S3 EP 8 Discovering the Power of Audience-Centered Writing with Leonard Cassuto

S3 Ep8 Leonard Cassuto,
              Professor, Fordham University

Intro Guest Bio
Leonard Cassuto wears many hats.  He's a professor of American literature at Fordham University, a well-known voice of reform in the graduate school world, and--encompassing all of these--he's a writer.  He has written or edited ten books on subjects such as race and slavery, detective stories, and of course graduate education. As a scholar and journalist, Len has written about science, music, and even sports.  In more than a decade as a columnist on graduate education for The Chronicle of Higher Education ("The Graduate Adviser"), he has helped graduate schools think about how to change to meet the needs of changing students during exigent times.  Len's newest book, Academic Writing as if Readers Matter, takes in all of these pursuits.  It's a pithy and witty handbook filled with advice and examples from across the arts and sciences--and it's also a hortatory call for academic writing that will build community with different kinds of readers, to serve the public good. 

Transcript

Liza Holland [00:00:02]:
Welcome to education perspectives. I am your host, Liza Holland. This is a podcast that explores the role of education in our society from a variety of lenses. Education needs to evolve to meet the needs of today and the future. Solving such huge issues requires understanding. Join me as we begin to explore the many perspectives of education.

Liza Holland [00:00:28]:
Leonard Casuto wears many hats. He's a professor of American literature at Fordham University, a well known voice of reform in the graduate school world and encompassing all these, he's a writer. He has written or edited 10 books on subjects such as race and slavery, detective stories, and of course, graduate education. As a scholar and journalist, Len has written about science, music, and even sports. In more than a decade as a columnist on graduate education for the Chronicle of Higher Education, the graduate advisor, he has helped graduate schools think about how to change to meet the needs of changing students during these edgigent times. Len's newest book, Academic Writing as If Readers Matter, takes in all of these pursuits. It's a pithy and witty handbook filled with advice and examples from across the arts and sciences. And it's also a horitory call for academic writing that will build community with different kinds of readers to serve the public good.

Liza Holland [00:01:32]:
Well, Leonard Casuto, welcome to Education Perspectives.

Leonard Cassuto [00:01:36]:
Thanks for inviting me. I am delighted to be here.

Liza Holland [00:01:39]:
Well, we are delighted to have you. I'm gonna kick you off with our first question to every guest. From a 30,000 foot view, why do you think that we, as a society, should invest in education?

Leonard Cassuto [00:01:50]:
Well, you are. You're reminding me of when I jumped out of an airplane once. But let's let's get instead to to, to the education piece. The answer is on one level simple. We need to invest in education because it's a public good. And that if that needs saying, it's only because if you sit where I do on the educational spectrum that is in the college graduate school space, what you've been witnessing as I have been witnessing for the last one and a half generations and more is a shift from viewing viewing education as a public good to viewing it as a personal investment. The idea of going to college, and I think any, anybody who's a parent who is thinking of sending a kid to college these days is very familiar with this idea. How am I going to use this? What kind of job am I going to get? And there's nothing wrong with those questions.

Leonard Cassuto [00:02:48]:
It's just that those questions at one point did and and now badly need to be accompanied by the idea that education is not just for the person who's receiving it because we're all part of something that's bigger than ourselves. It's called society And society benefits from an educated population. And, as as citizens together, we need to understand and appreciate that and do what we need to do. That is embrace our responsibility to make higher education into the public good that it's designed to be so that we, as the public, can benefit from it.

Liza Holland [00:03:29]:
That is a marvelous answer. I really like that nuance between what it's good for society versus good for the individual. That is neat. Okay. So, well, tell us a little bit more about your own education journey. What drew you to education?

Leonard Cassuto [00:03:44]:
Well, I think for me, it was the idea. So I'm an English professor, as as you know. And, I've ventured far and wide from that base in literary studies. But if I go back to the time when I wasn't thinking that that would happen, I just thought what a neat job it would be to read books and talk about them for a living. And I like to write. And so I get to write about them. And writing about them is a different way of talking about them. Thio enter into communication with people about books that I think are important, ideas that I think are important.

Leonard Cassuto [00:04:21]:
I mean, to me, that didn't feel like a job. That felt like something that I'd want to do for free. And the fact that it existed as a job that I could get paid for turned my head away from the other professions that I had been considering and, pushed toward it, got lucky, got into it, and haven't looked back.

