Teaching by Example: The Resounding Voices of our PVF Leaders

The OpEd Project’s Public Voices Fellowship program, begun less than a year ago, has already transformed hundreds of under-represented academics into visible, active, public thought leaders. Integral to the amazing success of this program are our illustrious PVF seminar leaders, working closely and tirelessly with PVF scholars to bring their much-needed ideas to the forefront of our public discourse.

Aside from being incredible teachers and cultivators of ideas, our PVF leaders are of course extraordinary thought leaders in their own right, each with her own unique and resounding public voice in both traditional and new media. This week is an exciting one for Fordham seminar leader Zeba Khan and Princeton seminar leader Michele Weldon, whose voices have been heard in major ways.

 

Zeba conversing with the President

This past Friday, Zeba attended the White House Iftar (Ramadan dinner) to celebrate Muslim women who have made important contributions to American life. Zeba had a chance to speak with President Obama and share with him the work of the Op-Ed Project and in particular the success of our PVF programs! So yes, the President officially knows what our scholars are up to and says, “We need more [of it].”

A still from Michele’s TED-Ed

This Wednesday, Michele got word that the Ted-Ed she wrote and narrated has been animated and will soon be up on the website. Ted-Ed, a viral online platform for educational material in the form of 3-5 minute animated lessons, is an exciting new forum for big ideas in the vibrant and constantly expanding TED community. Check out Michele’s TED-Ed on how to rise above the din as a journalist, coming out soon on the TED-Ed website.

Congratulations Zeba and Michele! You motivate and inspire the rest of us to put our voices out there!

PVF scholars give the real Olympian story

 

Last week, sixteen-year-old Gabby Douglas became the first American gymnast to win a gold medal for both the team and individual all-around competition. More significantly, she also became the first African-American gymnast to win the all-around gold. Unfortunately, what should have been a proud, historic moment was marred by public criticisms of her outer appearance, complaints that her hair was unkempt–complaints colored by blatant racial overtones. Furthermore, the biographical coverage of Douglas by popular media outlets such as NBC and NPR radio give a largely distorted picture Douglas’s family life, focusing mostly on her white host family and making false and implicitly racist assumptions about her real, African-American parents.

 

These negative and distorted public portrayals of Gabby Douglas reveal that though racial equality have made large strides forward on the Olympic stand, it still has a long way to go in the popular culture of a supposedly “post-racial” America. 

 

Fortunately, OpEd Project Public Voices Fellows Oneka LaBennett, Noliwe M. Rooks and Tera W. Hunter all took this opportunity to publicly confront the issue of a more insidious but very much present racism within contemporary American culture.

 

Oneka LaBennett, Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Fordham, delves into the implicit tensions of racial identity embodied by African American hair in her Ms. Magazine article, “Gabby Douglas is Not Her Hair.”

 

Noliwe Rooks, Associate Director of the Center for African American Studies at Princeton, wrote her own response to “Hairgate” in her Time magazine piece, “What’s Riding on a Ponytail? At the Olympics, A lot“, a sharp and insightful critique of the deeply-ingrained perceptions of African-American hair today and how they reflect a disturbing ignorance of African-American beauty.

 

Tera Hunter, another Princeton Fellow and a scholar of US History specializing in African-Americans, gender, labor and the South, wrote the third PVF op-ed of the week on Gabby Douglas in the Christian Science Monitor, “Olympian Gabby Douglas — the gymnast is golden but her family is obscured,” a brilliant analysis of the subtle racial bias implicit in popular media portrayals of Gabby Douglas’s family. Tera argues that these biases are so deeply ingrained in cultural perceptions of the African-American family that even prominent media figures such as NBC’s Bob Costas and Philadelphia Inquirer’s Trudy Rubin make assumptions about Gabby’s family life that greatly distort the actual picture. 

 

Oneka, Noliwe and Tera, thank you for shedding light on the complexities and neglected problems of a seemingly well-covered public moment. We commend your brave and perceptive words! 

