Video: Religion Matters: HDS at Harvard University

Religion Matters: HDS at Harvard University
[MUSIC PLAYING]

DAVID HEMPTON: I do admit I'm a bit discombobulated introducing this session. Those of you who have heard me introduce sessions before, especially outside, they always start with an Irish joke about the weather. And this time, there is no Irish joke about the weather. The weather is perfect. It's not Irish weather, and I don't have an introduction. 
[LAUGHTER]

So look, thank you for coming. And a special welcome to our three deans, distinguished deans from Harvard, who I'll introduce in a second. This session will be more of a conversation than a presentation. So I will ask our deans some questions, and then we'll get a conversation going. 

And then towards the end of our session, there'll be an opportunity for questions from you. But how we'd like to do this is if you write your question on a card and send them to the outer edge of the planet or the tent. And then they'll be picked up and filtered a little bit so that I don't have an army of questions but a goodly number, and then we'll pose those questions. So do keep in mind the cards that you have with you. Please write your question. Send them to the tent edge, and we'll pick them up in half an hour's time. 

So I'm very delighted to welcome our three deans. I'm fond of saying that when I became dean at Harvard Divinity School, the thing I was least looking forward to was the Harvard Council of Deans. And I had a strong image of the usual Harvard faculty egos, except on stilts, and that this would be the most unpleasant experience one could ever have in life. 

And I'm very pleased to say it has been the most pleasant experience I've had during my time as dean. And it's just been a tremendous amount of fun. And I love all of the-- as a good dean sibling, I love all the deans and the Council of Deans equally. 
[LAUGHTER]

But I love these three specially equally. 
[LAUGHTER]

So I'll just give a very brief introduction of our three distinguished guests. You'll have a longer bio in your program so that we don't waste too much time, and you get done with this humor. So Martha Minow is Dean of the Faculty at Harvard Law School and Morgan and Helen Chu Dean and Professor of Law. She's an expert in human rights and advocacy for members of racial and religious minorities and for women, children, and persons with disabilities. 

She also writes and teaches about privatization, military justice, and ethnic and religious conflict. She serves as vice chair of the Legal Services Corporation, supporting civil legal assistance for low-income Americans, and is a member of the board of the MacArthur Foundation and other nonprofit organizations. And she's currently preparing a book, I believe, on forgiveness. 

Nitin Nohria is Dean of the Faculty at Harvard Business School and is the George F. Baker Professor of Administration. Building on input from faculty, students, staff, and alumni, he has identified five priorities for Harvard Business School during his deanship-- innovation in the school's educational programs, intellectual ambition that advances ideas with impact in practice, continued internationalization through building a global intellectual footprint, creation of a culture of inclusion, and fostering a culture of integration within HBS and across Harvard University that acts as a catalyst for entrepreneurship. His own academic interests center on human motivation, leadership, corporate transformation and accountability, and sustainable economic and human performance. 

Jim Ryan is Dean of the Faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is a leading expert on law and education and has written extensively about the ways in which legal structures and educational opportunity, including such topics as school desegregation, school finance, school choice, standards, and testing. His most recent book Wait What? And Life's Other Essential Questions is based on his 2016 commencement speech and was published earlier this month and has had an enormous impact, both the speech and the book. So Jim is now the rock star of the deans. 
[LAUGHTER]

And he's authored articles on constitutional law and theory and argued before the United States Supreme Court, not argued with them or argued-- whatever lawyers do before the Supreme Court. So thank you so much for coming. Let's give our deans a real round of applause. 
[LAUGHTER]

OK, so I'm going to move from here to there to get our conversation going. And hopefully, this mic will also work. Good. So my first question for my three friends are-- and I hope there's an answer to this-- why do you do what you do? 
[LAUGHTER] 
And how does your school make a difference in the world? And what's your role in that mission? Another way of putting that is, I guess, what gets you up in the morning apart from your alarm clocks? So why are you the deans of your schools? And yeah. Jim, do you want to start? 

JAMES RYAN: I'd love to. Thanks for including me, David. I'm honored to be here, especially with Martha and Nitin. So I do what I do because I believe deeply in the power of education. And I feel really fortunate to be at an institution with people who share that belief. And I believe that the mission of our school is to expand educational opportunities and to improve educational outcomes. 

And I view my role as dean to ensure that we're preparing our students for the various roles that they'll play in the field of education, from classroom teachers to principals to superintendents to those working in policy, and help create the conditions for success for our faculty who produce research that identifies what works in education. 
DAVID HEMPTON: Thank you. Martha? 
MARTHA MINOW: Thank you, David, for this invitation. And anything you ask us to do, we'll do within reason. So we are living in a challenging time. Maybe everyone feels that their time is challenging, but it feels that way to me, particularly. And I believe that not everyone is capable of loving one another, as admirable as that is as an aspiration. 

And law is the tool that we have to help to build societies where people who actually don't like each other can actually live together. I also believe that law is a vehicle for bringing about change. And so the rule of law is actually a pretty precious and fragile resource for human beings. And I believe that we are in the business of searching the world for talented leaders who believe in the possibility of words as a way to persuade and to pursue justice. 

DAVID HEMPTON: Yeah, thank you. Nitin? 
NITIN NOHRIA: David, thank you for bringing us here. And congratulations to everybody on the 200th anniversary of the Harvard Divinity School. As a business school dean, I'm, as you know, always grateful when I'm invited to the Divinity School because people often wonder in my province whether we'll ever have a ticket to heaven. And this is my ticket, so here I am. 

We took a picture of the four deans. I said I'm going to have that very close to my heart. I got stopped at the pearly gates. I can show them here I was. 
[LAUGHTER]

So look, I grew up in India, and it's a poor country. And so I have seen how much economic self-determination matters in people's lives. People, of course, care about the health. They care about law. They care about personal safety. But if you think about the greatest source of human dignity that you could have, self-reliance and the ability to feel that you have economic determination over your own life is really important. 

I saw that through businesses that I visited. My father ran an electric utility company, so he went to villages that had no electricity. And their company brought power to those villages. I got the opportunity to see what happened how these villages got transformed by the power of business, the jobs that got created as a result of the jobs, hospitals that got created, schools that got created. 

So very early on in my life, I had this deep belief that business could be a force for good, that while it was certainly not-- also had, as any very powerful force, the opportunity to do harm. At its core, it was one of the most important ways of creating prosperity and economic self-determination for so many people around the world. 

