What a year! Despite COVID – and all the challenges it posed and continues to pose – we have had a very successful academic year.
We’ve had an active 2020-21 fellowship class, and we selected and announced an exciting new cohort for 2021-22. Our programs and projects are beginning to have an impact through the networks and products we’ve created. We’ve also been quite successful in raising money for them. We’ve significantly increased our outreach through our webcasts, podcasts, special websites, and web pages. We’re slowly but surely making progress with Santa Clara County in getting approval for our new building plans.
Of course, there also have been multiple burdens created by COVID for our fellows, staff, and programs. For the most part, we’ve overcome them or used them as opportunities. However, we look forward to a more normal academic year in 2021-22, albeit with some restrictions possibly still in place as required by Stanford. Budgetarily, we are in remarkably good shape for the time being, partially because of this year’s reduced expenditures for the fellowship program and the new major Ford Foundation gift. But we always have our eye on the long run, where concerns loom about the rising costs of the fellowship program, even under a somewhat reduced the class size, as well as staff and other costs expected to rise.
Staff
Let me start with our staff. They have done an outstanding job in the face of extraordinary difficulties and need for adaptation. I really must give a special shout-out to Sally Schroeder, our deputy director, who not only manages human resources for us but also administers to the varied needs of the fellowship class. Thanks to Sally, we have been able to retain and redeploy most of our employees as needed. She was also the lead person in negotiating with Stanford to ensure that we could welcome fellows in person in the second half of the academic year.
While they’ve been productive and adaptive, the staff have suffered. Our weekly Zoom meetings as a group and our regular Zoom and Slack interactions over tasks hardly compensate for the face-to-face camaraderie and informal meetings that provide so much of our glue. Very few of our staff have been allowed back to campus even for a day or two a week and won’t be until sometime in the summer or even fall.
Fellows
Believe it or not, about two-thirds of the 2020-21 class have been in residence, arriving at various times starting in January. Though the formal part of their fellowship concludes this week, they can remain in residence through the end of June. They are enjoying eating lunch together outside and in the main meeting room. They must maintain an appropriate social distance, and they can meet neither in their offices nor in any other room at CASBS. They nonetheless have been finding ways to have working groups and socialize within the restrictions Stanford imposes. Our research seminars, every one of them, were held on Zoom and functioned surprisingly well.
To the entire 2020-21 class, thank you for making the Center an intellectual island of hope and camaraderie. I, Sally, and the whole staff thank you for making this a real CASBS year despite our fears and the occasional setbacks. We'll remember you for all you did to continue our tradition of serendipitous and planned interactions – despite all odds – that will ensure even better scholarship and thinking in the future. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
For 2021-22, not only is the quality of the scholars exceedingly high; in addition, the group is very diverse by almost every measure. I am also happy to report that several of the fellows are participants in our programs and projects; one will be a short-term distinguished fellow; and there will be a theme – achieving racial equity in society – that numerous fellows are addressing in their work and that almost all will engage with through discussions and special meetings throughout the year.
Programs and Projects
I am pleased to report that “Understanding the iGeneration” basically has completed its work. Research affiliates Roberta Katz (board member), Sarah Ogilvie (former fellow), Jane Shaw (former visiting scholar), and Linda Woodhead (former fellow) have a major book forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press. We will alert you when it is published.
We started one new program in the fall after discussions with several board members and former fellows and with the approval of the Center’s Academic Advisory Committee. “Humans, Nature, Machines,” co-led by former fellow Jamie Jones and me (but me only until we find a more suitable co-leader), now exists and is in the process of developing some workshops and projects within it. Among these are: “Care and Caregiving,” led by former fellow Alison Gopnik, and “A Science of AI Practice,” led by 2020-21 fellow James Guszcza and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.
The program on a “New Moral Political Economy” completed its first three years and has secured additional funding from the Hewlett Foundation. I still lead this program, and program director Zack Ugolnik has proved an able partner and replacement for Federica Carugati, who left us to join the faculty at Kings College London. The program has produced a short book, A Moral Political Economy: Present, Past, and Future, by me and Federica and published by Cambridge University Press. We also launched the website Fairer Tomorrow and soon will launch a webpage that synthesizes syllabi collected by our pedagogy subgroup. Now we are involved in a series of small group meetings focused on essays and responses around key issues that will be published in an issue of Daedalusin 2023 that incoming research affiliate Henry Farrell and I are co-editing.
