Seeing the incredible relationships you all have with one another, and the ways in which you act as support systems and sounding boards well after the fellowship trip has concluded underscores the need for, and resonance of, the work that we do on a daily basis.  And this is why, each year, we invite you to step away from your daily lives and spend a couple of days once again immersed in FASPE.  It is our fervent hope that these opportunities to reconnect with one another and with your FASPE experience will be both grounding and guiding, a ballast point, as your professional responsibilities grow and change throughout the course of your careers.

And we are very much committed to expanding these opportunities in the future!  Later today, you will hear about more ways to become involved, and learn about some exciting upcoming events.  One of FASPE’s primary goals in the coming months and years is to build a much stronger alumni network, and we hope you will be part of that.  

As a reflection of our desire for growth and increased engagement, we’ve recently added two new members to the FASPE team. Please meet Maya, our Program Assistant, who in a very short time has become completely indispensable.  Maya will be focusing much of her time on alumni initiatives.  And Haley, our Communications Manager, who has managed to pull a group of luddites into the current century. Please do find a moment this weekend to say hello and get acquainted with both of them. Many thanks to Maya and Haley for all the hard work they’ve put into making this weekend possible.  I’d also like to thank Mia, who truly holds FASPE together, and David and Thorsten, without whose work, vision, and leadership, none of us would be here today.

I’d like to now spend a few minutes talking about this weekend, the topic of trust, and why we’ve chosen this particular focus.  

But first, it seems necessary to - and I would be remiss not to -  acknowledge the landscape of the current moment.  I do not want to make claims regarding the stakes being higher than ever - but I don’t think anyone could accuse me of hyperbole when I say that the need for ethical leadership is great.  

We are now 5 months into a harrowing, heartbreaking, and devastating conflict between Israel and Gaza, with horrific loss of life and safety, and pain and suffering contouring the daily lives of Palestinian and Israeli communities, and tides of fear and anguish emanating from Gaza, Israel, and beyond, resulting in terrifying surges of antisemitism and Islamophobia, denials of the right to Palestinian livelihood and the right to Israeli existence, and escalating risks to the stability of the region. 

Two years after it began, the Russian/Ukrainian war wages on, and the rise of autocratic leaders and intense nationalism threatens to upend the democratic world order.  

Polarization is at an all-time high – not only do we not have a shared vision of the future, we no longer have an agreed upon set of facts, or estimation of what is truth.   And this as we approach a major election in the United States, that stands to be a watershed moment for the course this country will follow.  

I could, of course, continue to go on.

Compounding all of these challenges is the fact that that productive discourse has all but broken down, resolution feels far out of reach, and conflicts and differences remain intractable.  

I would like to say that we invited you here with the goal of solving the world’s problems.  (Though even with such an august group, we might have needed more than a weekend!)  These past months, the challenges to communicate and engage in dialogue, even within a community as thoughtful and well-intended as FASPE’s, have at times felt insurmountable and paralyzing, as words of comfort for one are acutely painful for another, and what feels like an existential truth for one is received as a violation and affront to another. The FASPE community has always been enriched by the diversity of its members and by the willingness of those diverse voices to engage with each other. And though not immune to the fault lines and fissures that have been exposed, we believe in the power of discourse, and in the FASPE community’s desire and ability to engage meaningfully in it. This weekend, we want to take advantage of the opportunity to have a large, interdisciplinary group of thoughtful professionals gathered together.  On Sunday, we will spend time in breakout discussions, exploring questions of professional responsibility in light of these issues that are on many levels existential, and how individual professionals can navigate deeply opposing viewpoints and certainties and seek ethical solutions.

To return to today's program - and the topic of trust - you may be wondering why this, why now?

As you know, FASPE’s entire premise is built around focus on the individual professional, and we define professionals according to the idea of influence.  Our criteria for the professions we focus on does not include an assessment of whether there are formal qualifications or specific barriers to entry, but instead an identification of those who hold a certain expertise, and in exerting that expertise, influence their communities.  Influence imparts power, power imparts responsibility.  Responsibility, we hope, leads to the commitment to act ethically.