 

 

 

 

The Next Generation of Public Voices

Do women voice their opinions less as they get older? According to the 2012 Byline Report, 38% of articles from College Media are written by women, a considerably higher percentage than those in both Traditional and New Media (20% and 33% respectively). In regards to who gets cited as an expert, the trend is similar. The chart below illustrates the vast divide in the use of males and females as experts in the media, though it does not start out that way. For ages 12 or under, 27% of females are cited as experts, compared to 12% of males. Males overtake females as experts by age 13, but by only 2%. It is really when we get to ages 19-34, at the college, graduate school and full-time career stages in life, that the gap in numbers between male and female experts becomes significant, with 25% of women cited as experts and 36% of men. From here on, the divide increases with age, until we get to 50% male experts and only 16% female ones at age 65 or above.

In other words, in the 65+ age group, a woman is less likely to be cited as an expert in the media as a boy in the 13 to 18 age group.

Clearly, the crucial demographic here is college students. Young women entering undergraduate programs start out on a relatively equal playing field with their male counterparts in terms of the weight of their public voice. So what happens in the college years and beyond that lessens the power and credibility of female opinion? As a Columbia College student myself, I am personally invested in exploring and ameliorating this issue, especially since I recently learned, from a chat with my professor, that the field in which I am interested in obtaining a PhD, Philosophy, has the atrocious male to female applicant ratio of 6 to 1 at Columbia. Sure, we are used to hearing about the small number of women studying STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math), but this gender imbalance within Philosophy–the study of knowledge itself, indicates just how deep-rooted this problem is.

It is clear to me that the time has come for the OpEd Project to extend itself to college-age thinkers, writers and speakers, and get to the very root of the gender imbalance in public leadership within our culture. Let’s shape the minds of our youths during the most formative years of their intellectual and professional development, training them to reframe their experience and knowledge for the public good, and most importantly, to value their own thoughts, to SPEAK UP. Such a program would enable women and other underrepresented groups to contribute equally not only to opinion journalism, but to all leadership roles in their chosen professions.

This is what I hope to work on after I come back from Paris and rejoin the OpEd Project in the Spring as the PVF Junior Fellow.

To open up the public forum to the underrepresented, to create a more diverse generation of future cultural leaders and innovators, we must first encourage the youth to voice their thoughts.

-Xueli Wang, PVF intern

A blossoming voice from the OEP alums

This week we would like to highlight one of our most successful OEP alums, the lovely Marielle Anzelone.

Marielle is an urban conservation biologist, policy analyst, designer and Op-ed Contributor to The New York Times. She is also Founder and Executive Director of NYC Wildflower Week, an organization that connects New Yorkers to nature in the Big Apple. In her work, Marielle preserves and restores native biodiversity in the city and region as an essential foundation of our sustainable future.

Marielle attended her first OEP seminar back in the summer of 2010. Since then, she has become one of the most prominent public voices  on urban ecology in the city, with two fourteen-week columns in the New York Times, tracking seasonal changes in New York in autumn and spring. 

I spoke with Marielle over the phone about her experience with the OEP:

When did you first get involved with the OpEd Project?

“Two years ago in June I went to a day-long public seminar led by Katherine Lanpher. I immediately thought to myself: “she’s speaking my language.” Katherine spoke about the importance of owning the work we do and putting it out in the world for others. For me, as well as the twenty other women in the room, this was a very illuminating, almost shocking experience. At the time, I was at a juncture in my career and wasn’t fully satisfied with what I was doing. Having launched my organization, NYC Wildflower Week, I was taking stock of what I was already doing and looking to expand and move forward.

In a thousand years, I would’ve never sent my work to the New York Times without the encouragements of Katherine Lanpher and Katie Orenstein. Katherine went above and beyond what she needed to do to foster a burgeoning relationship between me and the New York Times editor. When I went back and forth, up and down with my first op-ed, she stayed right there with me. Although I myself did the writing and the work, I would’ve never thought to even knock on that door if it hadn’t been for the OEP.”

How did the OEP make you re-evaluate your knowledge and its relevance to the public?

