Larry and I recently joined more than 7,000 magical artists from around the world for the FISM festival in Turin, Italy.

My husband Larry and I just returned from a week in Turin, Italy, where we joined more than 7,000 magical artists from around the world for the triannual FISM festival of competition, lectures, and performances. Spending extended time with old and new friends from so many different parts of the world crystalized an important lesson for effective American academic leadership. We must prepare our students for a new ordering of global influence—one in which the dominance of American sensibilities, power, language, and culture can no longer be assumed.

The rest of the world is dismayed about the rise of isolationism in the United States. The people I spoke with retain sympathy for individual Americans and confidence that the American spirit of freedom will ultimately prevail. But they are not standing still or waiting for us to get our act together. Other nations are forging new alliances and moving ahead without us. Instead of entering the global competition for talent with enviable American credentials and the lucky advantage of native English competency, our students will find themselves at a lower rung—needing to defend their relative lack of excellence in science, politics, history, and technology. Patience for American monolingualism will be thinner. Tolerance for American self-absorption will be weaker. Deference to, and trust in, American institutions (including the dollar and the university degree) will be eroded.

Remaking our curricula in ways that give American students the skills they will need to adapt and to thrive domestically and globally is a pressing imperative. As you plan for the new semester, I encourage you to bring faculty together to think creatively about ways to help students develop the skills, perspectives, and habits of mind needed to forge a place in a global order in which American dominance is not assured and no longer assumed.

Questions for reflection: What assumptions does our curriculum make about American global dominance? What can we learn from other countries about preparing students to contribute to and lead in contexts that are not native to them? What international partnerships can we strengthen? How can we ensure that every student expands their global perspective?

Our staff has been experimenting with AI in order to discover its uses and limits. Using BoodleBox, I just created my first AI bot. Its purpose is to review past issues of my newsletter and create an index of topics, answer questions based on content, and make it easier for me to plan future issues. I do not use AI as a composition tool—writing is a form of self-expression that I will not turn over to a machine. But I appreciate the ease with which I can index and query past issues. It’s been fun to jump into this new technology and BoodleBox makes it easy. CIC members can access special pricing and join our popular AI network. Year two of the AI Ready network, designed to provide every campus member with inspiration to explore and try AI, gets underway in August.

Among the most innovative of CIC’s suite of leadership development programs, our year-long Presidential Vocation and Institutional Mission seminar inaugurated its new cohort of participants. The curriculum focuses on the “why” of presidential and executive leadership, helping participants discern the kind of institution they could effectively lead and the deeper purpose of their leadership work.

Also starting a new cycle, the Presidential Renewal program supports experienced leaders as they reconnect to their purpose and vision.

A Spark of Inspiration

Authoritarian governments of all kinds have to craft an inversion of values such that might equals right. They do this by interpreting resistance as evil and complicity as good—no matter the ends to which either is put. But as Orwell knew, they must also accomplish a linguistic reversal of values in which traits that were once valued—integrity, courage, compassion—are renamed and denigrated.

As a character in Madeleine Thien’s new novel, The Book of Records, describes it:

“He repeatedly told me exile was a blessing because we had freed ourselves from an empire in ruins, a hall of mirrors in which good people could betray themselves and never even know it.”

When that hall of mirrors covers over most of our reality, ordinary people become capable of not just tolerating but perpetrating great evil. Remedies are hard to come by since the blanket of moral fog is thick, and the dangers of standing against the authorities are real. How do we break through the rhetoric of propaganda that aims to invert our deepest values?

Innovative science fiction author, Ken Liu, offers a possible path of action in his lyrical translation and interpretation of the Tao Te Jing, chapter 19:

“Cease talk of mercy and justice and the people will reclaim kindness and goodwill.”

This is not a moment, in other words, for abstract ethical theories or sophisticated moral calculations. Instead, we must cultivate a return to the ground of right action. That is, the empathic kindness and goodwill that is our birthright. Be kind. Greet others with an open heart. Those are simple commitments and yet they may be our strongest defense against mass violence and terror. Like water, to which the Tao is often compared, gentle pressure applied consistently over time wears down even the hardest stone.

May examples of kindness and goodwill multiply and may we be their midwives.

The Book of Records

by Madeleine Thien



I read this novel in one large gulp on the way back from Italy and it spoke so directly to my deepest questions, interests, and passions that I almost wonder if each person who reads it gets an entirely different text. The plot is deceptively simple: a young Chinese girl comes of age in exile with her father, with the help of three neighbors and the historical figures (Arendt, Spinoza, and Chinese poet Du Fu) whose stories they inhabit. Together they reflect on the nature of resistance and collaboration, space and time, and the meaning of home. Spare prose, magical realism, and intensely relevant topics make this a spectacular story.

The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World

by Iain McGilchrist

McGilchrist’s magnus opus and follow-up to his celebrated The Master and His Emissary. He extends his core thesis that western civilization has allowed left hemisphere thinking to dominate, privileging mechanism and abstraction, and ultimately cutting us off from the phenomenal world and its many wonders. With two volumes, McGilchrist has plenty of space to review the science as well as to opine more speculatively. Some truly great insights but likely this will only appeal to fans of his earlier work.

The Red Queen

by Martha Grimes

At 93, Grimes just published her 26th Richard Jury mystery novel. While the book itself is not very good, I would never miss a chance to hang with the fabulous cast of characters she has created. And the thin plot still supports the witty repartee and situational humor for which she is known. In anticipation of this release, I treated myself to a re-read of the second half of the whole series and am glad I did.

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