And this is where FASPE’s focus has always been –  a bit narrower - not on the world at large, but on the professions and institutions on which we depend to safeguard us, to provide the structures and services that enable a healthy and productive society.  And on the individual professionals whose influence guides us.  But that ability to influence is now impaired.  And what it is impaired by is a lack of shared trust.  Trust is a necessary precursor to all accepted knowledge beyond our own direct experience, all understanding. It is the absolute bedrock upon which all ability to influence, to lead, is built.  And yet the long-trusted norms that provided the guardrails have been breached, and the very expertise on which we used to rely is now not just regarded with doubt, it is denigrated and discounted.  

You, as professionals, are on the frontlines of this battle, and no doubt may feel under siege.  

The breakdown is evident across professions - we need doctors to protect our health, yet do not trust they act in the patient's best interest; we need journalists to inform us, yet do not trust that they speak the truth; we need clergy to guide us, yet the decline in congregations persists; we need lawyers to protect and uphold our rights, yet we question what those rights are and how they should be applied; we need businesses to operate in ways that prioritize the health of the economy and planet, yet we believe they work only for their own interests; we need technologists to shape the ways of the future, yet we do not trust them to assess or rein in the consequences of their innovations. 

But I would also be remiss - and untrue to FASPE - if I did not point out that trust is what empowers us to lead, but it is also what enables us.  Loss of trust did not happen independent of the behavior or choices of the institution or the individual professional.  We cannot ignore the perpetuation of institutionalized racism, the ways that lack of accountability, and other factors have led us to a point of crisis - and the role that, intentionally or unintentionally, individual professionals have played. In order to foster trust, we must be trustworthy.  How can we as doctors, lawyers, journalists, clergy, businesspeople, and technologists navigate the current moment, the changing landscape?  This morning, there will be time devoted to breakout sessions within our professions to explore these questions.

So where do we go from here? What responsibility do we have for the loss of trust, and what is the path toward restoration? How does revolutionizing technology impact each profession in the face of enormous risk and lack of clarity?  What questions should we be asking ourselves in light of world events that impact us both personally and professionally?

We are grateful today to be joined by some incredible speakers and thought leaders to help us define and examine these questions - a very special thank you to Dean Jill Dolan, Trevor Morrison, David Miller, Julia Angwin, Gabriella Waters, and our very own Mary Gray for joining us today.

We hope that you will find this weekend edifying and gratifying.

My role as Dean is to oversee the undergraduate academic experience from their admission through students’ programs of study to commencement and beyond. Because Princeton is a residential liberal arts college, academics and the co-curricular experience are closely entwined.

But not enough attention is paid to the emotional quotient of our work in the academy. The pandemic, if nothing else, demonstrated the need for compassion and empathy in institutions that usually assert that academic rigor trumps all.

In fact, post-COVID, and in the face of the new epidemic of student anxiety and depression, Princeton’s president has been criticized for privileging academic standards over creating an environmental conducive to student mental health.

So, on the one hand, students clamor to be accepted to a college that’s selective and elite because of its storied rigor, but on the other hand, they want us to make sure that their education doesn’t cause them too much stress. With those impossible expectations comes their own inability to trust that we’ll ever get the balance right.

They also want colleges and universities to correct everything that’s wrong with the world by serving as a kind of magical microcosm. Students tend to see the local as their global, and if they can’t trust their college or university to get it right, then not only we but they have failed to right the world’s wrongs. In other words, there’s a lot at stake, and lots of ways for us to let them down.

Part of what they want is our empathy, to be seen and understood, but sometimes, they don’t understand the necessity of empathizing with others (or the Other).

