Patty Vest: Welcome to Sagecast, the podcast of Pomona College. I'm Patty Vest. Mark Wood: And I'm Mark Wood. Patty Vest: In these extraordinary times, we're coming to you from our various homes as we all shelter in place. Mark Wood: This season on Sagecast we're talking to Pomona faculty and alumni about the personal, professional, and intellectual journeys that have brought them to where they are today. Patty Vest: Today, we're talking with Susan McWilliams Barndt, professor of politics and chair of the politics department. A three-time winner of the Wig Award for Excellence in Teaching. She's an expert in American political thought and the author of such books as an American Road Trip and the American Political Thought and Traveling Back: Toward a Global Political Theory. Mark Wood: Welcome, Susan. Susan McWilliams Barndt: Hi, Mark. It's nice to be here. Mark Wood: Well, thanks for taking the time. Mark Wood: It's a new year, new president, same old pandemic. How have you been adjusting to all the craziness of these times? Susan McWilliams Barndt: I think like everybody, I'm in a constant process of adjustment. Susan McWilliams Barndt: I have to confess that there are certain things I like about the quarantine. I'm spending a lot of time with my children. I like not running from place to place and I like being able to sit and read books which is, of course, something I like to do a great deal. Susan McWilliams Barndt: I miss students though. And so I think like all my colleagues, the one thing I miss more than anything else is just being in the classroom. There's no way really to make up for that though I have been enjoying my Zoom classes more than I thought I would. Patty Vest: Susan, take us a little bit back. Tell us about your background in your early years, understanding you have family connections to politics that go back for many generations. Susan McWilliams Barndt: That's right. Susan McWilliams Barndt: I grew up in a small town in Central New Jersey but on my father's side, in particular, the specter of politics always loomed in the background. My great grandfather, Jerry McWilliams, was a democratic state senator in Colorado before the family lost all their money in the early 1900s and moved to Los Angeles. My grandfather, Carey McWilliams, then became a political journalist for his career and my father was a professor of politics. Susan McWilliams Barndt: I didn't really intend to go into politics but ever since I was pretty little, I just loved thinking about politics and while I really didn't imagine becoming a professor and I flirted with basically every conceivable profession around the field of politics, I ended up in some ways pretty close to what I think of as a family business, for lack of a better term. Susan McWilliams Barndt: I also actually come from a pretty long line of professors on my mother's father's side, professors and teachers. My great grandfather on that side was provost at UCLA. And in fact, my great aunt Betty Hedrick taught at Pomona about 100 years ago. Patty Vest: No way. Susan McWilliams Barndt: A fact which I didn't learn until after I was already out here in Claremont looking through a set of family records. Susan McWilliams Barndt: Of course, at that time, women weren't allowed to really be professors so she had some title like teaching assistant or, I don't know, adjunct lady person but she was a science teacher at Pomona, I think, in the years 1922 and 1923, almost 100 years ago. Patty Vest: There's a magazine story, Mark. Mark Wood: Yeah. Mark Wood: You wanted to rebel and you didn't succeed? Susan McWilliams Barndt: [crosstalk 00:04:05]. Mark Wood: What kept pulling you back? Was it a class? An event? A person? A mentor? How did that happen? Susan McWilliams Barndt: I wish I thought that there was a really noble inspirational thing there and sometimes I've told the story which is to some degree true that I really didn't like graduate school but I got on into teaching in a summer program for high school students sponsored by the State of New Jersey. It's actually the program that pays is based on and I loved it. Being in that classroom with those students really called to me. Susan McWilliams Barndt: But I think in some ways, the real truth isn't so intellectual. It's that I knew that I wanted to have a life in which I had a job and could spend time with children when I had them. I knew from having a father as a professor that it was possible to be a professor who also was always home when my kids were done with school and that trumped so many other career considerations. Susan McWilliams Barndt: When I made the move into the academy, the job I'd had before was working in real politics and I loved that job. I loved it. I loved the people I worked with, I loved the events, I loved the cocktail parties, I loved the sense of mission and purpose. But as I started thinking about what that would look like when I wasn't any longer 23 years old, I started to realize I wouldn't want to be out every night of the week, sipping martinis with people while somebody else took care of my children. Susan McWilliams Barndt: In a funny way, what really pushed me to being a professor, and I think this is a probably an atypical answer, is that I thought it would allow, and it's certainly proved to be true, me to both really be dedicated to my family and make them a priority while also being able to do the public oriented work that means a lot to me. Mark Wood: I have to take you back to what you were saying about working in real politics. What campaigns were you involved in? Susan McWilliams Barndt: I actually started working on campaigns when I was about 12 or 13 years old. But the first- Mark Wood: You were steeped in politics? Susan McWilliams Barndt: Yeah. My lifelong best friend really, he's now vice