to get ahead in life and to create a more equal, just society, I think

00:51:36.640 - 00:51:53.970

it, it makes people fear that their, their belief in these institutions is unfounded, and their, their belief in the ability of these institutions to achieve those goals is perhaps unfounded, and that's jarring. And I think the same can be said with regard to U.S.

00:51:53.970 - 00:52:15.010

history writ large right now and critical race theory. I think the fundamental problem that I think we have to wrestle with is that we have a nation that today and in some ways succeeds and that we would like to think is a governmental, democratic institution that can allow people of all sorts, all creeds,

00:52:15.010 - 00:52:27.790

all colors, to have a voice. And the way that, that political institutions are shaped and the way that our society functions, all with the goal of allowing individuals in the U.S. to achieve their own mobility dreams.

00:52:28.000 - 00:52:54.880

But if we talk in really honest ways about the ways in which the institution of the U.S . as a whole was founded, and the, the ways in which it's not pretty and has not been just, I think there's a real fear of, how much can we buy into, into what it is today, and do we undermine those foundations of our, what that institution is today, and what

00:52:54.880 - 00:53:08.530

we hope it can achieve? Anyway, I would I would love to hear what Dr. Byrd was going to say, if it still makes sense. I would, thank you, and I would just add, for me, what, what some of the conversation

00:53:08.530 - 00:53:36.310

around the structures of the institution and who they, who they're designed to serve and who they serve, who they end up serving, is, is to, to, to add to that, conversations around the changing nature and composition of those structures and institutions themselves, so that, so that they become, at least for me, sometimes difficult to capture

00:53:36.310 - 00:54:00.100

and characterize. So in some of our work, for instance, what does it mean, before there are black students on campus, to bring black musicians and performers on campus? In, in some ways, right, designed and meant to reinforce some of the worst caricatures

00:54:00.100 - 00:54:32.620

and stereotypes about black life in the South, and to use those caricatures and stereotypes to inform an aggrandized sense of whiteness, right, that, the need for black people to, in order to define whiteness, whether black students are on campus or not. But to have to take that and set it also next to some of the same organizations bringing

00:54:34.090 - 00:54:56.680

black entertainers and, and scholars to campus who, who don't brook those, those other stereotypes and caricatures at all. So what does it mean to bring, to, at the same time bring Dick Gregory, right, to campus and now I feel like I'm talking about, now I feel like I have to explain Dick

00:54:56.750 - 00:55:21.560

Gregory, but I don't have time, right. But, and what does it mean, for example, to have a college system that in one moment in the '60s is arranging activities that are steeped in caricature and blackface, and at the same time, right, or in similar moments, inviting young, powerful,

00:55:22.280 - 00:55:48.080

rising black members of a Democratic establishment in the South. So bringing Barbara Jordan to campus at the same time and using the resources of, of the college system and the programming at the university at the same time, that these complexities exist in the '50s and '60s, and they also endure, endure today, and make our

00:55:48.080 - 00:56:16.960

work both wonderful, but also difficult, and wonderful because it's difficult, I guess. So in a way, you're saying the same, I mean, in a way that's kind of a comment on on the institution of a university writ large, is the capacity of this organization both as a university, but also as individual units of it, like the residential colleges, to do both

00:56:16.960 - 00:56:37.180

great good and great harm, and how to tell a history that accounts for both of that, and in that process perhaps, inches those organizations and those structures closer towards doing more good. And so I think that's ultimately, looking forward, what we as, as a task force want to

00:56:37.180 - 00:56:55.960

do, and maybe we could conclude by looking ahead a little bit. Are there any closing thoughts that you have about, questions that you would like to see answered, arising from these updates, research questions that you've, we've talked about some of them I think already a little bit, but things you would like to see the

00:56:55.960 - 00:57:16.330

task force address or investigate. Or also, we were talking a little bit before we went live about ideas you might have about how to share this, this history and this material more broadly with our community. You know, we have this research presented in the summer updates, which are lengthy

00:57:16.330 - 00:57:40.960

documents with lots of footnotes, but what other ways can you imagine that we could, could, could help our community engage with this material? I've got two comments, I'll try to make them very quickly, I know we're running out of time. The first is, to answer your second question, I, I strongly feel that your work