Leonard Cassuto [00:04:41]:
You know, you are lucky. So many people, they there's a lot of talk these days about find your passion and that work won't feel like work. And to have that that early is absolutely awesome. I'm in my fifties and just discovered mine. So

Leonard Cassuto [00:04:54]:
You've got plenty of time to play in the play in the pool.

Leonard Cassuto [00:04:57]:
Exactly. A lot lot of good years left in me. I love it.

Leonard Cassuto [00:05:00]:
The water's great.

Liza Holland [00:05:02]:
Thank you. So, your latest book is kind of looking at writing as communication, especially as and including in higher education as a public good and how those 2 connect. I am fascinated to hear about your premise. Tell us a little bit about that that connection between those two things.

Leonard Cassuto [00:05:23]:
So you started by talking about writing as communication. And that is the basic premise here, that, that writing is an act of communication. And so it needs to be communication. And so what do we mean by communication? Well, let's get simple here. Communication is when somebody, a writer in this case, is putting something out there and somebody else, an audience, is receiving it. That something happens, that there's a circuit, that there's a connection that's being created. If the writer puts something out there and for whatever reason, the audience doesn't receive it, the writer did something. But communication isn't among the things that the writer did.

Leonard Cassuto [00:06:09]:
So I started writing this book because, like many academics, I was conscious of the idea that there's a lot of academic writing that either doesn't communicate or communicates only as a result of the greatest effort and difficulty by the audience. And that seemed to me to be an aggregation of responsibility on the part of the writer. Responsibility is one of my keywords. I mean, you've heard me use it already and probably wind up using it again in my neck of the neck of the educational woods. That is the college and grad school space. Academic freedom is something that you hear a lot. It's a it's a phrase that is very important in American academia, and it should be because it's descriptive of the, space that's necessary to do the kind of creativity that makes education and learning worthwhile. However, I have not yet encountered a freedom that's worth having that didn't come with a responsibility.

Leonard Cassuto [00:07:12]:
And academic responsibility is a phrase I hear a lot less. Now, writing to communicate, it seems to me, is a fundamental part of academic responsibility. If society is supporting teachers and now I'm not just talking about college teachers, but teachers at any level, if society is supporting teachers to do something for all of us, then the effort making that responsible effort to do that thing, to connect, to communicate is a fundamental part of our responsibility. And so I guess I did this book centers the search for that responsibility in the writing space.

Liza Holland [00:07:55]:
Well, I like that a lot, and it was interesting. I, my husband is a PhD. He's actually a DVN PhD, so did a lot in the academic space there. And I quickly learned to read at a a scientific level as far as, you know, the the articles that he was reading and whatnot. And I realized, to some extent, if you don't have quite a background, you would never be able to understand what those articles were saying. And so, actually, one of his missions moving in was to try to be able to translate that, you know, high science, eduSpeak to more of a common language that could be used in practical application. Do you see that happening in the higher education space as far as maybe, yes, you have your scientific papers, but maybe reaching to different audiences in, say, a blog or some other writing communication?

Leonard Cassuto [00:08:52]:
Certainly, some academics do this. But you're you're getting to an important distinction that we all need to make here that we any writer who is engaging in the, in in the process of writing is asking themselves, okay, who is the largest possible audience for this piece? And it isn't necessarily going to be the person who, let's say, goes to work at an advertising firm and comes home to read The New Yorker at night and, just enjoy themselves as some literature, maybe watch TV. That's the, part of the mythical general public. Let's say now, not everything that every writer does needs to be for the general public. If I am writing about coal production in Bolivia, I have no reason to believe that the general public or that a wider public than, people who study Bolivia or people who study coal are going to be interested. And that's okay because that information is valuable to the audiences that I'm writing it for. So I appreciate and value very much the work that your husband is doing to translate work to wider audiences. But he had to decide in the first place that that work is saying something that the wider audience may want and need to hear.

Leonard Cassuto [00:10:18]:
So something that that, that I've been saying a lot and plan to be saying a lot more now that this book is in the world is that writers, don't need to all reach the person who is reading The New York Times. Depends on what they're writing about. But all writers have a responsibility to reach the widest possible audience for the work that they're doing. And it's not likely to be the the New York Times. It's not likely to be the same audience that Stephen King has when he when he writes a novel. But if a writer writes outward with the idea that I want to reach the people who will be interested in can benefit by what I have to say, then that writer is going to write better because there will be more attention to communicating to the to a range of people who need to hear what they have to say. A writer who is instead deep in their own mine shaft, where there are only a small number of niche sub specialists in there with them. If that writer does is writing only to those, those few people who are next next them with picks and shovels, mining that particular vein, then that's not necessarily going to result in piece of writing that does all of the work it can do.