So we live in a society in which there will be 9 billion people or 10 billion people roughly in the world by 2050. As of today, there's at most 2 billion people in the world who feel included in this circle of economic self-determination. So that's 7 billion people more, and the ones who have it always want more as well. 

So I wake up every day deeply inspired by the mission of Harvard Business School, which is to educate leaders who will make a difference in the world. While many institutions have to play a role in creating this and expanding the zone of economic self-determination, I think business is one of the most powerful instruments of doing that. So I think it's a great calling to be a business person who can go out and create prosperity and economic self-determination for millions of people around the world. And the challenge is very large, and so we need as many leaders as we can who could possibly contribute to this mission. 

DAVID HEMPTON: Yeah, what I hear in these three answers is a really wonderful commitment to expanding opportunity, whether it's prosperity generated by economic growth or whether it's educational opportunity for all people or whether it's bringing the protections of the law to bear on people who otherwise would be victims of cruel and unusual punishments. And how then would you think-- is there some kind of tension in having those aspirations and starting from a place of privilege like Harvard? 

And maybe to sharpen that question a little bit, do you see that One Harvard or the collective university adds something extra to the aspirations that you have for your schools? Is it easier or harder to fulfill your aspirations for your school by being part of this bigger university city? So maybe pick up one or other of those questions. And-- 

MARTHA MINOW: Sure. 
DAVID HEMPTON: Martha, do you want to have a go at that? 
MARTHA MINOW: Well, I'm watching with great interest how you're observing your 200th because ours starts in June. The law school follows the Divinity School. And it actually was an innovation to have a law school affiliated with a university. Previously, in the United States, people became lawyers by apprenticing themselves to a lawyer. 

To become part of a university is to have the radical view that the study of law is actually related to the humanities, to the sciences, to the entire scope of human knowledge. And that is a tension that persists to this day because we are in the business of developing practicing lawyers who are eager to actually put aside what they learned in college and learn the real thing. How do you be a lawyer? And we are asking them actually to continue the journey of critical questioning. 

DAVID HEMPTON: Right. Yeah, thank you. 
NITIN NOHRIA: And we, of course, in many ways, are almost a hundred years younger than the law school. And the Harvard Business School is famously known for the case method, but the reality is that we actually borrowed it from the law school. So in many ways, we have been deeply indebted to being a part of this university in terms of getting some of our most cherished traditions from other parts of the university. 

And I do think that what Martha says is right. One of the great privileges of being in a university is that you can create a more holistic education for your students. So we're not a trade school by virtue of being a Harvard Business School in a university. We end up being a place that teaches people economics. We teach people law. We can teach things that come from other parts of the university. Of course, we teach them about business as well. 

But we're trying to create almost a liberal arts education for business. So when people ask me what's the real promise of a Harvard Business School education, we believe in general management. And what is general management? It's a person who has a holistic understanding of the role of business in society, of the ways in which they can exercise leadership in society. 

And that's not just the technical details of accounting or the technical details of finance. It's a much broader perspective that you need to have. And I don't think we would have ever developed that perspective had we not been a part of a great university. So I think the importance of being a part of Harvard, and the more we become One Harvard, the more each of our schools will actually benefit from being a part of this university. 

JAMES RYAN: Yeah, I couldn't agree more about the benefits of being a part of a university, both for our students and our faculty. I mean, education touches a number of subjects taught across the university and is relevant to a number of interests among our students. And there are a number of faculty all across the university that are studying education from different perspectives. And it's one of the most attractive things to our students and to our faculty. 

I want to say a word about the first question about the question of privilege because this is something that I think about a lot, and our students do as well. And I always tell our students at orientation-- most of our students are master's students, and we only have a year. So I tell them at the very first day that they all came from different places, and some of them had more difficult journeys to arrive at Harvard than others. 

But they are going to leave here privileged in a way that they don't yet fully appreciate, but that they need to begin thinking about now. That Harvard will open a lot of doors, but it will also cause a fair bit of distrust in some of the communities in which our students are hoping to serve, and that they should worry less about the existence of privilege and worry more about how they're going to put it to good use. 

DAVID HEMPTON: Right. 
MARTHA MINOW: Just on the way over here, I was talking with one of my students who came from the country of Georgia. And she said it was such an extraordinary experience to be admitted to Harvard from her country, one of the very first from her country ever to come to Harvard. And so she felt she was an ambassador from Georgia. 

And she looked at me, and she said, now I'm an ambassador from Harvard to Georgia. How do I do this? And I said, remember who you are and try to be humble. 
DAVID HEMPTON: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So that's reflecting on the positive of what gets you up in the morning and the benefits of being at a place like Harvard. Who would you say are your biggest frustrations in reflecting on being at Harvard or in the jobs that we occupy? Within reason. We don't want to spend hours on this. 
[LAUGHTER] 
MARTHA MINOW: And there's the liquor. 
[LAUGHTER] 
JAMES RYAN: Maybe you should start, David. 
[LAUGHTER] 
DAVID HEMPTON: Yeah, well, one might be not receiving invites from your fellow dean over lunch to give up a lunchtime. Yeah, but genuinely, do you think that there are things that you would love to see could be achieved better, or that things that you struggle with that if some tweaks could be made to a system or to a structure or to an educational philosophy or to a political climate, that would give you a following wind towards achieving the very noble objectives you've elucidated? Or are most of the frustrations outside our control altogether? 

NITIN NOHRIA: I think that the general anxiety that we have in society that people are less and less willing to have a true dialogue with each other and seem more determined to just bring evidence that reinforces their beliefs as opposed to listening to others who might have different views and finding common ground. You would think that universities would be a natural place where we would be more able to do that. What worries me right now is that it feels that what's happening in the world is actually entering universities as well. 

We find people almost looking for ways to be disagreeable with each other rather than trying to find ways of having spirited dialogues, spirited discussions, and that's whether it's the faculty or the students. So I hope we can keep finding ways to make sure that these are the spaces where we should prepare people to go back into the world and be the kinds of citizens who are willing to listen to evidence, who are willing to listen to each other, who are capable of having-- 

The case method at Harvard Business School was grounded on the view that with the same 16 pages that are given or 12 pages that are given to people, 90 people can come to class and see the thing differently and can learn from each other. If all you do is listen to another person's view and say, that's stupid, and my view is right, you learn very little. So we need to make sure that we're creating a culture, which is at the heart of great academic institutions, that is about dialogue disagreement, a willingness to do that in a way that's open minded to actually know what evidence would persuade you to accept someone else's point of view. 
And I hope that we can somehow not get so infected by the world in which we live right now that we lose that, because in some ways, if there is a hope to turn that around in the world, we have to create the next generation of people who can do that as well. And that worries me. 

