Dean Ian Solomon Academical Interview

Charlie
From Thomas Jefferson’s Academical Village and the Virginia Policy Review, this is Academical. I’m Charlie Bruce, the lead producer on the show. Each week, we interview experts on pressing issues of policy and leadership in the public arena.

Today, we’re talking to Dean Ian Solomon of the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, the home of VPR. When my team sat down to think who our guest should be on the inaugural episode, everyone said Dean Solomon was the perfect choice. Dean Solomon has done basically everything one can do in the policy arena: from private-sector development to working in the Obama administration. He also loves the theater, horseback riding, and yoga. Our conversation leaned more philosophical than our future episodes, but I think that’s an appropriate overture to the semester ahead. I started off my conversation with Dean Solomon asking about his Deans book club. Without further ado, her’s our show.

Charlie   
How is the Dean's book club going?

Dean Solomon  
So we met a few times. And it's not a regular book club. It's people who wish to join. And it's a book I usually pick books that I either haven't yet read or haven't read carefully. So the most recent one was Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me,” which is a terrific personal narrative about race, about growing up, about coming of age, about being a parent, but understanding the complexity and the trauma of this country. So we had a good discussion about it. I liked book clubs, because it's an informal way to gather and learn with people, or no one's graded. There's no right or wrong answers. It's about collective communal discovery and understanding together, helps to build community to have conversations about our values and what matters to us.

Charlie  
And what made you pick between the World and Me?

Dean Solomon  
A couple things. I think Coates is just a really beautiful writer, I think his use of language is powerful, and piercing, oftentimes. This in some ways, for many of us, it's the question of our lives and our work. How does this country reconcile itself with its history, its history and the and its continuing legacies of systemic racism. So I think this book does so well, is add some great thoughts and ideas and dialogue and anecdotes, for conversations about how we come to terms with this country's Original Sin or birth defect or continuing malady.

Charlie  
And do you think that Coates is giving us an answer? Or do you think it's more Zen koan, like where the process of writing and reading is attempting to find the answer?

Dean Solomon 
I think he's sharing his reflections on the answer. I'm not sure I think there is the answer. I think there are answers. And we continue to be in the process of evolution understanding, I think oftentimes, the more I think I understand something, the more I understand is left to be understood, the more I realize, I don't yet know. I remain, I try to remain quite humble about how much is left to be understood.

Charlie  
Absolutely. And I'm sure that this is something that's come up for you while you've been co chairing the racial equity task force at UVA. So the racial equity Task Force was initiated to address UVA history of systemic racial inequities. And that is a pretty big task to be put in this position. In the process of being on this task force, what has been challenging?

Dean Solomon
Everything. Now, we're tackling hard issues. So it's challenging to ask hard questions about why things are the way they are, and not other ways and how we might address things to make them better. And it's challenging because these issues often have a lot of emotional content for people and then people can grow really quite fearful or sad, or shamed, more angry, or threatened, right? So you have a whole range of emotions that are attached to our individual and group identities. And when you start diving into this work, you start stirring this pot of emotions, the stew of emotions and they interact with each other. And even people of goodwill, good faith and good intent. And can often react when they perceive a threat, can react in ways that actually reduce the likelihood of constructive conversation as opposed to promote constructive conversation. You know, there's not there's not a university in the country, I think that has really solved or even gotten anywhere near close to solving some of these fundamental racial inequities that plagued education.

Charlie  
Absolutely. And I'm sure that in this process, you've probably learned about other institutions you've been a part of, and how all of this has been an endemic part of American culture. And that's really challenging. How have you grounded yourself in this process?

Dean Solomon
Life is challenging. I think I think we all every day have a series of really difficult things we do with our families, with our loved ones, in our relationships. So I see getting up in the morning going to work about how we make this world more fair, more equitable, more just, more hopeful. I don't get as excited to do easy things. Here, I think we have a fundamental challenge to the viability of this democracy, And that's part of why I think this is worth our time, worth our time as a university worth a time as a school of leadership and public policy worth my time personally, as a human being some brother, father, husband, to tackle and see if I can make a positive difference.

Charlie  
Do you think that's given you hope?

Dean Solomon  
I work to remain hopeful. And even when I don't feel hopeful, I think I need to almost pretend to be hopeful. And I say that reflecting on one of my heroes, Nelson Mandela, who would talk about pretending to be brave, when you didn't actually feel it. Because the act of pretending to be brave actually built your bravery. And you don't actually overcome your fear. You work through your fear. And for me, I'm not sure hope and optimism are always natural. I do actively cultivate hopefulness from among myself and myself and with other people.

Charlie 
Yeah, I asked that because I think in processes like this, that can be discouraging, there needs to be a North Star to hold on to, to keep us going through the dark times.