Leonard Cassuto [00:11:45]:
That can be as much of a, can be a public good where I'm construing it's public as being it's everybody it can usefully benefit. So that's, I think, an important distinction because the goal of academic writing isn't for everybody to reach everybody else. The goal is for writers who are writing seriously about something to reach the people who are going to care about it and who can benefit from it.

Leonard Cassuto [00:12:17]:
And where their research may be able to or academic study or whatever it happens to be can benefit from it as well. I really like that. I do a lot of communications consulting in my business. And the number of times that I've started out with a client and they say, we need to communicate more. And I'm like, that's great. Tell me why. Why do you need to communicate? And they just are dumbfounded. What do you mean what we that's what we're supposed to do? And I'm like, okay.

Liza Holland [00:12:44]:
So who do you wanna communicate with? How many different audiences do you have? What are they listening for? I had a a wonderful speaker, Zig Ziglar, talk about, that everybody's tuned in to the same radio station, WIIFM. What's in it for me?

Leonard Cassuto [00:13:01]:
That's that's good. I'll steal that.

Liza Holland [00:13:03]:
And I I use it all the time because it really is true. Because, you know, are you you know, I do a lot of work. Are you is your audience your funders? Is your audience your clients? Is your audience, you know, people who are potential volunteers? And every one of those audiences are gonna benefit from a different perspective on the topic that you are presenting. So I love that that you're doing that in the graduate space.

Leonard Cassuto [00:13:30]:
And let's also consider the idea that we not only who is my audience, but how do they behave? That is, how does this audience behave when they are reading, when they're seeking information? This is something that I get into in the book, and I think it's a very important part of the book and hence chapter 1. But you want to think about how is my reader behaving? And you're describing readers who are reading for work, who are reading for use. And that's a lot of us a lot of the time. And consequently, a lot of us who are writing a lot of the time are writing for readers who are working when they read us. Now, that's there's nothing disgraceful about that. In fact, there's, there's something honourable about it that's it's contributing to the productive world. But if you're a writer and you're writing to somebody to an audience who is reading for work as opposed to purely for entertainment, then we need to think about what the habits are of a reader who is reading for work. When readers read for work, they are looking to extract information.

Leonard Cassuto [00:14:38]:
Now we could say that they're in the extraction industry then. But the metaphor that I prefer to use and which I use in the book because I'm trying to have some fun and I'm trying to write, I'm trying to entertain too, is, I'm comparing the reader to a blue whale. What blue whales are doing when that is when readers who are reading for work, what they're doing is, the same thing that a blue whale is doing. Blue whales are baleen whales, which is to say they have, a curtain of baleen in their mouths, which acts as a sieve or a strainer. And a baleen whale takes a giant gulp of water and then forces the water through the baleen, through the strainer, which traps the food. So the water the water goes out and the food stays behind, which the whale then swallows for a blue whale. That food is krill small, small marine organisms and a blue whale will go through the water, taking giant gulp after giant gulp of water and forcing the water out and swallowing the krill. And the way that whale is going to eat literally tonnes of food every day.

Leonard Cassuto [00:15:46]:
And that that's how a reader who is reading for use reads. We plow through a lot of information and we're looking for the stuff we can use so that we can capture and save it. Now the, I'm being half joking, but I'm also being serious because that is the process that working reader engages in. And if I'm going to write for that reader, then I need to keep that behaviour in mind and think, how can I best serve that behaviour? How can I write in a way that's going to help a reader who is reading for work? And it's not that you need to be radically different, but you need to think, well, you know, for example, I should front load or at least preview my main ideas so that that working reader understands what's going to come so that they can know where they need to bear down, what part of my work they may want to read most closely and so forth. So that kind of consciousness is a consciousness that if writers model it for themselves and if their teachers model it for others, then you you create readers who are more intent on their audience, more intent on communicating, more intent on creating the connection with a reader who has needs. How do we meet those needs? There's there's a way that writing is as simple as that. Although if it were that simple, then we would be more we need fewer teachers of it and everyone would have doing it because, in fact, it's a series of judgment calls. It's a series of judgment calls that are honed by experience.

Leonard Cassuto [00:17:22]:
And part of our job as teachers is to provide that experience under experienced supervision.

Liza Holland [00:17:29]:
You just make me think. I love this. Tell me as far as yeah. I know. I'm just like, okay. The hamster wheel is now turning and, spinning like crazy because I love the the behavior of the audience and really what they're looking for in that sort of of piece. Those were great, visuals, by the way, with the whale. Thank you.

