Visiting UMich Again
One of the great privileges of academic life is travel. As someone who grew up relatively poor, I never imagined that I’d see so much of the world, as my family’s reach was wherever we could drive, and the once-in-a-childhood flight to a theme park. But since I started my research career more than 20 years ago, I’ve been all over Europe, to China, India, Brazil, and nearly all 50 U.S. states. It’s been an incredible opportunity to not only see the different cities and academic institutions of the world, but experience up close the widely varying qualities of life, and the values that shape create their inequities.
This travel has helped me appreciate just how high my quality of life is in Seattle, and in my job. I have ample transit options, diverse food, robust health care; I have a broad respect for my various identities; I have clean mostly air and exceptionally clean water. And living in a boom town, my city is full of exciting new infrastructure, progressive urban planning, and striving communities who create great art, cuisine, and community. The vibrant civic culture that is broadly oriented toward progress, equity, and justice is also quite unique. Life in Seattle, of course, is far from perfect — income inequality is tragically high, and despite massive growth in housing capacity, it has not kept up with demand. Our ability to share prosperity is dampened by the unexamined white supremacy woven throughout our region’s power brokers. But our baseline quality of life is nevertheless among the best that I’ve seen in the world, approaching that of the Switzerland and the amazing northern European cities that I’ve visited.
Visiting the midwest makes these features of my life in the Pacific Northwest more salient. I had the opportunity this past week to visit Ann Arbor for a second time, thanks to the generous invitation from my colleague Mark Guzdial. Ann Arbor, a white flight city of wealth, shares some of the qualities of my home, such as good food and coffee. It also has a fairly progressive culture.
But in so many ways, my week here was full of struggle. My hotel was 2.5 miles outside the city, but without a car, I only had access to one bus line that came at 30–60 minutes frequencies, with no shelter to wait under in rain. Walking to campus took 55 minutes, and sidewalks would randomly come and go. When I was lucky to find a rental scooter, I had to carefully swerve around potholes, and vigilantly monitor for cars that would aggressively swerve into the occasional bike lane and sometimes angrily honk at me. My shower was clogged in my room but the hotel wouldn’t fix it, leading to foot blisters. Airport coffee shops only had cow milk, forcing me to choose between bitter espresso, no coffee, or diarrhea. Limited transit from Ann Arbor to the airport meant waiting 30 minutes for a $55 ride share instead of a high frequency $2 train ride in more modern cities. And every day, as I visited with the community across CSE, the School of Information, and the School of Education, I walked miles on foot in 40° drizzle between buildings and downtown, or had coordinated car rides from colleagues, just to get around. Life this week in Ann Arbor was hard; I imagine life elsewhere in Michigan, particularly for those in poverty, is profoundly harder.
The people I spent time with, fortunately, were wonderful. I arrived Friday afternoon, and Mark Guzdial picked me up from the airport, checked me in at my hotel, and then took me to dinner and a concert with Barb Ericson. We had wonderful conversations about academic program creation, leadership, budgeting models, and the many challenges of creating great new things in institution resistant to change and progress. The Ark was a joy, and Kyshona was amazing, offering an intimate evening of folk/jazz fusion, and a message of love and justice.
I spent Saturday on a search for shoes, waiting for buses, walking the long lengths between blocks, bouncing between different restaurants and coffee shops, each time paying my capitalist tax for a bit of food, water, and shelter. I eventually found the public library, where I sat amongst the houseless community and their belongings, there to find the same free shelter I sought. I pondered what separated us: my money, my hotel bed miles away, and the dinner gathering Mark and Barb had planned for the evening, with food, company, and conversation about knowledge, equity, and the graduate student strike. I wished I could invite the tired souls nearby me; they seemed so desperate for just one night of reprieve from the freezing rain.
On Sunday, I met up with two high school friends who had ended up in Ann Arbor, one a high voltage engineer who does contract research for NASA, and another a mathematician and short story writer. We had coffee, went on a long walk through the arboretum, and talked about fascism, capitalism, racism, and its particular effects in Detroit and Ann Arbor on basic needs for transit, housing, and education. We talked of the rise of student neo nazi groups on campus and the graduate student strikes for fair wages and protection from the police. I reflected on what it might mean to be a trans person in a state whose rights were contingent every two years on a razor thin margin of voter turnout. I ended the night with a group of junior faculty and postdocs; we talked of epistemic hegemony, of power, and of ignorance, particularly amongst senior faculty.
My Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday were a stimulating but grueling three days of 1 on 1 meetings, from 8–5, plus the occasional dinner. I started Monday with the insightful Barry Fishman, learning scientist and SI faculty. We had coffee and (I think) Albanian food while we discussed the many great scholars and opportunities at UM, and the various power imbalances I was learning of between graduate students, junior faculty, and senior faculty. We then drove to North Quad, where I met with Stephen Oney to talk about balancing parenting and faculty life and the many exciting opportunities to unify graphical and programmable interfaces. I then had a lively conversation with SI faculty Ron Eglash about anti-disciplinarity, nuances in notions of justice, and the necessity of centering agency marginalized voices in shaping the interplay between computational media and other media. School of Education faculty Lisa Lattuca picked me up from North Quad to drive me north to the CSE building, BBB; we chatted about the lack of capacity for faculty professional development, the essential role of leaders in creating capacity, and the lack of focus on equity in academic leadership preparation.
I found CSE faculty Wes Wiemer and his student Madeline Endres for lunch at a little vegan/vegetarian place. I thought we might talk about software engineering, but most of our conversation steered toward the staunch resistance amongst senior CSE faculty to making change, to creating capacity for change, and strategies for advocacy in the face of their resistance. We also talked about how to navigate this resistance as a graduating PhD student, and how to know whether an institution has capacity for change. Wes drove me back to north campus, where I met with the founding director of the Center for Research and Learning in Engineering, Cindy Finelli. We talked about the tensions between engineering education and CS education, the differences between the disciplines, and the limits of “professional ethics” framings in justice. I then walked over to BBB and met with Dhruv Jain to talk about accessibility in new media and how to center disabled communities in shaping it. I met with a student who had done some student organizing in CSE and talked about about student activism CS, avoiding burnout, and strategies for identifying opportunities for change. I then met former CSE chair Brian Noble to talk about admissions and DEI; that conversation made clear the chasm between senior faculty values and everyone else, with the power holders grasping onto notions of merit and money, and everyone else asking for equity and freedom.
Mark dropped me off at Zingerman’s deli, where I got a sandwich, then waited 45 minutes for a bus in the light rain. I finally arrived to my moldy room and taught teachers for two hours about the oppressive concepts build into programming languages that were so absent from any of my conversations earlier in the day.
Tuesday was also a marathon, but with a later start. I woke up early to hang out at RoosRoast for a breakfast burrito and cortado, and put some final polish on my talk on programming language justice. I met School of Education faculty Ying Li in the new Program for Computing in the Arts and Sciences (PCAS) space; we talked about meaningful application of LLMs to conversational skills, and the possibility that much of the five years might just be resisting problematic applications. I had a long and tasty lunch at Frita Batidos with the fascinating Emma Dodoo. We talked about life, learning, and identity at cultural boundaries, and strategies for wrangling big visions into discovery and progress, amidst what is often a complete lack of community in CS education examining questions of racial equity. I then had an enlightening chat with the excellent Angela Calabrese Barton about the profound questions and opportunities that the pandemic had raised about school, learning, teachers, and the future of education, and some of the unique opportunities for exploring that work in computing education in schools.
We walked over to North Quad, where I gave my talk,
Searching for Justice in Programming Language Design. I was in an irreverent, unfiltered, and somewhat caffeine-induced mania, and so to me it felt quick and buoyant, despite largely being overwhelming and disjoint in its scope. The reactions were fascinating: some described as the best talk they had seen in years, or a decade, and one called it another mother of all demos, alluding to Englebart’s talk in 1968. Some seemed dizzied. I’m still not sure what to make of it myself, since I conceptualized it more as art than scholarship, and so I appreciated the audience support in helping clarify its ideas and impact.
After the talk, I met with doctoral student Tamara Nelson-Fromm about project-based learning, student identity, and the purpose of school, and how she might navigate these big questions in shaping her dissertation and career trajectory. We then walked over to Comet Coffee where I met Education faculty Deborah Ball, where she asked me a fascinating flurry of questions about my talk, probing its implications on language learning, expression, mathematical thinking, making, and how I might know if I was making progress on justice. I had a short break after to wander the stacks of local bookstores, then met SI faculty Robin Brewer to talk about aging, baking, food, sabbatical, racism, promotion, and the weaponization of Christianity today and throughout history. Light topics for tapas and churros!