Dean Solomon  
Yeah, and there are lots of North Stars to hold on to. Every student here that I meet and get to talk to, it's it's, it's exhilarating to realize that this person might hold the key to understanding something fundamental about this world. That's amazing, right? That's one of the joys of being in higher ed being an educated being here at the Batten school, the number of people who... you're going to do something valuable, you're going to make a difference. And I might have the opportunity to get a little step along your journey or be part of that process for you. That's a gift. That's a privilege. And it makes me very hopeful.

Charlie
That's such an incredible amount of faith that you're putting into a lot of 20 somethings, but It's an honor to get it from someone who's had as much amazing lived experience as you had. 

Dean Solomon 
It's not inevitable. So that's the challenge. I do have a lot of hope in 26 and 25 year olds. And, and people generally in the human capacity generally/ But I also know that it's not always easy. And I think we are at a moment where there is a greater perceived urgency to the work than I have experienced in a very long time. So I hope that students recognize their potential to be agents in the direction of this country and in the future of this democracy, and act with urgency with that agency.

Charlie   
Absolutely. One, one lesson that you talked about last year, in the interview you had was gray areas, and how when working with different people, you have to embrace the gray areas. And I wanted to hear more about what experience you had that made you learn how to embrace those gray areas.

Dean Solomon 
Yeah, I think by gray areas, I was referring to the idea that nothing is ever black or white. Everything is a shade of gray, and the world is full of nuance. And I remember growing up wanting my heroes to be perfect. So you know, and I've mentioned Nelson Mandela before, right? He writes with great regret about his parenting. And I recall my son was about three or four years old. I was impatient in a rush and was driving him to daycare on my way down to the Senate office where I was working for Senator Obama. And when I was running late, and I was angry and frustrated, I remember shouting back at him. And just was overcome with a sense of shame. What was I modeling to him? How, how bad a father I must be to be able to yell at my kid in the car seat in the backseat, like, what was I doing? And, you know, I could write myself off as a bad parent. Or I could just recognize my fundamental humanity, that you know, none of us are perfect, we do the best we can. We are a complex species and public policies are the same way, right? There are policies that achieve some of their objectives, and then have unintended consequences. Or that achieved part of what we want but have trade offs. And we have to weigh those trade-offs and do the best we can as an imperfect species to try to make life better for others.

Charlie 
So why do you think that public service is such an important and critical part of the Batten mission?

Dean Solomon
I am a bit of a missionary here that I think we have an obligation and an opportunity to cultivate something really special. Now in my personal life, you may have heard me talk about the concept of Ubuntu which is a South African word, which basically means “I am because you are”, right? It’s about the fundamental interdependence of our humanity, that is at the heart of service. I think that's the foundation of healthy civilizations and societies.

Charlie   
Yeah, the concept of Ubuntu is one that I can feel through the philosophy of our class coursework. How do you want students to be embracing that concept as we're learning as we're going out into the world and becoming public servants? How is that something that you embraced in your leadership roles?

Dean Solomon 
I hope from a student perspective that we cultivate through their classes, through the community we have here, a refined sense of empathy and a hunger and a curiosity to understand other people. So when you go out into the community or you're working on one of your, your policy projects, or whatever it might be, you instinctively ask: how are others doing? Right? What is that person experiencing? But if we can train ourselves and practice and build our muscle memory to be curious about others, I think that will make us all more effective as leaders and as policymakers.

Charlie  
Yeah, it's interesting how what you just said about empathizing and imagining other people's lived experience, links directly with our research methods and data analysis class. Professor Hudson, led us through this study in Mexico where they were paying children to go to school and trying to see what the educational outcomes were. And we were looking at the baseline covariates of the people in the study, which were: did they have running water in their house? Did their house have a dirt floor? Did they have a bathroom? And she made us stop and look at the numbers and say, we can see 20% of houses didn't have a dirt floor, or 30% of houses had running water? Can you imagine the conditions that people are living in and how that might affect how often they go to school or what their educational outcomes are. And I thought that was a really humanizing way of looking at numbers. When we live in a world that can sometimes reduce the nuances and complexities of the lived experiences to a data point. It's really great to be able to look critically at those baseline covariates and think, how are these people living? And how is that impacting the world? And how is our policy impacting them?

Dean Solomon   
Yeah, this is a really powerful example of this process of perspective taking, taking another person's perspective and how that can reduce action on the basis of biases, right. So we've good data that show that people often quite naturally biased against people of other races. But when you have those same people actually practice perspective taking with photographs of people of other races, and imagining their experiences, their backgrounds, trying to understand, you know, what they may have had for breakfast, and how they got there. By fundamentally humanizing that photograph, that seems to then reduce the power of the bias.  I think the more we can humanize each other, through empathetic imagination, through our sense of goodwill towards others, I think that should make us better at every interaction we have during the day more effective, better in terms of exercising leadership, in whatever role we may take in an organization or community better as friends and parents, children, citizens, members of the community.