president of a PR firm in D.C. He and I bonded over a love of politics really early on and the first campaign we worked on was the Jim Florio's 1990 campaign for New Jersey Governor then we worked on Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign and I've worked hard enough on that that as pretty young teenagers, we got invited to the inauguration which was, if anything, a moment that signaled to me how exciting it can be to work in politics. And then I worked on a series of campaigns pretty much up to the point that I started graduate school. Patty Vest: Wow. The integration that young, that had to be so exciting. Susan McWilliams Barndt: Yeah, it was pretty epic. Also, we got to miss school which was top notch for us at that point in time. To be fair, I was so dorky that the first time I ever cut school was to go sneak into an event during the 1992 campaign at the Merck headquarters to meet Bill Clinton with my friend Becky. Susan McWilliams Barndt: We got to miss school and Maya Angelou was the inaugural poet and in fact, [inaudible 00:08:02] and I were just reminiscing about what a powerful experience that was to be on the mall with these hundreds of thousands of people listening to Maya Angelou being piped across what felt like the entire city of D.C. Susan McWilliams Barndt: Again, when I think back to those kinds of things, the fact that I ever thought for a moment that I was going to work in anything other than a political field seems to be like, I think you're right, an act of adolescent rebellion or like deep misguidedness at best. Patty Vest: You couldn't fight it anymore. Susan McWilliams Barndt: Yeah, that's right. Patty Vest: Susan, what drew you to Pomona and what keeps you here? Susan McWilliams Barndt: My Pomona story is pretty funny which is that when I was in graduate school, I had encountered the work of John Seery. Literally, this is how old I am becoming. Someone had given me this mimeographed copy of an essay that John Seery had written that had never been published because it was considered too extreme for the particular edited volume of political theory. I loved the essay and I thought I got to meet this guy someday. Susan McWilliams Barndt: So when I was in graduate school, I was dating someone who was doing research in LA and I used it as an excuse to come out to LA because it is warm here. While he was doing his research, I wrote to John Seery and said, "Hey, I'd really like to meet you." And he said, "Why don't you come out to Claremont? You can take the train," and I took the train out here from Union Station. Susan McWilliams Barndt: I remember walking up Yale Avenue and thinking, "Oh my gosh. This is the perfect place. This is the dream." Walking around campus with John and talking to other people, I just thought this is that ideal job. Susan McWilliams Barndt: I came back from that trip and said to a number of people it's really too bad that John Seery is such a nice guy because if he wasn't, I would wish that he would get hit by a bus so that I can take his job. Susan McWilliams Barndt: Little did I know that two years later there'd be a job at Pomona and that I would get it. I really felt like I won the lottery. I've got to be one of very few professors who's lucky enough to teach at the actual school that I had identified as my dream school. I'm always grateful for whatever twists of fate landed me in that position. Mark Wood: And John didn't even have to get hit by a bus. Susan McWilliams Barndt: And as a bonus, I didn't have to murder John Seery. Patty Vest: Or a train or anything. Mark Wood: I'm sure he's grateful. Mark Wood: Did you ever confess that to him? Susan McWilliams Barndt: I believe I have in fact told him that. Mark Wood: So he's not going to be shocked when he hears this. Susan McWilliams Barndt: He's not going to be shocked. Patty Vest: So this is not an exclusive. Mark Wood: Susan, you're an expert in American political thought. What does that field of scholarship have to tell us about where we are today in national politics? Are we on new grounds here? Or have you been here before? Susan McWilliams Barndt: I think the answer is yes and no. I'm fond of saying that history doesn't exactly repeat itself but history does rhyme. Susan McWilliams Barndt: I do think one of the things I've always valued about the study of American political thought is that it's a constant series of reminders that nothing we're facing that seems unprecedented or newly problematic is entirely unprecedented or newly problematic. Susan McWilliams Barndt: I think that's especially important in the United States which is Toni Morrison is beset by an epidemic of pastlessness. This is a nation in which no matter how much history we teach in the schools, people are forward looking, people have very little connection to ancestry, to history, both personal and political. I think, especially in this nation, American political thought is a corrective to what I take to be an American tendency to say, "This is like nothing that's ever happened before in the history of all of the times." Susan McWilliams Barndt: What I think American political thought can remind us, in this moment in particular, is that contrary to more conventional punditry understandings, the structure of American institutions is fragile. It's experimental. To a large degree, the American political system isn't exceptional in the sense that all regimes maintenance is an important part of just the whole system. Susan McWilliams Barndt: There are specific things that I can point to but I've been really taking a lot of solace in learning a lot from colleagues in American political thought looking back to various moments in history, looking back to various debates at the time of the founding to realize that as with so many things in the United States, we're