The media, of course, also breeds mistrust in colleges and universities by feeding political tactics that scapegoat our work. It’s sometime hard even for me to hear Princeton’s president, Chris Eisgruber, say that we’re a “truth-driven” institution when it’s no longer entirely clear what the truth is or how it’s adjudicated.

Commentators and politicians insist ever more vehemently that universities are ideologically biased echo chambers. Perhaps as a result, our students don’t come to us with the same level of respect and admiration for they once considered the more pristine neutrality of the enterprise.

In such a partisan and unhappily quarrelsome context, how can our students trust us to deliver their education? And how can we trust them to be full, ethical, and open participants in their learning? I’ll offer four examples of this conundrum.

First, students no longer trust nuance. I recently heard Susannah Heschel, a professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth (and daughter of the legendary Jewish theologian/activist Abraham Joshua Heschel), speak about teaching undergraduates in this particular historical moment. She emphasized that students today see everything in black and white. People are good or bad, they’re heroes or villains. Our goal as instructors, Heschel said, should be to teach students nuance, to teach them to accept uneasy but generative ambiguity and ambivalence.

I agree. But that’s difficult to do if you can’t establish trust and empathy in your classroom. And it’s difficult to do if your students haven’t yet learned foundational skills that allow them to engage through the structured conventions of intellectual discourse.

Another example. My colleague, Khristina Gonzalez, a senior associate dean of the college, argues that this generation of students doesn’t understand irony. They take everything literally and at face value, which is partly why they need trigger warnings and why speech in the classroom has become so fraught.

To understand irony is to trust a partial point of view, to be able to see and appreciate a critique, to hold two contrasting ideas in tension at once.

But irony is also nuanced, and if students think gray areas are pernicious and potentially harmful, how can they engage? And again, if they expect us to take care of them rather than challenge them, and don’t trust us to foster their mental health, you can see why they want trigger warnings.

Wrapped up in this conundrum of care versus rigor is students’ sometimes explicit mistrust of expertise. A colleague a few years ago offered a lecture on minstrelsy in an introduction to American Studies course. She’s a white performance studies scholar with an expertise in American theatre history and popular culture, of which minstrelsy is an important example, imbricated though it is with the history of racism.

She intended to share clips from the African American filmmaker Marlon Riggs’ documentary Ethnic Notions that illustrated the idioms of minstrelsy. She’d prepared students in advance by noting that its use of blackface is upsetting, and she assigned an essay that explained the importance of a form which by contemporary standards is anathema.

But as she prepared to show the clip, several students in the class protested that her race disqualified her from teaching the topic and stopped her from proceeding. By reading the lecture only through the professor’s whiteness and not her expertise, the students mistrusted the professor’s ability to teach them this history.

One final example. Princeton has an Honor Code that’s existed since 1839. It’s meant to represent a pact between students and faculty, an understanding that students can rely on one another’s integrity not to cheat, not to seek an unfair advantage, and, by extension not to need faculty to proctor their seated exams.

Students and faculty are meant to trust that their ethics will prevail to prevent cheating and that when a student sees one of their peers cheat, they’ll report them to the Honor Committee, which hears academic integrity infractions.

Well, nearly 200 years later, I don’t think the Honor Code works the same way. That’s partly because students don’t trust one another not to seek an unfair advantage. They don’t trust that their fellow students won’t try to get ahead because even their premier liberal arts education remains an instrumentalist, goal-oriented race to the best GPA, which will get them into the best professional school or Wall Street firm.

Without trust, how can we rely on the Honor Code? A student recently told me she’s lost faith in humanity because she was prosecuted by her peers for cheating on an exam, which she insists she didn’t do. She told me she had trusted the system, but it let her down.

As the dean to whom appeals are sent, I’m not sure I trust the system, either. The Honor Codes presumes that students will turn one another in for cheating. But what if the reporting

students are lying? What if they’re acting on implicit bias? After all, our students are no longer all white male Scotch Presbyterians.