“The OpEd Project showed me that there had been this underlying interest I had that I hadn’t had an opportunity to explore. I had written pieces about plants before, but they weren’t opinion-driven. Doing the seminars changed the way I saw the work I was doing and caused me to re-evaluate where I wanted to take it next. Instead of continuing to do some of the same things I had been doing, I geared my work towards something different after my first op-art, When New York City Bloomed was published in March of 2011. I became more actively engaged in publicizing my knowledge and my work.

The OEP changed the way that I voiced my opinion. It made me realize that the work I had done and the issues I was concerned with were important to the public and should be given air time, that they were not represented anywhere else. After publishing When New York City Bloomed, I came up with the idea for the series autumn. The Times loved the idea and I was given my own fourteen week column. Spring followed soon after.”

How have your op-eds impacted your career?

“Before working with the OEP, I was not sure how to expand and move forward in my work. My op-eds served as the seeds out of which new opportunities germinated. As an Op-Ed Contributor for the Times, I am treated differently. My op-eds have given me leverage to do more and go further. Writing for the Times has also just been fun and wonderful. All my editors love my work and are really good to me.  In short, my op-eds changed the way I view my own work, validating my own strongly held feelings that I’m “on the right path”, so to speak.”

Congratulations Marielle! Your public voice has blossomed beautifully! We are so heartened here at the OpEd Project by your wonderful progress, and look forward to seeing your work expand in even bigger ways.

Look out for Marielle’s upcoming op-ed, to be published in the New York Times on the first Friday of August.

-Xueli Wang, PVF intern

All moved in!

Today was the first day at our new office space west of Soho, in the beautiful, homey, spacious WeWork building. At the cusp of this bright new chapter for the OpEd Project, we look forward to expanding in big ways, launching new projects, initiatives, ventures, extending our ideas and our voices more broadly than ever before.

Whatever challenges the future might bring, we’ll do as the British: keep calm and carry on! Though as of now, there are nothing but open horizons ahead.

Fresh voices from new kids on the block: TWU scholars instantly enrich public debate

The Texas Woman’s University division of our Public Voices Fellowship program, launched merely two weeks ago today, has already given rise to numerous powerful new public voices.

TWU scholar Ellen Magnis, for one, published two pieces within the same week, both of which provided a sobering and thought-provoking perspective on the Jerry Sandusky child abuse scandal, a case so frequently featured yet only superficially analyzed in most news media outlets.

In the Huffington Post article Monsters, Bad Guys and Perps, Ellen’s second op-ed, she shows that she is not afraid to confront the complexities of child abuse by pointing out that rather than doing the easy thing and labeling the perpetrator as a monster who exists totally outside of humanity, we should actually try to understand the real motives and causes behind these acts of sexual abuse. A step in the true road to recovery is to recognize that the perpetrator is a human being, and to see his/her hurtful acts as stemming from preventable causes.

Here is a powerful excerpt from that article:

“There are no easy answers here. We don’t really understand exactly why sexually deviant behavior occurs in our population. Humans are complicated beings with unique sets of brain chemistry and experiences. According to Dr. Jim Tanner, who studies sex offenders as part of his life’s work, perpetrators can be blocked, angry, delusional, deviant or anti-social. Tanner says it is far easier for us to demonize someone when we don’t understand their behavior. Otherwise, we have to accept that we, as human beings, have the potential to do something equally vile.”

So congratulations, Ellen, for having the courage and insight to provide this much-needed new perspective on an age-old issue! You are a real inspiration!

In other child-related issues, PVF scholar Anna M Clark published her first op-ed in the Guardian yesterday, Is pink milk the new pink slime, an exposé on the poor nutritional standards in our public school cafeterias. In this enlightening article, Anna points out that rather than serve “pink milk”–artificially flavored, super sugary beverages that barely meet federal regulations, our public schools should treat school meal nutrition as a top priority, and develop rigorous nutritional standards for that which they serve.