just paying the bills for checks that were written, checks that were promised often 200, 300 years ago, and that we're a part of a story not part of a dramatic rupture from what's come before. Patty Vest: Susan, you've suggested that our political vocabulary is all jumbled up these days. That terms like liberal, conservative, socialist, and so on have lost their classic meanings. Can you break that down for us? Susan McWilliams Barndt: Sure. Susan McWilliams Barndt: I think you said it really well. Americans have a really messy political vocabulary. We tend to categorize in ways that don't make sense. This has always been American problem. Susan McWilliams Barndt: To riff on the theme, I was just talking about when Jefferson says or is this famous moment in his presidency, "We are all Republicans. We are all Federalists." He's saying, "Look, we're making all these category distinctions in a way that forgets the fact that we're all people who are unified by the aspiration to have a basically liberal, small L, government that is oriented around human liberty in this system dedicated to the proposition all people are created equal and that our categories tend to divide us and they also tend to allow us to forget the things that we have in common." Susan McWilliams Barndt: Some of the things that in particular, I think, Americans get wrong is the use of the term liberal. What does it mean to be liberal, to be committed to Liberty? Now, Americans have disagreed since there have been Americans about what liberty means and I think that's an important part of studying American political thought is studying those [inaudible 00:15:01] about what liberty means but liberal does not mean committed necessarily to redistribute [inaudible 00:15:07] politics. It doesn't mean what we often take to be liberal. Susan McWilliams Barndt: Nor I think does conservative mean what we usually take to mean conservative. Susan McWilliams Barndt: One of the things I always enjoy teaching to my students is the classic conservative thinker, Edmund Burke, who's one of the great early environmentalists. Now, you go to the San Diego Zoo and you'll see quotes from Edmund Burke all over the place about how important it is to conserve nature and we never think about environmentalism as a conservative position. But of course, it's a classically conservative position because it's saying we need to conserve natural resources. Susan McWilliams Barndt: We tend to use liberal to mean something that it's not. We tend to use conservative to mean something that it's not. I'm very well aware that professors can, and we often do, get especially twitchy when terminology is off and to a lot of people thinking about the definition of words doesn't seem politically actually important. Susan McWilliams Barndt: But I think of the thing that a lot of Americans struggle with in everyday practice is trying to figure out how to have consistent political positions. So many Americans sense that political leaders don't have consistent ideological or political or intellectual positions but can't figure out how to articulate that because they keep being told this is what conservative means, it means this incoherent jumble of stuff. And this is what liberal means and it means this incoherent jumble of stuff. Susan McWilliams Barndt: I think that our terminology actually impedes ordinary citizens and noncitizens, for that matter, ability to understand what different ways of thinking about politics might mean and how to square certain kinds of political positions. Again, though, I am professory, I do get definitiony some time. Susan McWilliams Barndt: I do think that our fairly incoherent and narrowly categorizing political discourse is to the detriment of the republic as a whole, and in particular, a detriment to people's ability to participate in and understand civic life. Mark Wood: Related to that, speaking of incoherent jumbles. This is something we've talked about in the past and for me, the pandemic is really underlying and that is the Americans love to use the words liberty and freedom and they don't have a clue what they really mean. Can you talk about that? Susan McWilliams Barndt: Sure. I take my understanding of this... Though plenty of American political thinkers have written about it, I take my bearing here, as I often do, from James Baldwin. Susan McWilliams Barndt: A very short version of what Baldwin to me suggests is that Americans are stuck with this idea of freedom in practice starting before what we call the founding period where we get this opposition of freedom and slavery, where that we have this understanding that freedom is one thing and slavery is its opposite. Baldwin reminds us, of course, that's not the truth. It's not that freedom is the opposite of slavery. It's that mastery is the opposite of slavery. Susan McWilliams Barndt: It's meaningless to say in a system that there are some free and some slaves because there are some people contributing to enslavement and there are other people who are enslaved. Susan McWilliams Barndt: Baldwin's central critique is that so much of what Americans have internalized as an understanding of freedom is really an understanding of mastery or domination over others. Susan McWilliams Barndt: Rather than under having a true understanding of freedom, that's egalitarian, that's spiritual, that's internal, that has dimensions that can't be measured as well as dimensions that can, we tend to think of liberty as, "My right to assert myself against other people at the expense of other people to compete with other people." Baldwin says that's not a true understanding of freedom. That's an understanding of mastery. Susan McWilliams Barndt: I think there are certainly other ways that you can critique the American understanding of liberty and freedom. But