I woke up early Wednesday and grabbed a coffee at curry pie at Hyperion Coffee, and tried read the urgent emails and direct messages before my day started. I met with Cyrus Omar first; he had just gotten back from vacation, and we nerded out on structure editors. I showed him some of my Wordplay demos and we realized we’d converged toward similar designs. I then walked down the street to PCAS to meet Education faculty Chris Quintana; we talked about design, exploration, and media, and I gave some short demos of Wordplay and my vision. We had a fascinating chat about how simple unasked design questions — what if we supported all languages, all abilities?—can be such powerful generative forces in learning experience design. I walked to North Quad to talk to doctoral student Qiwei Li and had a fascinating conversation about the different internets we might need to envision social media that is free from harassment and data weaponization. I then had a tasty banh mi with Eytan Adar, where we talked about the various privileges required to decline administrative power, and the various inequities that threatened UofM’s ability to education students and support research.
After lunch, I met with a few doctoral students to talk about their work. I discussed how to facilitate change in CS culture with Jane Im, especially through data and computer-mediated communication, and how to do that when so many people blame themselves for the structural forces that shape their negative experiences in CS. I talked with Anjali Singh about the opportunities and limits of feedback at scale, and the essential role of interrogating and reconciling values in our visions, our funding. Aadarsh Padiyath and I talked about the narrow interventions of CS ethics efforts, the opportunities and tradeoffs of engaging in advocacy as a student, and the responsibility of faculty to listen and problems that is so often refused.
I ended Wednesday with dinner with Mark. We talked about what I noticed during my visit (much of what I shared above), and also about how to navigate opportunities for leadership and change. I appreciated his position on senior faculty needing to help where help is needed (basically everywhere in academia, to varying degrees), but also struggled with what kind of personal sacrifices I would have to make to make change where it is not wanted. It struck me that my role as senior faculty is not all that different from the many junior faculty and graduate students also in a position of having to sacrifice to make change. I’m just having to make the choices at a higher level of power, in ways that impact more people. And yet always requiring personal sacrifice.
I woke up early Thursday and fumbled through the airport, trying to find a rideshare, failing to find a place with oat milk, and just barefuly find a corner of the airport with a sufficient cell connection to speak on an AERA virtual panel about generative AI and assessment. I pushed back on the ideas of the two panelists, which centered profit and scale in their efforts to support learning, and talked about the usual third rails of capitalism and white supremacy. It felt weird being the computer scientist closest to the technologies, to be the one speaking so firmly against their merits. I couldn’t see the reactions of any of the 70+ people in the audience, and the panel ended abruptly. I then got on a plane to Chicago, pondered how the panel reflected the same commitments to capitalism and power that I had seen throughout my conversations at UM, and grieved on Twitter that I would no longer be able to legally pee in Florida.
Sometimes it’s surreal to think about how much my awareness of the broader systems in the world has shifted over the last ten years. Growing up in a world and education systems that hides these systems from youth makes them fairly invisible and unknowable. Knowing them now, and continuing to learn about them, makes them hard to ignore, and hard not to talk about, especially as someone for whom these systems are not designed. I’m sure to many of the people I met on this trip, I might have seemed disconnected, radical, or even unhinged. I’m hoping, however, that my unfiltered presence on campus this week was a chance to break some people’s assumptions about the merits of the world we live in. And that the many students and faculty trying to learn to make change at least feel like they are not alone in doing it.
As for Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the the midwest, they feel so distant from the just world we need. I can’t help think of them as captured long ago by a tragic white supremacist capitalism, slowly but inevitably leading to a social and economic decay, as white folks refuse progress because it might help someone else. UofM is full of incredibly smart people, many of whom don’t want this to happen, but who seem to be just at the beginning of learning how to prevent it. But they also seem largely suppressed by the intellectual leaders of the past. I see reasons for hope, largely in these younger generations of scholars, but I’m afraid that it is not years away, but decades, since the systems and infrastructure that they will have to make change are being built today, and not in ways that center equity and justice.
That said, I’m exceptionally grateful to Mark for the chance to visit, and get to know the Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan a bit better. I’m so impressed by the vast range of expertise and ideas across its many schools. And I’m optimistic that some day, even if it is a distant day, it will be a place where everyone in the region has what they need to thrive, and not just survive.
