Happy news, per our official release:

Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life today announced that Dr. Kenann McKenzie, an accomplished educator, researcher and civic leader, will direct the newly created Generous Listening and Dialogue (GLAD) Center.

Designed to be a global center of excellence to promote authentic dialogue and generous listening across differences, the GLAD Center will serve as an educational resource for Tufts and beyond. The Center defines generous listening broadly, encompassing the art of listening to ourselves, to nature, and to others—especially when people disagree or when they confront differences of power and status.

Dr. McKenzie, who will join Tufts on November 1, 2021, has worked for two decades in the higher education sector as an academic counselor, researcher, lecturer, policy analyst and administrator. She currently serves as Director of the Aspire Institute, which supports the preK-12 educational sector with professional development based in a social justice framework and community engagement. In addition, she currently teaches at Wheelock College and serve d as the Educational Leadership & Policy Studies’ faculty representative to the college’s Equity, Diversity & Inclusion Committee.

“Working with Tufts students—the next generation of civic leaders—is a wonderful opportunity, and I’m thrilled to join Tisch College in building and sustaining a community of robust dialogue and truly generous listening,” said Dr. McKenzie. “This work challenges us to hear each other and ourselves, and to commit to considering big questions and big issues together.”

Housed at the Tisch College of Civic Life, the GLAD Center will collaborate with schools and departments across the university and with external partners, building on the expertise of Tufts’ faculty, research centers and civic engagement programs. Its programming, research, and interdisciplinary initiatives will help people at Tufts and beyond to develop skills and awareness, address hard issues, and generate new knowledge. The GLAD Center was launched in the spring of 2021 in collaboration with the Vuslat Foundation. Dr. McKenzie will be joined on the Center’s leadership team by Dr. Deborah Donahue-Keegan, Associate Director, Tisch College Senior Fellow and Lecturer in the Tufts University Department of Education.

“We look forward to welcoming Dr. McKenzie to Tufts and Tisch College,” said Dayna Cunningham, the Pierre and Pamela Omidyar Dean of the Tisch College of Civic Life. “Her leadership of the GLAD Center could not come at a better time. To grapple with the challenges that confront our students, our university and the world—from systemic racial injustice to the existential threat of global climate change—we need to flex every civic muscle we have, including the skills of listening and dialogue.”

Dr. McKenzie has a BA in Africana Studies from Cornell University, M.Ed. from the University of Virginia in Social Foundations of Education, and a Ph.D. in Politics and Education from Teachers College, Columbia University. In her civic life, she serves on the Beverly, Massachusetts School Committee and as VP III and education chair of the North Shore Branch of the NAACP. She is most proud of being a mother to amazing children who inspire her work everyday.

The Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation has made a $1.5 million gift to endow the directorship of the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), the leading research center on youth civic education and engagement at Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life.

This endowment is the most recent gift from Elyse Newhouse, J82, and her husband Michael Newhouse, A82, who have long been generous supporters of Tisch College and Tufts University. The gift will advance CIRCLE’s mission to understand and eradicate the barriers that keep some young people from participating in civic life. It will ensure that CIRCLE, a consequential anchor institution in the fields of civic education and engagement, will continue to have extraordinary impact on diverse young people’s ability to have a voice in our democracy.

[See the whole press release here.]

This announcement is doubly meaningful for me. First, the director is my close colleague and successor Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, who richly merits an endowed position as a national leader in the field of youth civic engagement. CIRCLE is intensely collaborative, and the whole team deserves credit for all of its work, yet this is a moment to celebrate Kei. The gift reflects her accomplishments and excellence.

Second, the endowment vindicates our initial vision for CIRCLE. Founded in July 2001, CIRCLE began as strictly grant-funded project, albeit with the ambition of becoming a permanent institution that would help create a new field of research and practice. We moved from University of Maryland to Tufts in 2008 because of Tufts’ commitment to civic engagement and research. I proudly turned over the leadership to Kei in 2015. Tufts has supported CIRCLE in many ways, of which the Newhouse endowment is the newest–and one of the most significant–examples. We can now be sure that CIRCLE will be active and influential for a long time to come.

In Ghost Stories for Darwin, Banu Sabramaniam recalls:

Trained in evolutionary biology, I saw a field of morning glories and asked about flower color variation. I did not ask why it was the most obvious question. The landscapes in Southern California provoked me to ask questions about native and foreign species, without questioning the blurry distinctions between the native and the alien and the histories of the plants. The problem of women in the sciences elicited strategies to increasing their numbers, without any questioning of the gendered and racialized expectations of science.

Years later, I look at the same fields and see the ghostly apparitions of a eugenic past—the many mutilated, tortured, imperiled, and dead bodies, the stigmatized, contained, disciplined bodies of communities and nations of color, the poor, those deemed mentally incompetent, inferior, the many lives deemed not worth living. In tracing the genealogy of variation, all these histories came tumbling out.

Sabramaniam derives this use of a ghost metaphor from Avery Gordon and others. One example in her book is eugenics, which was widely endorsed and taught, closely linked to the development of population biology, genetics, and even statistics, and embraced across the political spectrum. In turn, eugenics is rooted in racism and sexism.

A defender of science would say: eugenics was a mistake, but now it has passed thanks to the self-correcting methods of scientists. A deep critic of science would say: the institution is still the same one that produced eugenics. I take the ghost metaphor to mean something between those two views. The institution is not eugenics; it is science. However, science is haunted by eugenics and racism, just as we might imagine a house to be haunted by ghosts. Likewise, Sabramaniam’s question about color variation was not racist; the flowers really were colorful, and it was good that she enjoyed them. However, once Sabramaniam had explored the history of scientific inquiry into variation–which was important work–she was no longer able to see the wildflowers without also seeing specters of the past.

A house and a ghost are distinct. We can imagine an effective exorcism or another solution to the problem presented by a ghost. Yet we are not actually banishing the ghosts that haunt us.

This metaphor resonates for me. I am not interested in blowing up the institutions around me, partly because I am not convinced that we would be better off without them, and partly because I actually admire aspects of them. But they feel haunted, and the more necessary work we do to understand their pasts, the more haunted they seem.

See also: pseudoscience and the No True Scotsman fallacy; media literacy and the social discovery of reality; the progress of science; mixed thoughts about the status of science etc.