to me, I think, especially in this moment, that's the most important conceptual mistake that I certainly want my students to think about when we're talking about American politics. Mark Wood: I think that segue just a little bit on that notion of freedom, the American notion of freedom, it's hit me during the pandemic especially [inaudible 00:19:59]. It's very tied up to this very macho, super masculine worldview. That insinuates itself into our politics. But for the first time now, we have a female vice president who's a heartbeat away from being the leader of the free world. Do you think that's going to have any impact upon our political thinking in the future? Susan McWilliams Barndt: I think it's great that we have a woman in the White House. I was sobbing when that was happening when Justice Sotomayor was swearing in Senator Harris to become Vice President Harris. I thought that was just deeply meaningful especially as somebody who has two children, a girl and a boy, both of whom I wanted... It felt important to me that they were able to see that at such a young age. Susan McWilliams Barndt: I do think you're right that that Trumpy freedom has a macho overtone and chauvinistic masculinity. We could use any of those terms. But I think that there's an underlying different kind of confusion of what freedom entails that Trump embodies. You could call it a freedom mastery mistake. But Trump often seemed to suggest that freedom was somehow equivalent to winning. Susan McWilliams Barndt: Winning is the Trump language. It's actually very resonant of one of the most important texts in ancient Greek political thought Plato's Republic where Thrasymachus, whose Socrates great interlocutor, when they're talking about what is justice and Thrasymachus keeps advancing the position. "Look, justice and politics isn't important in practice. Winning is important. Winning is the thing that you do in politics because you want your side to prevail and justice is what the people in power say it is, so winning is the important thing." Susan McWilliams Barndt: Teaching that in the last four years has been interesting because my students see Trump in that immediately. It's all about winning. The proof that you're free is that you win. Again, it is this dominating ethos. Susan McWilliams Barndt: But it's certainly not an ethos that's exclusively the province of men. I know in passing that the new congresswoman from Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene, when criticized by Senator McConnell just last week, she said, "Yeah, people care about you. The only thing you know how to do is lose gracefully. We need to get back to winning." And I thought, "Wow, what kind of mother says [inaudible 00:23:04]." Susan McWilliams Barndt: Why is that a problem? But in fact, that's just a different way of articulating the idea that the purpose of politics is to win and we are free to the extent that we are winning and beating other people. I think she's a very nice reminder, maybe a troubling reminder, that that kind of political ethos, though it may be a macho politics, isn't exclusively the domain of men. Susan McWilliams Barndt: In fact, if I'm thinking about what many people are talking about right now, the rise of the extreme right wing conspiracy theory wing in the Republican Party, its most compelling salespeople right now are women in the form of Congressman Boebert and the form of Marjorie Taylor Greene. Susan McWilliams Barndt: While I think there's a lot of reason to be happy that a woman is in a heartbeat from the presidency, I don't think that we should simply assume that the ascension of women within the political system is going to lead to a more egalitarian or a less macho kind of politics. Susan McWilliams Barndt: In fact, I see reason to suspect that at least in some corners, the opposite might be true that often women get used to sell really egregious forms of politics in part because people don't assume that women have that kind of capacity or venality. Motherhood often can be a shield to hide all sorts of really terrible cruel political positions and to soften them. Patty Vest: I'll pivot a little bit to the pandemic, Susan. What effect do you think that COVID-19 pandemic has had in our democracy so far? And do you think it's going to have a lasting impact? Susan McWilliams Barndt: I think it will have certainly a lasting impact. I think that's without question. Susan McWilliams Barndt: I think about just my own children right now and some of the habits that they've developed that they certainly would not have developed were it not for spending a critical part of their childhood unable to see their friends. I think there will be all sorts of impacts, psychological, political, civic, social, that we haven't yet even begun to come to terms with. Susan McWilliams Barndt: I think in the terms of the pandemic period itself, there are some obviously very troubling things for our politics. We talked before about the mask versus anti-mask, vaccine versus anti-vaccine. Susan McWilliams Barndt: The pandemic has certainly amplified that kind of part of our political life wherein there's, on the one hand, really big pockets of a kind of aggressive libertarian individualism not oriented toward community, not oriented toward the wellbeing of neighbors or fellow citizens or fellow inhabitants of the country and deeply suspicious of all political, governmental corporate impulse. Susan McWilliams Barndt: That's obviously politically troubling. It's troubling on its face, it's troubling in that it leads to higher levels of social distrust and social distress just in general corrosive for democratic politics. Susan McWilliams Barndt: On the other hand, I think it's really important to know, and I don't think people have noted enough, that during this period