Charlie 
I'm really curious to hear about, in your Batten Hour speech, you talked about your brother, and how his his death was the consequence of a public policy failure. And if you'd like to talk about it, I'd really love to hear more about what what you learned in that process about how to navigate public policy failures. 

Dean Solomon  
No, I'm happy to talk about it on my brother, Sheldon Solomon, passed away in 2011 was my big brother, and a person who had many, many challenges and as you said, was the victim by many aspects of public policy and national policy. So he was an adopted Sioux, from the lower tribe of South Dakota. So he, him and his people in his, you know, parents and siblings born on a reservation in South Dakota, that's not their natural land, they were pushed there. So our indigenous peoples policy, our policy toward Native Americans failed the native population here so overwhelmingly. I mean, it's a tragic genocide. There was a program to try to send native kids off the reservation to adoptive families on the east coast. And that's how my parents ended up adopting my older brother. nothing inherently wrong with that although it was against his mother's will. He was actually taken from her at birth. She was an alcoholic, and several of her children were taken from her. He then had, you know, a series of learning disabilities. And schools didn't handle them very well. Those issues, of course, lead to greater challenges with employment and economic sustainability in this country, because we prioritize certain types of skills and abilities over others. That then drove him to seek health care back in South Dakota on the reservation where he was born. Because through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, he could get medical care. But there were no jobs, there were no real supports and services, his addictions were exacerbated, ending up in the criminal legal system, and it was in custody where he ultimately died of a traumatic brain injury. So a life that I think illustrates many policy failures. And what's the takeaway? What's the key lesson? I think it's that, we forget people's humanity, we're too quick to put them in a bucket or put a label on them. And I did the same thing. I thought, he's an alcoholic. Well, no, maybe we think about it a he is a human being suffering from alcoholism, or this kid here is a child who never attached well to their parents and has certain, you know, aggressive behaviors, let's think beyond the categories of right and wrong, good or bad, worthy of being arrested or not and say, what's the whole person? And what might be the challenge they are dealing with? And can we help them deal with that challenge?

Charlie  
Did that experience change your life or the path you were on or make you see things differently?

Dean Solomon 
So certainly was part of my evolution. Again, I'm not sure there's one there. But again, there may be these moments that have Aha, moments of realization. But I think they they, they they weave together each moment is another just kind of, you know, piece of a thread in this broader tapestry of our understanding. And I think it has helped me to orient the priority of healing. Really, it's about how do we just restore what's been broken? I was having a conversation with my sister today, she was really angry about something that had happened to one of our kids, and I said, I hear your anger. What do you really want to happen? You want revenge for that anger? Or do you actually want to try to get something healed? It’s not always easy to have the courage to heal without what some might consider justice others might consider vengeance.

Charlie   
Yeah, so and sometimes we just want to be seen, and our anger and recognized for the pain we're going through. And that's not always granted to us and and that can cause and create more pain down the line. The last question that I wanted to leave us with is, what's a lesson that you would give to your younger self? What's something that you've learned in your policy experience that you wish you knew when you were in your early 20s?

Dean Solomon 
I really spent a lot of time in my 20s agonizing over what I was supposed to be, what path was I supposed to be on? Who am I supposed to be? And I think, as I've aged and as I've tried a variety of different things. I was asked the wrong question. It's not so much what I want to be, it's how do I want to live each day? You know, what were the people I wanted to surround myself with? What was the contributions I wanted to make? How do they want to feel at the end of each day? And I think recognizing that it's not your title. It's how you conduct yourself. That really is what makes the real difference least in my life, has brought me a real measure of greater peace and joy than perhaps I experienced the metrics.

Charlie 
Wow. That's something I needed to hear right now. I'm not sure if anyone else needs to hear this, but our listeners will be happy to hear it. Thank you so much, Dean Solomon for taking the time to talk to me. It's been a pleasure,

Dean Solomon   
Charlie. It's been great to be with you.

Charlie
… I’m so thankful to have such an insightful Dean of our program who believes in reminding us to be empathetic, to lean into the grey areas.

That’s our show for this week. In our next episode, hosts Connor Eads and Gary Christensen will sit down with Commissioner Chris Piper about election integrity and security. Listeners, please like, subscribe, and share on socials. If you have any questions, comments, guest recommendations, slide into our inbox! [email protected]. I’m Charlie Bruce, See you next time.  

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