DAVID HEMPTON: Yeah, yeah. 
MARTHA MINOW: I agree with that. And I think a related phenomenon-- again, it's the world coming inside the university-- is the digital revolution has great resources. But one of the real costs is people aren't listening. People are multitasking. And people think that they're listening while they're multitasking, and that's the worst of all worlds. 

I think that there's a real danger of losing what's very special about being a face-to-face community. People are in a classroom fearful that what they're saying is going to end up on a blog somewhere with their name attached. And to actually cultivate what it takes to be quietly in the presence of others and not simultaneously projecting your image around the world, I feel a special challenge about that right now. 

JAMES RYAN: I guess I think a lot about-- I don't know that it rises to the level of a full-blown anxiety. But I think a lot about, are we doing all that we can to prepare our students for the world and the fast-changing world of education? Part of that is exactly what Nitin is talking about, preparing our students to engage in productive conversations with whom they might not agree and teaching them how to disagree without being disagreeable and how to search for consensus. 

And that's actually been a goal of ours this year. And one of the programs that we started is what we're calling the 3D program, which stands for Dinners, Dilemmas, and Debates. And faculty hosts small groups of students at their homes to talk about ethical dilemmas. Part of the point of it is to provide a space for students to disagree with one another. It's difficult to talk about a dilemma and all agree on the proper approach to it. 

And that is done in part because I was sensing the same thing that Nitin is sensing is that we're too often, I think, in a university, a part of an echo chamber rather than encountering ideas with which we disagree and people who hold them. But I also worry about making sure that we're preparing our students for the fast-changing world of education. Martha talked about digital technology. That's just one of the enormous changes in education and thinking about how we prepare our students, not just for the education that exists in schools today, but the education changes that we know are on the horizon. 

DAVID HEMPTON: So one thing I've noticed a little bit in our school is that we take students, as I'm sure as true here from almost every state in the union and many countries outside, and we take people in from places that are possibly more conservative religiously, politically. And then they spend two or three years with us. And we mostly position them in the coastal places again in metropolitan centers in the East Coast or the West Coast. 

So it's almost like we act as a little bit of a vacuum cleaner. We suck in talent, and then we export it to centers that already have a lot of talent. So I guess what I'm thinking-- and, Jim, you gave some really great practical ideas about the problem that Nitin diagnosed about, how do we actually encourage a better discourse on our campus but also outside our campus? 

And it sounds like your dinner conversations with students is a great way of doing that in a more relaxed atmosphere. Have you found other things that have worked in this very polarizing climate that we're in that can help build these conversations in the nation that we care about? 

NITIN NOHRIA: So we're trying something. We don't know whether-- so we invited a wonderful author who's-- if you haven't read her book, you should. It's Arlie Hochschild. She's written a book called Strangers in Our Own Country. It's a remarkable book where someone who-- as she says, I'm blue, blue, blue. I'm from California. I'm from the University of California at Berkeley, and I'm a sociologist. So I can't get any more blue than that, so I decided to go out and study red, red, red. 
And so she went to the south. She went to Louisiana, and she went to a county in Louisiana, Crystal Lake, which she didn't know this when she started studying it, which was four years ago, but which voted 91% Trump. So it's as conservative a group that she could find. 

And she said, I really wanted to climb this empathy wall to understand who these people were, because sitting in Berkeley, I almost imagined that they wore horns every day and were out there ready to destroy the world. And she says, the first thing you discover is that these are wonderful people. You can sit down and have tea and coffee with them, and then you understand their world in a deep and important way. 

So we have to, I think, find more ways of getting to places where we tend to other people. So we're trying to take a group of our faculty to a place called the Golden Triangle, which ends up being a very vibrant economic area that has been done in the last three years. One of the poorest districts in Mississippi has been converted into a vibrant economic zone. 

So we're going to take 10 of our faculty members to go out and spend three days in Mississippi so that none of us have had the opportunity to understand, how do communities like that transform themselves? We've studied how the kinds of companies that we are most excited about-- Google and Facebook and other things-- are doing business. But we've never really taken the time to deeply understand, what are the challenges in communities like that? How does economic redevelopment occur that way? 

So my hope is to rekindle in our own faculty first the imagination that things that are happening in the middle of our country are actually interesting. They're worthy of our own intellectual interest. We should be writing and thinking about what goes on there and then through that, bring our students, in some ways, engaged in those places in the world as well. 

MARTHA MINOW: So this is, of course, a big question. And to say to someone who's the first in the family to go to college, why don't you not go to New York? Why don't you go back home? It's not exactly to respect their aspirations and their family's desires. One of the things that we do at the law school-- and I know that many at other parts of the university do as well-- is we really encourage service. So it is a remarkable experience for people who disagree about a lot of other things to be working side by side. 

In the Mississippi Delta, where we have a clinical project where people represent individuals who are still recovering from natural disasters and economic disasters, we have a requirement of pro-bono work, public service work that's 50 hours before graduation. The average last year was 650. 29 clinics, 11 practice organizations, whatever people's own interests are, there are people in need. 

And to actually put aside your worries about your own jobs and your own student loans to actually work on behalf of someone who is living on much less than you are, I think, puts it in perspective and also gives people in the student body a chance to learn from each other about these very real experiences. 
DAVID HEMPTON: Thank you. 

JAMES RYAN: So I would say, for us, it comes up in two ways. In the context of education, one topic that is often given a nod to but not addressed nearly enough are rural schools, which face a lot of the challenges that urban schools do. But they are a very different context, often a politically different context. 
And so we've been in conversations about, how can we bring more attention to rural schools and introduce our students more to the challenges that rural schools face and the opportunities that rural schools face? It's difficult for us, because of our location, to work closely with rural schools. But we're thinking about how we can encourage our students to spend time there and faculty to pay closer attention. 

The second issue, picking up on the theme of the 3D program, is working with faculty to create a classroom environment where students feel free to disagree with one another, to voice unpopular opinions. I mean, education debates are some of the most strident in our public discourse. And people's feelings are very strong. And often, the debates shed more heat than light. 

And a number of our faculty are working on ways to encourage students to actually disagree with one another in class and disagree with a faculty member. Some of this is importing the case study method from the law school and the business school. Some of it is setting the right tone for the class. 