of pandemic there have been real outbursts of civic energy all over the place as tragic as the events are that motivated the protests this summer, the murder of George Floyd, the other murders that we seem to witness on an almost daily basis in this country. Susan McWilliams Barndt: Those protests were a really pure expression of a civic energy and longing to have a better civic life together and they took place all over the country not just in cities, not just in small towns, not just in rural areas, not just in white parts of the country, not just in black parts of the country, not just in more diverse parts of the country. And I think those protests showed a desire for civic engagement that I take to be a very positive sign. Susan McWilliams Barndt: To some degree, I think that pandemic freed up people to be able to direct their attention to politics. It also shouldn't escape anybody's attention that more Americans have voted in the November election than have ever voted before. More young people in particular voted. Susan McWilliams Barndt: And the thing about voting and civic participation is that like everything else, it's a habit. Once you do it, it's much more likely that you'll do it again, once you cross that threshold. And especially once you realize that the experience of protesting, even if your side doesn't win, the experience of voting and having your say even if your side doesn't win, is exciting. It's exciting. And for most people, it's a positive experience. Susan McWilliams Barndt: I think that it's hard to know on balance whether the kind of bad politicsy stuff during the pandemic or the good politicsy during the pandemic will prevail. But I see signs to think that the pandemic has moved us in both directions, both directions that I worry about and directions that I think we should celebrate. Mark Wood: Let's shift to something else you've written about, American Road Trip and American Political Thought. I've always thought that was such an interesting insight into American thought, the quintessential American road trip for a part of American mythology and A big part of our national literature and you suggested it's filled with really distinctive American ideas about freedom and equality and other important concepts. Can you unpack that for us a little bit? Susan McWilliams Barndt: Sure. I'll start by saying that one of the things that nobody really appreciates about the moment of the constitutional framing is that just as the Federalists are saying, "We're going to have a separation of powers. We're going to have checks and balances. We're going to have a federal system." They spend a lot of time saying, "What's going to make this nation work?" Susan McWilliams Barndt: What's going to make it possible to have a coherent governmental system over such a broad geographical expanse with so many people from so many different ethnic, cultural, religious backgrounds is that we're going to have a really awesome system of roads. Susan McWilliams Barndt: Roads are going to allow people to travel in ways that will allow them to interact with each other. Roads are going to allow people to be able to get to government centers, to be able to talk to their representatives and allow their representatives to travel to the nation's capitol. Susan McWilliams Barndt: And roads are going to be the thing that in some ways, in practice, as a matter of structure, are going to allow us to do what political theory up to this point has said before is not possible which is to have a basically Democratic or Republican system across a really broad geographical expanse. Roads are the structure that are going to do it. Susan McWilliams Barndt: Roads are bound up really early on not just in the imagination but in actual political structure as a key cornerstone of American politics. To the extent that we look at later developments like Eisenhower's development of a federal highway system, they're all expansions on that original idea in that moment of constitutional framing that roads are somehow definitive of American politics. Susan McWilliams Barndt: Americans, of course, themselves have, as you said, often take in roads and what they signify in some ways to be constitutive of American values. Like you said, to many people, the road symbolizes freedom. To many people, the road symbolizes mobility and opportunity. Susan McWilliams Barndt: Though, I want to make it very clear that my own account of American Road Trip stories is not this kumbaya-ish, me and my bro go on the road and we discover freedom. In fact, I think most American road trip stories... Susan McWilliams Barndt: In fact, even the ones like Jack Kerouac's On The Road that tend to get celebrated as like white man is free roaming around the country are actually pretty tragic stories and they tend to be stories of people who are desperately searching for community, who are desperately searching for a place to belong in a very big, very impersonal, very diverse political system where they don't necessarily have ancestral ties that bind them to a place, they don't necessarily have histories that bind them to a place, they didn't necessarily grow up in stable communities. Susan McWilliams Barndt: Their families didn't even necessarily end up where they are because their families or their ancestors chose to be there in the first place. Susan McWilliams Barndt: I see road trip stories, and again, I'll reference Baldwin, as the way in which Americans are consistently trying to work out what he saw as central to American politics which is that Americans are always in a state of being confused about what it means to be an American and confused about what it means to belong within America. Susan McWilliams Barndt: Think about how many debates we have in American politics that are about who belongs