Podcaster, author, and organizational psychologist Adam Grant attracts world-class authors, scientists, thinkers, and creatives to be on ReThinking, his podcast about leadership. Earlier this year Ken Burns told a George Washington story, David Beckham shared how he learned from mistakes, and neuroscientist Darby Saxbe discussed the “dad brain.”
Add Trinity University President Vanessa B. Beasley, Ph.D., to the list of esteemed guests. Her episode “How leaders build a collective identity with Vanessa Beasley,” a 40-minute conversation about rhetoric and leadership in higher education, published this week. Listen to the podcast on Spotify and Apple, and watch a YouTube video here.
Grant, who has nearly 8 million social media followers, visited Trinity in March to deliver the Flora Cameron Lecture on Politics and Public Affairs. Soon afterward, he invited Beasley to be a guest on his podcast, which averages 486,000 monthly listener downloads. The segment was taped remotely in early May.
“It was a wonderful opportunity,” said Beasley, whose conversation with Grant ranged from President Ronald Reagan’s visual storytelling to “monk mode” thinking to social media. “Adam is a terrific listener, and he provides fascinating insights from his and other scientists’ work as well as the vast array of guests he interviews. I was honored to discuss some of my previous academic research and to share some of what’s so special about Trinity and the education we offer here.”
Grant begins the podcast by asking Beasley, author of “You, the People: American National Identity in Presidential Rhetoric” and editor of a volume entitled “Who Belongs in America? Presidents, Rhetoric, and Immigration,” about the history of presidential rhetoric and who some of the best communicators have been.
President Theodore Roosevelt was the first president to bypass Congress and directly address the American people, Beasley said, after describing how the concept of “mass media” in the first decade of the 1900s had to be understood in a much different way than today. Reagan, whose team used visual images and narrative expertly, was both effective and innovative at “going public.” Honest Abe Lincoln did something many citizens hated (no spoilers).
Grant asked how to build an educational environment in which students pursue truth and learning. At Trinity, Beasley said, that pursuit is translated directly into the mission of undergraduate education. She said she wants Trinity students to learn – and think – for themselves through methods found in the liberal arts and sciences as well as in pre-professional degree programs such as business and engineering. Trinity makes hands-on learning and research available to undergraduates, opportunities often reserved only for graduate students and faculty at other universities.
She also talked about an undergraduate course she has co-taught at Trinity for the last two years: “Listening.” One of its central themes, Beasley said, is that you can learn how to listen to another’s point of view without being reactive or hostile.
“Listening doesn't mean agreeing,” she told Grant. “Listening doesn't mean that your ideas have to be threatened.” Listening could mean that someone cares enough about another person to want to know why they think a certain way, even if they assume they might not ever agree.
When Grant dove into his experience as a professor teaching short, intense courses as a way to keep students, faculty, and staff focused, energized, and learning more deeply, Beasley offered an example of one similar example at Trinity: the university’s first entrepreneurial bootcamp, a one-week opportunity in January that paired students from various majors with students from the Culinary Institute of America in San Antonio, where their new skills were tested in real time in pop-up booths in one of the city’s most popular marketplaces.
She also mentioned Amer Kaissi, Trinity professor of health care administration, who “changed the way I think about learning,” she said. Kaissi’s books have taught her that “learning happens best under conditions of high psychological safety and high accountability. If you have high accountability as a faculty member and the students do, too, because of the immersive and intensive nature of (an abbreviated class or project), some magic learning’s going to happen.”
To which Grant replied, “Yes!”