I taught a class last fall, where we focused on school desegregation and school finance cases. And I divided the class up in half every week, and they were assigned to argue one side or the other. And I told them that part of the reason to do this was to force them to articulate an argument with which they might not agree. And in doing so, they'll come to appreciate and respect that argument more than they might otherwise. They may still disagree with it, but they'll be much more informed about it. 

DAVID HEMPTON: Yeah, thank you. So I'm going to change the topic a little bit now, when you foolishly agreed to come to Divinity School, and this is part of the ticket. 
[LAUGHTER] 
NITIN NOHRIA: Any price. 
[LAUGHTER] 
DAVID HEMPTON: So how does religion affect each of your professions in scholarship and in practice? How would you think about that question? Does it have any impact at all in that kind of generic sense? Or how would you parse out that question? 

NITIN NOHRIA: I can go. I mean, so in many ways, the relationship between capitalism and religion has been quite strong. So if you think about Max Weber, he talks about capitalism and the Protestant ethic. So there's been a deep intellectual connection that capitalism arose out of certain religious groups that had a view of how to create work and how that business was itself a way to do something that was in the service of humanity and in service of God. 

So it's not that it was-- so the value of doing it came from a religious orientation. We've seen this repeatedly in society thereafter. So the Quakers in this country built some of the greatest companies, including things like Procter & Gamble that live until today or Johnson & Johnson. And these are companies that grew out of people who were founders, who were deeply inspired by a religious-- the work that they thought that they were doing in building these companies was as much a religious calling as anything else. 

So of course, business has over time become much more secular. And we have lost increasingly this very explicit connection to religion. But in meeting individuals, even though they would never talk about it publicly, which is interesting to me that religion has disappeared from the public discourse about business, but in the private life of businesspeople and where they find inspiration from and where they find meaning for what they do, I am quite struck by how much I will still meet people who find meaning in what they do and purpose and what they do from their religious roots. 

So it is an interesting thing that, in a sense, Weber and a very explicit discussion of the role of religion in the intellectual discussions of capitalism and business has completely disappeared. It would be very hard to find today scholarship that takes that point of view. So it's almost as if it retreated from the public space into the private space. But I don't think that one should underestimate the important role that religion continues to play in the life of business leaders. 
DAVID HEMPTON: Thank you. 
MARTHA MINOW: So religion is present at the Harvard Law School before every exam. 
[LAUGHTER]

For a law school to be situated in the United States, the temptation is to think there's only one legal system. And we've worked really hard to locate the United States and the 50 states inside of many legal traditions. And those include Islamic legal studies, Jewish legal studies, Christian Legal studies, Hindu legal studies, and Buddhist legal studies. I can go on. 

We recently held a freedom seder organized by students with-- I think it was 30 student groups that cooperated in putting on the seder, each one adding a new symbolic dimension to the seder plate and telling the story of their people. So our students come with diverse backgrounds, and they're curious about how their background does and does not relate to others. 

We do view religion as a subject of study, an object of study. And a comparative legal tradition is a big part of our education. But frankly, right now, I do think that conflict about religion is an enormously important subject at the law school and in American law. 

And in my own research, I gave a lecture this fall at the medical school on how should conflicts between religion and medicine be resolved, which tend to come to the legal community, as if we have an answer, which we do not. And indeed, we may make it worse by imagining that there is an all or nothing, that either the religious view prevails or the medical view prevails. 

The issue of what role should the religious belief of a private company have in claiming exemptions, for example, under the Affordable Care Act, these are very live issues. They occupy classroom work and scholarly work. And it concerns the larger issue that I mentioned when you began, David. 

We live in a world in which there's conflict and disagreement, and people don't all love each other. And the law is often the way that people try to work out how to work with each other. How do you do that when the law itself is at risk of not being neutral? Because it can't be neutral. That's a constant issue for us. 

JAMES RYAN: So as you know, the intersection of religion and education is long standing in this country and around the globe. And so it is a ripe topic for scholarship among our faculty and myself included. I've been fascinated by the role of religion and education my entire professional life and became fascinated with the rise of Christian academies in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. 

The proper role of religion in education and the relationship between education as represented by the state and religion is only becoming more important, given the current administration's interest in expanding school choice, including choice among religious schools. So this is a topic that has received a decent amount of attention and, I think, will receive even more. In terms of practice, a small fraction of our students leave to teach or leave independent schools, a number of them religiously affiliated. 

We have a faculty member who's reaching out to pull together religious leaders and education leaders from communities. And I think this is a really promising idea because it's pretty obvious that for schools to succeed, there needs to be both family engagement and community engagement. And community engagement has often left out religious leaders from the conversation, I think, out of a fear of intermingling church and state, which is not required by the Constitution. 
There's nothing in the Constitution that prohibits religious leaders and education leaders from sitting down to discuss their mutual interests in the development of youth in their communities. And so I think this is a promising approach. 

DAVID HEMPTON: Yeah, do you think it would be really advantageous for the students in your respective schools to be more religiously literate than they are? Or do you think-- Martha, you were saying that at the moment, so much around religious discourse is about conflict or even certainly in the schools as well or even a capitalism versus a kind of liberal progressive agenda that sees capitalism or generation of prosperity as a bad thing. 

So, I mean, are there ways in which you think there would be a real benefit to greater amounts of religious literacy? Or do you think this is something, as some colleagues at Harvard might think, that this is a time to move away from religious discourses in search of more secular and therefore potentially more unifying discourses? 

JAMES RYAN: I actually think it's really important for students to be more religiously literate if they're going into the field of education, because if you think about a teacher going into a classroom, there are going to be a number of religions represented in that classroom. And the ability to prevent conflict or to resolve conflict, I think, will be related to the extent to which the teacher is familiar with different religious traditions. 

Martha is right that we are in a time of religious conflict, and that's showing up in classrooms every single day. And if teachers don't understand at least the basics of different religious traditions, I think they're going to have a more difficult time navigating those conflicts. 

NITIN NOHRIA: I agree. I think that, in fact, if anything, perhaps there's people who've argued that the 20th century, the great tension in the world was between capitalism and communism. And by the end of the 20th century, that tension dissipated. And it looked like, OK, this was one model that was better. 