In other words, many of our bedrock academic values—like engaging with multiple perspectives and with ambiguity and nuance as modes of learning; understanding irony not as harmful but as hopeful; respecting and trusting faculty expertise; and trusting students’ commitments to an ethical learning and assessment environment—the very values that underpin our systems are now weakened.

I don’t want to leave you thinking I only despair about higher education. Many of my students are empathetic, emotionally acute young people who do embrace multiplicity, ambivalence, and nuance and who crave learning from experts. I’m describing here a more general malaise of mistrust that undermines our essential, enabling structures.

My hope for their repair or renovation resides in conversations like the ones I know you’ll have today. Trust can only be rebuilt if we come together with faith and integrity, to look one another in the eye and to rehearse how to recognize and empathize with one another’s humanity.

I know that’s what distinguishes you all as FASPE fellows, and as ethical professionals in your fields. Your work on empathy and experience, on ethical praxis, is founded on values that can help repair and renew the broken systems in higher education and in other vital social institutions.

Your presence here today gives me hope. Welcome to Princeton.

There are four continuing fundamentals:

• Professional ethics.

• Focus on the individual professional.

• The Fellowship Program as our flagship.

• Framing through the study of the Nazi-era professionals with Europe as the situs for the Fellowship Program.

These are what make us distinctive, these are what define us.

I want to spend a bit of time with each.

VI. The FASPE Mission: to promote a recognition by professionals of their influence as professionals; to promote ethical awareness, ethical behavior and ethical leadership among professionals; to promote professionalism among professionals. Our focus is on the individual professional.

VII. The FASPE Method:

Framing through history:

• As a starting point and framing device, we examine the actions and motivations of Nazi-era professionals. In so doing, we recognize quotidian and familiar behavior and motivations within professionals who behaved unethically with terrible consequences; and, with this framing, we can identify our own vulnerability to behave badly.

• Why the Nazi-era professionals? First and foremost, because they display the power/influence of professionals. And, because the results of their actions are so reviled and so consequential, the quotidian nature and familiarity of their motivations are therefore impactful and urgent. They help to establish the risks and dangers of our own vulnerabilities.

• We recognize the challenge that we must not seek or propose direct analogies between the Nazi-era professionals and ourselves. Thus, we must always be clear that we are framing conversations through these professionals, we are not comparing ourselves to them; we are not equating us with them.

• We use “cases,” often starting with particular Nazi-era professionals and institutions, using them to connect with themes that I discuss below and to use them as a bridge to current ethical issues.

• Personal Risk and Vulnerability. We seek to learn, through self-awareness, who we are; what motivates us; our vulnerability to be complicit; the risks inherent in our own motivations.

• Current Ethical Themes. We operate in themes, in categories of motivations and professional challenges, that are embodied in the examples of the particular Nazi-era individuals (and institutions) whom we study. Some themes cross many or all professions; some are particular to individual professions. Examples include the following, all identified within the FASPE cases. I actually want to spend a little time on these—they matter, they are at the heart of what we do.

• Particularist ethics: ethical behavior is not necessarily universal; we have the capacity, and within professional settings, to create our own micro-environments with self-defined and self-rationalized particularist ethical constructs.

• Moral neutrality: Is it good enough to do our jobs well without regard to ethical consequences; may we cede ethical responsibility to our clients and our customers? May we transfer and absolve ourselves of ethical responsibility through transparency and “informed consent?”

• Role morality: do we leave our personal moral and ethical compasses at the doors of our offices?

• Expertise: the influence of professionals, and trust in professionals, derives from their expertise. The expertise must be real, studied and honest. Without expertise, how can we expect to be trusted or to be influential?

• Unintended consequences: What is our responsibility to consider the unintended consequences of our professional advice/work?

• Multiple loyalties: To whom do we owe loyalty—the individual patient, client, et.al., to the institution we serve, to the system we operate within? To ourselves?