Anna’s vision extends beyond non-pink milk at the cafeteria. She envisions an improved cafeteria diet as the first step to transforming America into a healthier, smarter and more productive nation:

“At a time when America is expanding its waistline while slipping in educational rankings, could elevating nutrition in schools be a lever for societal transformation? Yes, and it’s already happening.”

We applaud you, Anna, for both the concrete solutions you provide and the hopes and aspirations you generate in this article for an America with healthier bodies and minds.

Other successes from our TWU fellows include:

Katie Pedigo’s Trafficking Victims Protection Act deserves passage

Patricia Davis’s Backpage in Our Backyard

and the very first TWU article published, Ellen Magnis’s The Jerry Sandusky trial and child sexual abuse’s walking-wounded

Congratulations to Ellen, Katie, Patricia and Anna for your amazing voices, as well as to Rose, Chloe and Katie O. for such a fruitful first convening!

-Xueli, PVF Intern

Fordham PVF Reflections

Hello all,

As the Public Voices intern, I have been transcribing interviews featuring our wonderful PVF fellows over at Fordham, conducted during our third Public Voices convening back in May. In these interviews, the scholars reflect on the impact the Public Voices seminars have had on re-framing their academic work to be more accessible and relevant to the public, as well as on opening the door to having a passionate, compelling, and opinionated public voice. These interviews are some truly insightful and heartening feedback on our year of hard work, and shed a great deal of light on the concrete and substantive result our Public Voices Fellowship program yields, not only in improving the quality and diversity of public thought leadership, but also in generating interest and enthusiasm in using academic scholarship to provide solutions to real life problems.

Here are some excerpts from a few of them. Take a look:

Christinana Peppard (Assistant Professor in Systematic Theology):

“The Public Voices Fellowship was an explicit invitation to live into the self whom I had always imagined and understood myself to be, and it really has set the tone for considering my work, the context in which I do it, and thinking about who and how I want to become in this profession and for whose benefit. I think that this project has been an amazing invitation to cultivate my voice for the public good. It’s been extraordinary.”

Christina Greer (Assistant Professor in Political Science):

“The value of the program has been enormous in the sense that before I joined, I would give a few interviews here and there for some news outlets, and I never thought of my quote that appeared in the NY Times, the AM NY or the Metro, which is the local newspaper that people read on the subway, as anything of importance or significance—it’s just a quote that I gave about a local election, or a controller or a city council member. And now, as a member of the OpEd project, to really realize that it’s not just about writing longer pieces, which is definitely a goal and a very important aspect of the program, but to really think of myself as a thought leader. So when my students or miscellaneous people say ‘I saw your name in the Metro on my way to work, I really liked your quote,’ I realize now that my little words here or my five minutes on a news program really does contribute to helping someone understand the American political process, and that’s why I got my PhD in the first place.”

Dawn Lerman (Area Chair and Associate Professor of Marketing):

“The value has been absolutely enormous. One of the things it’s done for me is help me to translate what I do in an academic sense and make it real and useful to a nonacademic audience, and it’s inspired me to actually use my research, my interest, my expertise in the exact what that I just described, which is: for public good.”

Gregory Acevedo (Associate Professor in Graduate School of Social Service):

“[My last op-ed] was a piece that I had been dying to write for the longest time…But scholarly writing gets so bogged down in the evidence, the facts, telling the longer story. Working with Abby was amazing: trying to get all of this complexity and nuance into two pages, the number of rewrites. I found a whole completely different voice, one that was very distinct from the scholarly voice I had, and it was actually a voice that I felt I was more empowered in, in some ways, compared to my scholarly voice: to not have to extinguish or dampen down the passion, or what my opinion or position was, to just do that openly, with the evidence—a healthy respect for evidence—but not to have to play this game of ‘I’m neutral,’ ‘I’m objective,’ no, I’ll tell you what I think. I think that was liberating to me.”

Hope your souls have been invigorated by these genuine responses.