I actually think that in the 21st century, religion has become one of the real great divides that separates the world. And if we don't understand people whom we tend to other-- certainly, one can think of Islam today as being a great place, which is almost as if Winston Churchill used to describe that the world is separated by an Iron Curtain. I sometimes wonder whether the world is now separated by a black veil, that people who live on the other side of the veil don't understand us, and we don't understand them, and it all feels very mysterious and different. 

And it's so easy then to imagine that everybody is evil on each side. And if we don't start to understand each other better across religions and pretend that everybody is going to be secular as we are because that's the righteous place to be, we'll just miss out on understanding what's going on in the world right now. And not just in the world outside us, but it's increasingly, of course, through migration and immigration and refugee crises and things like that entering our own worlds too. 
And you can see how different countries are struggling with different models. Is the right model France? Is the right model Germany? Is the right model the United States? Is the right model-- there are so many different places where we're running into different ways in which people are struggling with these things. 
And I think the vast majority of our students, because it's so heated and because it's so hard, would rather not engage. It's almost safer to say, let me not go there, because if I go there, it just creates an internal conflict or an external conflict. But I just think that that's irresponsible. We must find a way to have these conversations in a way that allows us to understand better how people who are not like us religiously think. 

MARTHA MINOW: So some time ago, the Divinity School hosted a panel discussion with Jack Rawls, Cornel West, and me, which one of these things is not like the other. 
[LAUGHTER] 
And I was a young assistant professor. And I was very honored to be there and very taken, of course, with John Rawls's view that we could come up with a public discourse overlapping consensus, where we could speak the same language and keep our private, personal religious views out. As I came to know him over time, I learned, for him, that was very personally a goal of his political philosophy. 

I'm less and less confident that that goal is within reach, not to mention, is it even desirable? And I think that's why my colleagues' discussions about literacy in terms of religion, I think, is so terribly important. I guess I would just add to it this. I think in a time of globalization, sense of being unrooted, sense of challenge to any meaning is profound for people in all walks of life. 

And I think that people who in 20, 30 years ago said, we're going to see the decline of religion, they didn't understand that actually, this is a time of growing religiosity, growing intensity of religious affiliation. And we need to understand how that operates, even for people within a religion. I'm in a religious tradition. I'm Jewish. And to watch the changes of my own tradition in this moment and to understand how history affects belief, I think that we all need to pay attention to this. 

DAVID HEMPTON: Yeah, thank you. So in light of that, I'm going to ask you to act out your deepest fantasies now about-- that you could be dean of the Divinity School-- 
[LAUGHTER]

--instead of being approached by Drew for another school that just happened to have a decanal vacancy. So in the light of what we've discussed, I mean, what would you look to from the Divinity School, a Divinity School at a great research university like Harvard, as it gets into its third century? Or what can we do better? 
What do you most want from us? How do you see us in the university? And what role could we play even more constructively going forward? And the prize for a really excellent answer here is to become dean. 
[LAUGHTER]

That should sharpen the competition. 
JAMES RYAN: Or it can induce silence. 
[LAUGHTER] 
DAVID HEMPTON: I'm hearing the silence. Any-- 
MARTHA MINOW: So I think in some ways, it feels to me that the answer to that is connected to this last question that you asked us, which is, where would the capacity to have these conversations emerge from? And where could we learn? How can you have productive conversations with people who come from different religious traditions can talk about religion in a way that doesn't cause them to become even more retreat into themselves? How might we learn how to do that? 
So for example, we learn by the case method that it's a way in which different people who might have disagreements. It provides a very powerful and productive pedagogical device by which people can reasonably disagree and not come to blows with each other. It'd be nice to know, what are the ways in which we might-- all of us who wrestle with this but won't be experts in knowing how to navigate this conversation? 

What could the Divinity School do by itself that enables this dialogue to occur across religious traditions in a way that is productive? And if you know how to do that well, then how can you help the rest of us in our own settings learn how to do it better? That to me would be-- especially because I don't think these problems with the next 50 years are getting any smaller. 

So if you think about-- a hundred years is a long time to think about. But at least it feels to me that the world is coming to a place where the challenges of the world come more into the sweet spot of the Divinity School. And to the extent that you can learn how to navigate that on all of our behalf, we would all benefit from what the Divinity School might do. 

DAVID HEMPTON: Yeah, thank you. I think you're in danger of becoming a dean. 
[LAUGHTER] 
NITIN NOHRIA: I said I'm always looking for my ticket to heaven. 
[LAUGHTER]

MARTHA MINOW: When the Supreme Court of the United States decided a case in which it actually eliminated accommodation for religion as it had previously been done and instead said, if there's a neutral rule, then there's no need to accommodate individuals whose religious beliefs come against it. The Divinity School hosted a meeting. I came to that meeting, and there were people from many, many traditions who had never been in the same room together who shared one view, which is, this was wrong. 

And that led to one of the many, many meetings around the country that led to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. And that statute, passed by Congress almost unanimously, we are now living in a moment when the interpretation of that statute is of great challenge because it turns out when you adopt by statute rather than case law, the idea of accommodation, it can be pretty crude. And I think that it would be helpful for the Divinity School to host another meeting. 

DAVID HEMPTON: Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 
[APPLAUSE]

JAMES RYAN: I would say, Martha is in the lead, judging by the applause. 
DAVID HEMPTON: So be careful. 
JAMES RYAN: Yeah. 
[LAUGHTER] 
So I'm reluctant, for a number of reasons, to give you advice. I don't really feel like I'm in any kind of position. And I came here because you promised you were going to give us advice about how-- 
[LAUGHTER] 
I think I would echo a bit of what Nitin was saying and a theme of this conversation. And I think that you have a remarkable opportunity to show what is common across many religious faiths. You certainly know much more about this topic than I do. But I have a strong sense that there are strong areas of agreement and commonality about some deep and fundamental issues, the environment peace, caring for the disadvantaged and the elderly. 

And if you can show the way past the conflicts that occupy so much of our attention, so much of our discourse and illuminate-- which I know is one of your guiding principles, illuminate the areas of consensus and the areas of commonality and the areas of working toward a greater purpose together rather than fighting for supremacy, I think that would be not just a service to the university but a service to this country and to the world, honestly. 

DAVID HEMPTON: Yeah, because one example of that is just soon after I became dean, we hosted a conversation here among some leaders from the evangelical tradition, some of whom might not have been enthusiastic about the idea of climate change but who nevertheless had a very high ideal of creation care, and brought some of those people into conversation with people who did have a strong view of climate change and the damage it was doing, but who could unite over the idea of care for the creation, thinking about it strategically, and so on. 