• What is the makeup of a successful professional: What values and competencies do we seek in ourself, as a professional? What values, motivations and competencies can lead us astray? Do these attributes of a successful professional sometimes collide with the attributes that we seek in ourselves?

• Where are the risks: what internal motivations can lead us astray; what externalities or characteristics of the professions, themselves, can lead us astray?

• Normalization: The risks of the slippery slope, of normalization, of the consequences of “momentum.”

• Crossing Professional Cohorts. We believe that the ethical guideposts of one profession can provide guidance to professionals in other professions. Examples: a journalistic guidepost is truthful reporting; do lawyers in their advocacy value truth? How do other professions think of the doctors’ “do no harm?”

• Fellowship and Place. With our Fellowship Programs:

• We believe in the power of fellowship, in shared experiences. We now understand that our use of word “fellowship” is not merely as the honorific of the grant/award, but about the relationships that we hope for—on the trip and thereafter.

• We employ the power of location—believing that conversations are more intense and impactful when taking place in the locations where the Nazi-era professionals operated and/or where the consequences of their actions played out. Similarly, in our alumni programming we increasingly are seeking to visit similarly impactful sites in the United States.

VIII. The FASPE Approach:

• We seek to provoke/encourage conversations, not to answer what is right or wrong.

• We seek to hone the questions, not to provide answers. We are not the ethics police.

• Our focus is on the individual, not for example, on the systems of justice or health care. Provoking and honing can lead to challenging or questioning the systems, but that is not our institutional brief (though we very much believe that professionals should use their influence to challenge, question and create change).

• We believe that, in our Fellowship programs, the diversity of the Fellows—racial, gender and religious, geographic, political and economic, professional interest, focus and motivation—leads to more complete individual inquiries and learnings.

• We believe in emotional and experiential learning—through the locations that we visit, the use of art and literature, the challenges of the topics.

IX. Our Goal. As a consequence of our work:

• We want our Fellows and Ethical Leadership Training (ELT) participants to be more self-aware of what motivates them, of what drives their behavior. To be self-reflective.

• We want our Fellows and ELT participants always: to search for and recognize the ethical questions and quandaries in their work, to ask the ethical questions, to think about the consequences of their work, to act on their ethical conclusions.

• We want our Fellows and ELT participants to lead and to mentor—with their clients, patients, customers, et.al., and within their organizations.

• We want our Fellows and ELT participants to recognize the responsibility of being a professional, always to practice professionalism.

X. The Potential Misconceptions. FASPE is a program in individual professional formation.

• While we study Nazi-era professionals, we are not a program of Holocaust education.

• While we examine the motivations of the Nazi-era professionals and the consequences of their actions which included the murder of 6 million Jews, we are not a program devoted to fighting anti-Semitism.

• While we recognize the genocidal consequences of the actions of the Nazi-era professionals, we are not a program in genocide prevention.

• While our cases are largely focused on the behavior of the professionals whose actions led to the autocratic fascism of Nazi-era Germany, and to the resulting genocide, we are not a program whose expertise is in defining autocracies, fascistic regimes, war crimes or what is just war or genocides; and therefore our mission is not, and it would be irresponsible and off-mission for us, to examine, comment on or advocate about geopolitical matters.

As to all of the above, we encourage our Fellows to advocate as they wish; and to utilize their professional expertise and influence in support of their conclusions as to appropriate ethical behavior.

As an institution, we do not take positions or advocate—other than to urge individual professionals to utilize their professional expertise and influence in support of ethical behavior.

XI. Looking forward, where we will devote resources:

• Curricular—new cases, professional ethics and the connections; ensuring that we are clear in our mission and that we are current in what are the ethical challenges in the actual practice of our professions.

• Alumni—FASPE serves you! We want you to be the future of FASPE. So, more learning, more connectivity, more programming, more opportunities to be together, more alumni trips, more networking, more involvement in all parts of FASPE, more…!

You have influence. You represent the institutions on which our communities—small and large—depend. Use your influence ethically, productively and responsibly.