where. Those are obviously racialized. They're obviously about class. There are about these categories that our students are familiar with talking about. But Baldwin suggests it's more elemental than that in American politics. Susan McWilliams Barndt: I see Road Trip stories... And I think it's also important to say, I take it as axiomatic that if you want to understand a political system, you should not be looking at things exclusively written by people in positions of power who live near the centers of power. You need to be looking at things that are written by people who are far from centers of power, who don't occupy positions of power, because they will often have a better sense of what the true political culture of a place is. Susan McWilliams Barndt: I see Road Trip stories which have been written by a really wide variety of Americans as a way in which in an ordinary way Americans are working out what it means to be an American, to what extent there really is freedom in America, and to what extent there really is spaces for belonging and community and connection in American politics. Susan McWilliams Barndt: Let me just, since I have the mic here, say that if any of your listeners want to read a couple of the Road Trip stories that I think of as central to my own thinking, I would recommend first, Erica Lopez's, I think it's a 1994 book, Flaming Iguanas. Susan McWilliams Barndt: And I'd also recommend Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, both of which are different kinds of Road Trip stories that I think if you read any of those books with a mind to trying to explain to yourself what's going on in American politics even somebody who's fortunate enough not to be trained in political theory can find lots there to think about in terms of what it means to be an American and what it means to occupy a political position in this particular state. Patty Vest: Susan, one of the authors that you cite in the book we're just talking about is Mark Twain. we know you have a personal connection with Twain from childhood. Can you tell us how that started and how it continues to be part of your life? Susan McWilliams Barndt: Sure. My father, who as I mentioned, was a professor of political science at Rutgers for a long time was a scholar of Mark Twain. Susan McWilliams Barndt: Twain was a really important figure in the background of my childhood. I read a lot of Twain. When I was probably about 10 years old, my father got the Quarry Farm Fellowship at the Center for Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College in Elmira, New York which is a really neat fellowship which just allows a scholar of Mark Twain to go to Twain's House in Elmira which is where Twain wrote a number of his most famous works and spend the summer working on something related to Mark Twain. Susan McWilliams Barndt: I got carted up to Elmira as a child and spent some time in Mark Twain's house which is something that at the time, I didn't really understand in any way the significance of. My parents were very conscious of not wanting me to grow up with a certain kind of academic pressure, though it was definitely there, despite their best efforts. Susan McWilliams Barndt: It was only much later that I returned to Twain and not only re-fell in love with Twain who I think is a really complicated figure who people often get wrong when they think about and started to think about doing my own work on Twain. My father died before he could finish his book on Mark Twain. One of the things that I'm going to be doing first on my next sabbatical is to finish that book. Susan McWilliams Barndt: The happy postscript there is that a couple summers ago, I applied for and got the same fellowship and got to go back to Twain's house in Elmira and spend a week there going through some of the transcripts of lectures my dad had given during the summers that he was there working on Twain. Hopefully, I will be able to bring to fruition what my father worked very hard to bring to fruition. Susan McWilliams Barndt: Though, I will say, I feel this feeling now too and I suspect that my father did as well that working on Twain is so much fun and it's so complex and you so want to get it right that it's hard to let it go because you don't want to not be working on it anymore. Susan McWilliams Barndt: [inaudible 00:38:00] the case with my dad that Twain will be with me for a long time. Mark Wood: While I was getting ready for this interview, I watched, again, your convocation speech from 2018. My favorite quote is about liberal arts education being an education [inaudible 00:38:25] of liberty. Can you talk to us about what you mean by that? Susan McWilliams Barndt: One of the things that I think, and again, my frame of reference here is mostly American political thinking, liberty and the idea of liberty, as I said, is obviously central to our politics. I think, also, some degree of liberty is essential for a good life. And yet, Americans in particular, I think, tend to assume that liberty is something that you're just born with and that other people have to take it away from you for you to not have it. Susan McWilliams Barndt: By contrast, I follow thinkers like Alexis de Tocqueville who say actually, liberty and learning to be free, it's not just something you're given. It's something that you have to cultivate. Some of that is a, let's say, more refined, less obviously political cultivation, like learning how do you live with other people, how do you carve out a space in community with other people where you still feel like you're able to be yourself. Susan McWilliams Barndt: That's the kind of thing that we're really good at helping people at schools like Pomona to understand because you have to live in a dorm with other people, not all of whom you like, not all of whose habits