So I think there are many examples like that where the hostilities, because of the way they're framed and the way that the insults are traded, really just push people apart and make that kind of conversation impossible. Whereas I do think-- I mean, obviously, not in everything there will be areas where there's just frank, honest disagreement, but I think there are many other areas where some of these disagreements can be softened a little bit in the interests of some greater objective. 
And so I'm going to finish before gathering questions from the audience. And there's a bestselling author who's written this book on questions. And the final question is, what really matters? And I was just wondering, how you would begin to answer that question for yourselves? And maybe take it whatever way. Either give it a personal twist or a professional decanal representative of school twist. 

What really matters to you? So either in your professional lives or more deeply as you think about your roles here. And maybe start with you, Jim, since you're a expert on this. Or-- 
JAMES RYAN: So I'm the one who asks the questions in that book. 
[LAUGHTER] 
So I'll answer it from the perspective of being a dean. And this ties to my personal life as well, I suppose. What truly matters to me is not to lose sight of the purpose for which our school exists and the purpose that I see is motivating my role as dean. And that's to serve others. 
It's very easy to get caught up in the day-to-day details of being the dean or the day-to-day life of being a faculty member or a student. But if you have decided to go to the Harvard Graduate School of Education, you have decided in effect to dedicate your life to service in the form of serving others through education. I think that's an incredibly noble purpose. 

And I think we're all better off and we're all at our best selves when we remember that's why we're all here. And I try to remind myself that that's why I'm there. 
DAVID HEMPTON: Thank you. Great answer. Martha, do you want to have a stab at that? 

MARTHA MINOW: Well, I guess I will respond to it as a person. I remember when I was pregnant and realized that every single person on Earth, some woman had gone through that experience for them. And that was the beginning of recognition that every single person, somebody's loved them somewhere, sometime. 

And what does it take to look at every person even someone you're mad at it through that lens? And what does it take to create the context in which there's that capacity for each person now? And I think that we are very much encouraged to think about ourselves and our careers and our successes. And finding ways to support this sense of the privilege of being alive and what it is to bear witness to the privilege of other people's lives, that's something that I try to think about every day. 

And one of the challenges of the kind of job that we have is that we're kind of the clergy for a small community. And we know the sadnesses. We know who's ill. We know who's lost a family member and to try to find the ways to make a community that holds with some gentleness all of the people in it as we go through the challenges of our lives. 
DAVID HEMPTON: Thank you. 
NITIN NOHRIA: So for me, I have always been deeply moved by the mission of our business school from the first day I joined the school. It's a very simple mission. It says to educate leaders who make a difference in the world. And for me, every day, just that phrase "make a difference in the world" is a useful phrase. 

And it can sound very lofty, and sometimes you can say, oh my god, make a difference in the world? Do I have to be some leader with a capital L in order to do that? But there are so many opportunities to do it every day. You can go back. I go back every day and always do a little mental accounting. 

Did I bring a smile to someone's face? Did I bring despair to someone? How many ways did I have an opportunity to-- did I say hello to my daughters in a way that was really meaningful? Or did I just skip past them? So there are so many ways in which we can do it every day in our daily lives. And the daily ways in which we live with other people, you can do it in other bigger and larger ways. And so it's a circle that can keep expanding. 

But as long as you have that sense that you do make a difference in the lives of others and you can make a positive difference or a negative difference, you always have the opportunity of doing both. And to the extent that the ledger in the end is that you make more positive difference than not, then you would have lived a good life. So I find that mission useful in the small. I find that mission useful in the medium and in the large. 

And it ends up being a very powerful way to live my personal life as well as think about what I'm doing on behalf of our business school and what I hope our students in turn would be doing on behalf of their own families, their own communities, and the world at large. 

MARTHA MINOW: I think you have the ticket. 
[LAUGHTER]

DAVID HEMPTON: Thank you. He's the one who can give it, though. Thanks, Paul. So the era of soft questions is over. We're now in a hard-- so thank you for these questions. I'll post them to our-- those are great answers actually on what really matters. So thank you so much. You can see why being on the Council of Deans is really fun. 

"So how does HDS add value to your schools?" And what kind of content from HDS would you like to see more of?" I guess we've answered that a little bit. But do you have anything-- how you think we add value to-- yeah. 

MARTHA MINOW: Well, I'll say just very simply, the students and the faculty participate in discussions that affect my students and my faculty in very, very important and enriching ways. And the most obvious are the students who are pursuing a joint degree, but many are not. But we have students from HDS at the law school and vice versa. 

And I'm working on a book on forgiveness. And I have very strong interest in loan forgiveness and debt forgiveness. And to be able to work with students who actually know something about that is-- and what are the religious traditions, what are the resources that we could maybe summon up as we deal with a very practical problem in the lives of people right now? It's incredibly helpful. 

JAMES RYAN: I would say exactly the same thing as Martha, yeah. 
DAVID HEMPTON: OK. 
NITIN NOHRIA: Ditto. 
DAVID HEMPTON: Yeah, so here's a trickier one. "What is the role of ethics in your schools? And secondly, do you provide spaces in your curriculum where students can consider faith based that is from different religious traditions' perspectives on the ethics of education, business, or law?" So really, it's a question around the role of ethics in your curriculum and what role, if any, religion plays in considering how that ethical curriculum is constructed. 

NITIN NOHRIA: So ethics permeates our curriculum. We have required courses that encourage people to think about the ethical dilemmas that will be a part of all of their lives in business. I had the great privilege of being involved in creating that course. It was one of the highlights of my academic life at Harvard Business School was to be involved in creating a course called leadership and corporate accountability, which tried to make ethics a required part of our first-year curriculum, which it now is. 

I must confess, though, that this is the part that I was lamenting, that even though religion has always played an important role in business, it seems somehow less opportunity to talk about where these values and ethical principles might come about explicitly. It's almost as if we feel compelled to have that conversation in very secular terms or in very analytical terms but not in the same ways. 

I have tried a couple of times to see if we could encourage our students to have the conversation in which values or ethics that are grounded in a religious set of beliefs or religious traditions could be introduced into the conversation. But it's been hard, to be honest, to bring that into the conversation. 

MARTHA MINOW: We, too, have required courses that deal with ethics and also hope to have a kind of pervasive approach. But I think that the religious contributions to ethical discussions really is deepest in the very vibrant organizations on campus. So Christian Legal Fellowship, many, many religions have student organizations. 
And what's been moving to me to see in recent years is their collaboration around topics where the whole conference is on subjects like, what is it to be a religious professional? And I think that that's been more effective in creating space than in the classroom where people are being graded and judged. 