00:57:40.960 - 00:58:05.560

needs to be accessible to everyone, regardless of their preference for absorbing new knowledge, and so I am recommending an audio or an audiovisual version of this, for people who like to get their information that way. I think it would be quite compelling to have an audiobook version of these reports

00:58:05.560 - 00:58:24.550

somehow, or an enactment of them, audio or visual. The first question that you asked is something that I deal with every day in my role as Senior Associate Dean for DEI at the business school here at the university. It is a research question that I'm sure that someone has probably addressed in some way,

00:58:24.550 - 00:58:44.410

but I can tell you what's on my mind right now. I would like to know through what mechanisms individuals can shift from being in the big middle space. If you think about, I am an academic, so if you just think about the statistical notion of a distribution, let's say a bell curve, and on the right hand side,

00:58:44.410 - 00:59:01.270

we have a small tail of people I would call active advocates for diversity, equity, and inclusion in our midst. And then the other tail on the far left might be what I might call anchored resistors. It's the big part in the middle where, I call them ally expressers, you know, they

00:59:01.270 - 00:59:14.020

say, hey, I really believe in this thing. Let me know how I can help. I really feel so awful about the things going on in the world and the trials we see on TV today and all of this, but they're not actually doing anything about it.

00:59:15.640 - 00:59:38.920

I would like to know how you shift that big middle more to the right. What are the internal and external motivators that, that would allow us to do things managerially as leaders at this institution to help that shift along? And even more intellectually stimulating, what, what other things are we not thinking

00:59:38.920 - 00:59:50.920

about that would mediate the relationship between some of those motivators and that outcome? Because I believe that most people are in the middle. I don't believe that the loud resistors are the majority. I think they're just loud.

00:59:52.330 - 01:00:09.340

I think the active advocates need support, and the people in the middle are a big opportunity. So that's what I'm gonna put out there as a research challenge for someone to investigate empirically. Thanks for that, Dr.

01:00:09.340 - 01:00:34.810

Porter. Dr. Bryan, do you have any closing remarks along the similar lines? What, what charges, if any, would you give the task force moving ahead? I mean, I am very excited to hear and eventually read more about the tidbits that you've shared today about sort of this period after, after the statue, really.

01:00:35.170 - 01:00:57.190

I'm very excited to see what more is unearthed and shared about that period. I can tell you that, in particular from my perspective as somebody who thinks about wealth inequality and the legacies of that, boy, the thing that, the sort of historical research question I wanted to know most when reading this report was what, what has become

01:00:57.190 - 01:01:15.370

of the children of, and the grandchildren, great grandchildren of William Marsh Rice's slaves? I know that's probably an impossible task. I believe you even noted at least once, possibly more than that, that the names of children were just generally not recorded.

01:01:15.760 - 01:01:37.510

But boy, if you ever stumble upon some sort of document that gives you that information, that, that is what I would like to to know and see so that we can really get a better sense of thinking through the very complex legacy of this man and this institution and, and what has followed for, for all those involved.

01:01:39.770 - 01:01:53.450

But I do wanna finish by just saying thank you for this really excellent work and this great opportunity to talk about it. I agree. Thank you very much for it. Well, thank you. We're very indebted to you for taking time at a very busy moment in the

01:01:53.450 - 01:02:15.530

semester when I know it's been a challenging, challenging year, challenging semester. Here on campus, it feels like we're all just sort of inching towards the finish line. But this has re-energized me to, to talk with you and hear your insights and ideas about the task force, and we're just very grateful to you and look forward to

01:02:15.530 - 01:02:31.520

future doc talks. We will be off next week for Thanksgiving. We wish everyone a happy holiday, but we will return the following Friday, the last day of class, so we hope to see all of you then at noon central for our next doc talk at the same Zoom time and place.

01:02:31.520 - 01:02:36.140

So thank you again, Dr. Porter and Dr. Bryan. Have a great weekend, everyone. Thank you. Thank you.

01:02:36.770 - 01:02:37.700

Thanks, take care.