jive with yours, not all of whom have the same cultural reference points. There are those kinds of habits that we need to learn if we really want to live in a free society and cultivate our own freedom. Susan McWilliams Barndt: There are also, of course... And I didn't elaborate on this, there's a limit to what one can say in a 10-minute convocation, but there are also more obvious political facts like not all of us politically are equally free because of the histories of violence and domination and oppression that exist in every society in the world. How do we think about those rules both formal and informal? How do we work against them in the service of liberty not just for ourselves but for our fellow human beings? Susan McWilliams Barndt: Again, those are kinds of things... You're not born knowing how to do that. You need to learn how to advocate for yourself, how to advocate for other people, how to communicate across differences, how to form coalitions. Susan McWilliams Barndt: Again, I think that's something that's very much in the water at small liberal arts colleges because you are thrust into these situations with lots of different people who you have to work with, who you have to negotiate, who you have to live in common with, both professionally and personally. It's a really intense, often difficult experience, frankly. Susan McWilliams Barndt: But even aside from the kind of academic content that we teach in classes, which does touch on all those things, communication, working together, self-advocacy, dealing with people in positions of power, being in a room with lots of other talented people and making yourself heard and listening to them, it's also beyond the classroom in terms of the residential framework of the campus and our belief that students participate meaningfully in the governance of the college. Susan McWilliams Barndt: When I say the liberal arts are about the arts of liberty, that's a lot of what I have in mind, that liberty isn't a given, we can never take it for granted in human life, and it should be a key part of education for everybody in a liberal society frankly, and I would say or not in any society, think seriously and to develop certain kinds of habits that will both lead to freer societies, but will also lead to freer individuals and for your communities. Susan McWilliams Barndt: I want to say two side points here. One of which is no, I don't think that everybody in the country needs to go to a small liberal arts college to be a fully realized human being. I wish there were more small liberal arts colleges which is going to be my second side point. Susan McWilliams Barndt: But I always do worry especially given the fact that this small liberal arts college experience is increasingly the province of fewer and fewer more and more fortunate people that those of us in these institutions will start to think in ways that are fundamentally undemocratic about people who don't attend these kinds of institutions. Susan McWilliams Barndt: I think it's up to those of us in these kinds of institutions to try to translate and transmit and share and give back and extend the reach of the kinds of things that we're able to experience because of our good fortune to be in this place. But it's also important not to think that you need to go to a place like this to have those kinds of realizations. Susan McWilliams Barndt: James Baldwin himself, from whom I take most of my understanding about what it means to be a free person, didn't go to college at all. I think that's an important caveat to my love of these kinds of institutions. Susan McWilliams Barndt: The second side note is I think it really should trouble people that the liberal arts are under attack and on the decline and perhaps the greatest cost of the pandemic will be the cost to liberal arts education. We're seeing that both in terms of small liberal arts colleges themselves closing. Susan McWilliams Barndt: One of my favorite small liberal arts colleges, Guilford College in North Carolina, almost folded entirely its entire liberal arts program just about a month ago. More schools have done that and more schools will be doing that. Susan McWilliams Barndt: But also a lot of state and public schools are cutting back on their liberal arts course offerings in favor of much more narrow technical training. Susan McWilliams Barndt: I think that's bad for the reasons that I've said but also bad in the sense that especially when we're talking about small liberal arts colleges, small liberal arts colleges tend to have much better outcomes with students who come from first generation in their family to go to college, who come from disadvantaged backgrounds in other ways in part because the scale of our lives make it that much harder for people to fall through the cracks. Susan McWilliams Barndt: Both in the headier intellectual sense but also in the real civic, like we're talking about the actual lies of our actual fellow members of not just the United States but other countries around the world, the decline of the liberal arts is really troubling in that I think we're entering a period... Susan McWilliams Barndt: Well actually, we've already been in this period for 20 years but we're seeing an acceleration of the period of a two tiering of higher education in America where there's going to be a very narrow band of very fortunate people who are able to dedicate serious time to thinking about all of the things that go into cultivating what I would call the arts of liberty and more and more people who are shut out from that and who are not afforded even a similar kind of education. You Susan McWilliams Barndt: Public universities are especially important to me because until me among the McWilliamses, everyone had gone to public universities. It was the UC system that