NITIN NOHRIA: And we find the same things. In fact, our student organizations have turned out to be the most powerful way in which this-- and they're now connecting with each other across the university. So the nice thing is that they're no longer people who are just isolated in each of our schools. We found our groups connecting with people here, groups connecting with people at both of your schools. So I think it's been really striking that the students are finding their own ways of having these conversations outside of the classroom in very productive ways. 

And maybe that's a good thing, right? Everything at Harvard doesn't have to happen in the classroom. We do remember one of the reasons why we've created a residential community is to create opportunities for people to do things that could be better done outside of the classroom. And so that is actually an encouraging sign that more of that conversations are occurring, and they're occurring outside the classroom. 

JAMES RYAN: And it's very similar at school. And there are a number of courses on ethics related to education. And there are a number of efforts outside of the classroom to focus on ethics. There's a group on civic and moral engagement that involves both faculty and students. But I would say it is a secularized version, the discussion. There is not much discussion about the origins of particular ethical values or their consistency with particular religious traditions. 

DAVID HEMPTON: Do you think that's a weakness? Or I think are you saying that these ethical discussions, if they do have strong religious foundations, are almost better worked out outside the curriculum? Or do you think there's a case to be made for paying greater attention to that in the curriculum? Or how would you think about that? Or-- 

NITIN NOHRIA: I think we don't have the competence to know how to do that right now. So that is one of the things that I was saying that as you think about what the Divinity School might do if you could help us figure out how to do that. So when we talk about fairness, so for example, that's an important ethical principle. And you say, we're not going to not have a discussion at Harvard Business School in which people say, well, let's think about claims of fairness. And in what ways is this decision fair? Who will feel it's unfair? What does that mean? 

Now, fairness is presented as an utterly secular idea, whereas the reality is that notions of fairness have very different interpretations, very different imaginations in different religions. But we don't know how to unearth that, discuss that, have a conversation about it that's productive. So we tend to retreat into trying to find these universal ethical principles that you can talk about without having to uncover or unearth or even try and understand the differences that different religious traditions might have on the same word, where there is some apparently secular understanding of it. But actually, there may be underneath it deeper and more different meanings. 

So I do think that there is, as you say, David, probably value in trying to get more nuance and richness into these secular discussions that are informed by different religious insights. But I'll be honest that no one of our faculty members would know how to do that today. We wouldn't know how to have that conversation in a way that was productive. And so we tend to have the conversation in a way that ends up being very secular, very scientific, very analytical. 

DAVID HEMPTON: Yeah, when we look at the foundation document of our school in 1816, and one interpretation of the founding of the Divinity School-- and this happened right across the United States a little bit later-- is the separation of theology and religion from the main university, if we put it that way, in a separate place where it's done as a vocational or professional training, and although there's something called religious studies back in universities. 

So one interpretation of what you've just said is that not having any kind of faculty or programs or curriculum that can deal with these issues is part of a structural reality of how the American university is unfolded. So in our silos, we deal with these things. But collectively, the connections are not strong enough. 

And of course, at somewhere like Harvard where there's a spatial separation between the schools as well as a disciplinary separation, are there things that you think we can do better to-- I know President Faust, who we all report to, has this One Harvard vision of how collectively we can be better than we are individually. But is this an area we can do better? And if so, what would doing better look like? And-- 

MARTHA MINOW: To get very practical, it's about schedule. It's very hard for people to actually take classes across the university, because the schedules are different. And the January term, I think, is now this great opportunity where the whole school is on the January schedule. I think we should have many more occasions where there are topics-- take the topic of food, food law, food safety, food health, hugely important, hugely timely. We know that law is a teeny part of it. 

And to think about what are the contributions that other parts of the university can make to that-- or you talked about climate. We have many people on our campus interested in animals and animal welfare. There are people in the rest of the university interested in that. Are there ways that we can actually just make it possible for people to easily come together January? 

DAVID HEMPTON: Yeah, one example, we've had this Religious and Practice of Peace Initiative going for the last two years at the Divinity School. And this is well known to all of you that in parts of the world where economic prosperity is higher, civil conflicts, generally speaking, are lower. 

So when we try and think in our RPP, Religions and the Practice of Peace, we're trying to look at the faith foundations and spiritual foundations for peace building. We're driven back again and again to other frameworks of understanding, economic understandings, or legal understandings. To what extent is it possible through things like the International Criminal Court or through legal devices in our great friend who wants to make war a war crime, Ben Ferencz? 

MARTHA MINOW: Ben Ferencz. 

DAVID HEMPTON: So what we found, the same with educational provision, that when we come up against these big questions that we try to get at through religious foundations, we're driven back in other categories a lot but then sometimes also lack the expertise in a different direction about how to think about these things and can often then have very defensive positions about law or laws. And that which is run by people in power or business prosperity is that which is generated for the few and not the many or these kind of cliches really that defy a deeper analysis. 

So I guess what I struggle with a little bit is for all the-- I think that the really great intentions of One Harvard, which I think is a wonderful ideal, and I think we've made some real headway towards that. But I do think we have a long way to go of how to build across that isn't-- and the schedule is a problem. 

And you, folks, like we have, have got priorities. You've got to train teachers in a year or lawyers in three years or business people. So people need to understand accounting methods and marketing. They need to understand all the different forms of law, from corporate to private and so on. So that's a challenge. 

We all are operating away at our very specific curricular needs. So how to do that? That isn't just things like-- I mean, and some of these questions are, well, do we need more joint degrees? Or do we want more-- and that's one way of attacking these questions. But there must be other ways of doing it that can get to the same destination without having another big structure piled on top of it. 

MARTHA MINOW: Sorry. But Kurt Vonnegut, the great novelist, in one of his novels, suggests that everyone is born with a middle name that randomly assigns them to a family. And what if everybody at Harvard was randomly given a middle name that connected them to people in the other schools and had enough time to get together and talk together? 

DAVID HEMPTON: Yeah, wouldn't that be interesting? 
MARTHA MINOW: Yeah. 
DAVID HEMPTON: Yeah, or just given a random number when you come to Harvard between 1 and 11, and that you had to gather periodically with people in your number group. And would be kind of fun, wouldn't it? So long as all the [INAUDIBLE] all was rigged, and they all came here. 