Signing off for the day,

Xueli

PVF Intern

3rd Fordham Convening–Going Off the Page

Today Fordham’s Public Voices scholars convened for the third time at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus for a fully packed day-long session led by our illustrious team leaders Zeba Khan, Abby Ellin and Catherine O’Neill Grace, the last of whom “came on like gangbusters” (as some scholars warmly noted) to lead her first ever Public Voices session. In other exciting news, the day was documented by Emmy-award winning filmmaker Mary Olive Smith, with our very own Deborah Siegel hosting individual on-camera interviews with each scholar—all as part of the upcoming Public Voices Fellowship video.

[Catherine O'Neill Grace, welcome aboard!]

The convening began with a Gathering and Sharing session, when scholars reflected on their experience as Public Voices fellows and leaders marveled at the incredible increase in Fordham successes in the last quarter, during which it practically “rained op-eds.” Several scholars gratefully noted the crucial role the OEP played in jump-starting their passion and personal investment in writing these opinion-driven pieces, referring to the OEP as “freeing” and important in helping one “prioritize her own happiness” above more impersonal, goal-oriented aspects of professional life.

The majority of the day was devoted to “going off the page,” furthering the expansion and empowerment of underrepresented voices by exploring new media platforms, such as TED Talks, TED-Ed, MAKERS, and other interactive visual and spoken presentations in addition to written op-eds. Major highlights of the convening included guest speakers Jordan Reeves and Stephanie Lo of TED-Ed, who came in to talk about their freshly established and already viral online platform for educational material, make current TED content usable for educators, a project similar to Khan Academy. Jordan and Stephanie encouraged scholars to contribute to TED-Ed and continue the diversification of ideas in the vibrant and constantly expanding TED community.

At around noon, Katie popped in for a surprise visit!

Filmmaker Mary Olive also spoke with the scholars, introducing them to her Emmy award winning work “A Walk to Beautiful,” about women who suffer from childbirth injuries in Ethiopia, as well as “Fixing the Future,” her current work in progress. She also advised scholars on how best to present their ideas and conduct themselves on television and film, including advice on language, energy, appearance, how to create a sound bite and how to be cited in documentaries as an expert.

The session concluded with a peer panel, with scholars sharing their experience in writing, pitching and public appearances. A special point was made to address the underlying structure a female academic must operate within—balancing work, family and other commitments—a much discussed issue throughout the session, and improving this structure by increasing the recognition of the merit of such forays into the public forum as Op-ed writing, thus paving the way for a smoother and more powerful entrance into public venues for future women.

[Fordham scholars, hard at work]

Lastly, an idea for a new app was proposed—the “i-Pitch”—to everyone’s delight.

At the end of the day, scholars came away with a productive exchange of thoughts, a flurry of ideas for potential TED-Eds and Op-eds and a great sense of anticipation for the coming months.

[the staff]

Greetings from the new Public Voices Fellowship intern

Hello all–

My name is Xueli Wang and I am excited to step in for Ravenna Koenig as the Public Voices Fellow this summer at The OpEd Project. Ever since entering college and being introduced to the world of academia, I have become increasingly more interested in bridging the gap between theoretical, field-specific knowledge and the real world–a common source of frustration in the university. Imagine my delight then, when I discovered that the OpEd Project’s Public Voices Fellowship program has been here all along, with its office located only a few subway stops away! Before I dive in though, let me tell you a little bit about myself:

I am a rising senior at Columbia University, majoring in Art History and concentrating in Philosophy. I have been living in New York City for the past eleven years, and before that, I spent a wondrous childhood in Guangzhou, a city in Southern China. In addition to working at the OEP this summer, I will also be hosting numerous interviews with scholars, filmmakers and other visual artists around the world as the Arts department head at WKCR 89.9 FM, Columbia radio. In my free time, I’ll be reading alot of philosophy and watching many many films, as well as improving my French in preparation for going to Paris in the fall, where I’ll be participating in an intensive filmmaking program at the EICAR film school. I am above all interested in the intersection between culture and social activism, and hope to be involved in both after graduating Columbia in 2013.

A summer with the OEP promises productive, enlightening, invigorating conversations, projects and relationships, and I write with great anticipation for the coming days.