educated my father, the child of a single mother. It was the UC system that educated my grandmother and her sisters when most private schools weren't educating women, especially not women who couldn't afford schools like Wellesley and Mount Holyoke. Susan McWilliams Barndt: I think that one of the things that I'm going to be really concerned about in the next, I imagine for the rest of my career, will be what I see as the speeding up of the erosion of liberal education in the United States. Patty Vest: And the pandemic has probably accelerated that. Susan McWilliams Barndt: Yeah, the pandemic is accelerating that, no doubt. But lots of state legislators, lots of college boards are using it as an excuse to push through changes that have been debated for 10 years, whether that's doing away with the protections of tenure or doing away with majors or doing away with entire schools of arts and sciences in favor of programs that are short-term moneymakers, but long term to the disservice of the students in the program. I think that's really worrisome. Susan McWilliams Barndt: Hopefully, at the very least in the next couple of years with the Biden administration, we'll see some pulling back of for-profit higher education which has been part of the story of the evisceration of public education. But beyond that, I don't have much hope that we can count on the federal government, government in red states or blue states to really be leaders on this. Susan McWilliams Barndt: I'm not particularly optimistic but I do think that especially those of us at institutions, like Pomona, where we're so fortunate to be in the position we are, we have some obligation to try to think about how we can support and sustain our colleagues and in some ways the republic in terms of supporting other public and private institutions of higher education. Patty Vest: I have one more question. Mark Wood: You have one more question. Go ahead. Patty Vest: Yeah. I know we have to wrap this up but as a chair of politics, I wanted to ask you this, Susan. Patty Vest: I know your choice of following politics was complicated by family history but why should an incoming student at Pomona or elsewhere consider majoring in politics? Susan McWilliams Barndt: I think the study of politics is, as Aristotle called it, the architectonic, the architectonic form of study. There's almost nothing else that you can pursue in the world in full without an understanding of the political dynamics that lie underneath that. You can play that in all sorts of different ways. Susan McWilliams Barndt: It's not just that professions have internal politics to them or that personal relationships have power dynamics to them, though, of course they do. It's that the laws, the systems, the institutions, the formal structures, all of the things that make everything else possible that you take for granted in your daily life have something to do with political decisions that have been made by people at some point in time. Susan McWilliams Barndt: I think it's a fundamental tool of empowerment and understanding of your world to have facility in the study of politics. Susan McWilliams Barndt: My friend, Ben Dworkin, who runs the public policy school at Rowan University in New Jersey says, "Everybody has to know enough politics to be just a little bit dangerous." I think that what Ben says there is about right. If you know, and W.E.B. Du Bois says this in a much more refined way than I think Ben or I are inclined to do. Susan McWilliams Barndt: If you understand politics, even in non-explicitly political circumstances, you have a kind of knowledge that allows you to advocate for yourself, to advocate for other people, to see what forces are in play and to be able to play with them. You can do that both in the service of empowering yourself and others, but also in the service of that old political term justice and making a more just world. Susan McWilliams Barndt: Our politics majors at Pomona go on to do so many different things. Very few of them go to be... When people say you major in politics, parents always say, "What are you going to be? A politician?" Very few of our students become politicians, though, of course, some of them do. They become journalists, they become teachers. They work in tech, they work as doctors, they work as sports broadcasters. They work all over the place. They own businesses, they work in finance. Susan McWilliams Barndt: Part of the neat thing I will say in passing about the pandemic is that we've brought a lot of our politics alums back via Zoom to talk to our students and they're all now in these very different professional fields and in these very different places in the world, all can tie these things that they've done back to what they studied in some way in the politics department whether that's because they learned skills of leadership or because they learned skills of resistance or because they learned about something much more specific. Susan McWilliams Barndt: But to me, I think politics in some ways is one of the classical liberal arts major where we really give you time not just to think in the abstract about things like liberty and freedom and self-actualization, but in practice how do you move through the world and understand the systems that you encounter in a way that allows you to work with them, to work against them, and every so often and to conquer them and take things over when they need some taking over. Mark Wood: Well done. We're going to have to wrap this up very reluctantly. We've been talking with professor of politics, Susan McWilliams Barndt. Mark Wood: Thanks, Susan. Susan McWilliams Barndt: Thanks so much, guys. Patty Vest: And to all who stuck with us this far, thanks for listening to Sagecast, the podcast of Pomona College. Stay safe, and until next time.