[LAUGHTER] 
JAMES RYAN: I'm sorry. 
MARTHA MINOW: No, no, no, this is not nearly as creative a suggestion. I think of two ways. One is Martha's right that the scheduling is difficult, and you're right that everyone is compressed for time. So thinking about workshops that each school could offer that would be relevant to students in another school so that there was an effort to reciprocate would be one way, I think, to cross the boundaries in a very discreet and manageable way. So religious literacy for teachers would be a great workshop that your faculty could put on. 

The other way is-- and you adverted to this-- collaborating around problems in the world. I've become a big believer that that is the way to draw faculty together. That is, you identify something in the world that you actually want to address, and you're serious about addressing it. 

In order to do that, you'll find often that the expertise doesn't reside in a single department or a single school. You need leadership within that group. It can't be deans simply commanding faculty to work on this. So it needs to be a bit organic. 

But if the problem is compelling enough and there are resources and structures in place to allow for the collaboration-- so I think, for example, of this idea of a colleague of mine is pursuing about how to bring religious and education leaders together in communities to support the development of kids. That would be, it seems to me, an ideal opportunity to bring together faculty from across a number of schools, including the Divinity School. 

DAVID HEMPTON: Yeah, that would be wonderful to have an opportunity to think more deeply about ways of-- because these are great, really creative suggestions, I think. I was surprised that you're saying, Jim, that in your school, the dean can command the faculty to do what you want. But it's very different here. 
JAMES RYAN: I misspoke, if that-- That's right. That might have been wishful listening. 

DAVID HEMPTON: I think is our time almost up? We've got a few more minutes? So-- 

NITIN NOHRIA: Can I take a stab at this last one? I've been so struck by, in some ways, what the i-Lab has generated, right? It shows me that the student energy to connect across-- I mean, the faculty may be the last people that we find easy ways to connect. But I think the students have an extraordinary opportunity to connect. 
And we created this space, which was on the remote edge of Harvard, for the vast majority of our students. When we first built it, people said, other than business school students, nobody will even find it. Now business school students are at most 30% of the users of the i-Lab. We have Divinity School students there. We have education school students there, law school students there. 

But it met a particular impulse that students had. So it found an opportunity for people who are naturally entrepreneurial or may have had even a hint of that in their life to say, is this a way to explore and give voice to this natural-- so I think we need to find ways in which we can tap into the natural energies and the natural desires our students might have and pick those areas where there may be some density of that interest where they might connect with each other and then create the space and some resources for them to do that. 

It's not obvious what all those spaces are. Entrepreneurship ended up being one. So I'm not saying that I can easily come up with a list of 10 other such things on which people might find those connections. We're trying to do it now with the arts, and it'll be interesting to see how that project unfolds. 

But I think it's worth thinking about where might students have a natural energy and desire to connect with each other and something that feels purposeful to them or meaningful to them. And then can we create those one university spaces where that might occur in a productive way? So that's just another idea, because I do think that the potential in this university is large. 

But the constraints on how to do it based on schedule time, each one of us feeling that if I have them for my one precious year or two precious years, I got to give them 240 pounds of stuff to carry in a 200-pound bag because our faculties want to give them more and more and more of their own materials. So we squeeze out all the space to do other things in any case. 

So that to me feels like another thing that at least this i-Lab experience has opened my eye to, which is that the students have more desire to connect with each other. And as you were saying, even these religious clubs and how they are connecting with each other seems to suggest to me that there's something about the energy of students that we should unleash in ways that's not just the curriculum. And we should take advantage of being a residential community and find ways of connecting them in these other ways. 

MARTHA MINOW: I'll never forget the first advisory group that you convened for the Innovation Lab. And the first request the students had was to stay open later than 2:00 AM. 
NITIN NOHRIA: Yeah. 
[LAUGHTER] 
It was a big decision that we as deans had to make, which is we had responsibilities about safety. And could we do it? And how might we do it? It took a big deal to make it more 24/7, which it now is. But it was a complicated decision because shuttles stopped running. And again, as I said, it's a remote edge of campus. You had safety and security concerns. But that's when they want to work because they can't work during the day. 

MARTHA MINOW: And it was a sign of their desire. So it comes back to time and space. Kant had something going for it. 

JAMES RYAN: But I also do think that it's also a commonality of purpose. What draws students to connect with students from different schools is that they share a similar goal. 

NITIN NOHRIA: You do have to find those intersections where commonality of purpose is strong and powerful and drives you enough to be able to take on that extra cost of doing things to connect, which at Harvard otherwise are not easy. 

MARTHA MINOW: Well, again, when we have conferences on food, we have people from all over the university. And our work on immigration refugee rights all over the university, I don't think we have any shortage. So it is about creating the ways for people to connect. 

DAVID HEMPTON: Yeah, yeah. Those are actually great examples, I think, of-- I mean, the i-Lab and what you're saying around food. So we have a Center for the Study of World Religions right over here, which has, in many, ways accomplished some of this, but I think we would all recognize that we have a ways to go on this. 
Because, again, I think what you've pointed out and what we found out when we put up an exhibition of our first 200 years of our school and what we've discovered from that exhibit is that the real important innovations in our school have been student driven, more than either Dean or faculty driven. So what was really interesting about your answers was really that, I think, how to empower our students and provide the spaces and the opportunities, which I think they will seize. 

And to hear from them about the things they're interested in, I do think that's-- I mean, rather than a couple of deans getting together and putting together, oh, here's a new joint degree program or whatever because that's a way we almost automatically think that's our go to-- so those are interesting thoughts. Are there any final things you wish you had said or didn't say before we give you your tickets to the pearly gates? 

MARTHA MINOW: Can I just say thanks for the privilege of this conversation? It's just really very valuable. 
DAVID HEMPTON: Yeah, so I just want to thank-- you can see why-- 
JAMES RYAN: Oh, can I say one more thing? 
DAVID HEMPTON: Yeah, go for it. 
JAMES RYAN: I just want to say it is a genuine delight and honor to serve with you and Martha and Nitin on the Council of Deans. You are an exemplary leader. 
DAVID HEMPTON: Thank you. Yeah, so you can see why it is a fun gathering. 
[LAUGHTER] 
NITIN NOHRIA: We all love him. That's why it's a fun gathering. 
DAVID HEMPTON: No, thanks. 
[APPLAUSE]

Thank you so much. 
[MUSIC PLAYING]