In all of these efforts and others you will hear about in coming weeks and months, we have increasingly relied on Stanford undergraduates as research assistants. This year will be our third summer employing two or three students working at CASBS but supported by the Department of Political Science Summer Research College. Stanford’s King Center for Global Development regularly supports undergrad research assistants at CASBS as well. The iGen project also incorporated undergrad RAs. Previously we’ve documented some of these activities in their earlier stages.
The other major initiative has to do with the Ethics, Society, and Technology Hub, a university-wide presidential initiative that CASBS co-leads with Stanford’s Center for Ethics in Society. Among other things, EST Hub program manager Ashlyn Jaeger has been organizing Hub events and helping CASBS program director Betsy Rajala manage the Ethics and Society Board (ESB), a process for how researchers can best consider the ethical implications and societal consequences of their work. Incoming CASBS fellow Michael Bernstein is the lead with me, Debra Satz (former CASBS fellow and current dean of Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences), and Stanford Medical School bioethicist David Magnus. Collectively, we are the coordinating team that runs the ESB. We’ve received several small grants for this work already and recently received a large multi-year NSF grant.
Training institutes remain a focus. They are critical to the kind of field building for which CASBS is famed, and they are rich source of potential new fellows. Faculty fellow Woody Powell and research affiliate Robert Gibbons, both former fellows, have done a spectacular job in creating a cohort of young faculty around questions of organizational performance. They continue to run their training program and cohort creation, albeit virtually, last summer, this summer, and during the past academic year. They are the model for a new “Diversity Institute” that we plan to commence in summer of 2022; former CASBS fellow and incoming research affiliate Mary Murphy will be the director with the assistance of former fellow and current CASBS board member Kate Stovel and incoming fellow Jennifer Richeson, the 2020 SAGE-CASBS Award winner.
While the training institute on climate politics and science, initiated by former fellow and current research affiliate Robert Keohane, continues to treat CASBS as its base, it is enlarging its leadership team and sites for convocations. It has received funding from Harvard for its next meeting. It has also produced a climate syllabus bank, hosted at Brown University’s Watson Institute.
One final word about the program and projects: When I came to CASBS seven years ago, the creation of programs and projects rested almost totally on me. We now have two superb program directors, who carry a huge part of the burden in coordinating and fund-raising, as well as in making their own intellectual contributions. The leadership of most of what we do now rests with former fellows, who take the initiative in planning, help with raising funds, and work closely with Betsy and Zack. We also have created networks of active, engaged, and committed participants among current, former, and future fellows, as well as attract people from policy, tech, and government organizations world-wide. Several of the programs we helped create continue in other forms; the Mindset Scholars Network – now renamed the Student Experience Research Network – comes to mind. Others have influenced both academics and other thinkers to engage in approaches and work they might never have done. While we do not yet have adequate metrics for assessing our impact, I am confident that CASBS is better known and respected and influential because of these efforts.
Outreach
Enhancing our impact and influence is our outreach. One of our most successful forms of outreach ever are the webcasts produced by communications director Mike Gaetani. Unable to hold our in-person symposia on our campus, during pandemic we started experimenting with live-stream conversations on socially significant issues in our series Social Science for a World in Crisis. Though the size of live audiences varies widely – Zoom fatigue, I don’t have to tell you, is real – the archived video recordings of these webcasts are reaching thousands (and we offer them in audio format in our podcast, Human Centered). Each episode features world-class panelists, moderators, and co-sponsor organizations, further enhancing our own reputation.
A special shout-out to former CASBS associate director Bob Scott, who organizes regular webcast episode screenings and discussions among residents at the complex where he lives. We love this deep engagement and want Bob to serve as a model for other communities of interest.
Transitions
Next academic year will be a major period of transition as I wind down my directorship in late spring 2022, as we make changes based on our 21st century strategy, and as we, hopefully, commence construction on the new building. These all represent challenges and opportunities as we continue realizing the transformed CASBS we have all been working so hard to design and bring to fruition.
That said, it will be a bittersweet 2021-22 academic year for me. Nothing in my long professional career has given me such satisfaction as my current position at the Center. It will be hard to ever match again the intellectual stimulus and energy I receive from fellows and from the collaborations we have created in our program and projects. I do plan to stay involved with the Creating a New Moral Political Economy program until it winds down in two years or so and perhaps as a participant in other programs and projects with which I’ve been closely involved.