Leonard Cassuto [00:17:49]:
It's a there's a picture of a whale in the book.

Liza Holland [00:17:52]:
Perfect. I know. I haven't, our this interview came up kind of quick, and I haven't had a chance to read the book yet. But now I'm definitely I'm hooked. I am hooked.

Leonard Cassuto [00:18:01]:
It's a dandy stocking stuff.

Liza Holland [00:18:03]:
Oh, I can imagine. I can imagine. That sounds great. We I I've put a link in the show notes so all of our listeners can go out and and, get gift that for for Christmas.

Leonard Cassuto [00:18:13]:
Buy it for the writer in your life.

Liza Holland [00:18:16]:
So some of these ideas are a little revolutionary for what has been the standard in the status quo in academic writing, probably not so much in the English department as it has been in the science department. But tell me a little bit about what you think needs to change in the graduate school world.

Leonard Cassuto [00:18:37]:
Yeah. So okay. The I'm gonna tie I'm gonna tell a big story, and I'm gonna tie everything together. So so bear with me here. The first thing I'm gonna say is that the importance of telling stories is something that I get into in the book that writers are storytellers because human beings are storytellers. Stories are how we communicate with each other. And so let me tell you one higher education in this country. That is my business is guided from above.

Leonard Cassuto [00:19:02]:
That is what happens in the graduate school sector affects what happens in the undergraduate sector. And it also affects what happens in the K 12 secondtor because graduate schools are training all of the people who work in all of those spaces. So although the graduate schools the top of the pyramid and, we give relatively few PhDs in this country each year, about about 50,000 doctorates are awarded each year in the United States, which sounds like a lot until you compare it to the millions of people who get B. A s. But the influence of those doctorates is outsized because it trickles down through the whole system. So, okay, so let's start with that fact. And now we'll go to go to another one. Graduate school is a faculty centered enterprise, which is to say it's not about the student.

Leonard Cassuto [00:19:52]:
It's about it's about the faculty. And if you say, okay, it's school. I mean, what do you mean? Schools about the students? Well, not exactly. No. If you're a scientist, if you're if you're a lab scientist and you are, if you're entering graduate school to become 1, you're going to be writing your PhD dissertation about a subject that your advisor is already working on, which your advisor got grant funding to pursue. And you're going to work on a subset of your advisors work. You can choose which lab to go into, but whatever lab you go into, you're going to be doing the work of the of the person who's running that lab, who is your advisor. So your work is centered around your advisors work.

Leonard Cassuto [00:20:36]:
If you are a graduate student in the humanities as I was, then, you will take seminars that, in my experience and I'm sure that, that readers who have been through this will nod with recognition at what I'm about to say. You'll take you'll take seminars that have an invisible subtitle to them. You know, the, the title will be whatever it is that you're doing in the seminar and the sub and the invisible subtitle is my next book or my last book, because ultimately the, the faculty member is pursuing their own research and, the student is going to learn how to do stuff by working on the, matters of the faculty members concern. So in this sense, so graduate, what I'm suggesting then is graduate schools are fundamentally faculty centred enterprise. And there is a way that that's, simply the way it's been built. And so we shouldn't necessarily look to blow it up. However, when you, you asked me what, what is, what does graduate school need? Something that I have been spending quite a bit of time on, the, the direction that my career has taken researching and, also opining in, in the graduate school space. I've been writing a regular newspaper column for The Chronicle of Higher Education about graduate school.

Leonard Cassuto [00:21:57]:
And one of the refrains that I have been engaged in repeating over the last, you know, 13, 14, 15 years is that graduate school needs to be more student centered. That is, if graduate school is going to become a sustain, a sustainable enterprise in today's times, I'm, you know, I'm not sure that the faculty centered model was ever optimal, but it worked for a long time. But where we are now, I think graduate school badly needs to be more student centred. And it also needs to be more public facing. It's an insular enterprise where we're where graduate school is is doing its work for people who are already in the space. And the trickle the trickle outside is almost incidental. Well, I think we need to be paying more attention to that. And there's a way that that is contiguous with the idea of student centredness.

Leonard Cassuto [00:22:50]:
Let's think about what the students need here and how we can make the graduate school enterprise answer those needs. Now, as I'm using terms that I've already been using and talking to you about writing. And that's because this book that I just wrote about writing and it's called Academic Writing as if Readers Matter because readers do matter. And there is a contiguity between the reform work that I've been doing in the graduate school space to try to make graduate school more student centred and more outward outward looking in its perspective. There's a there's a direct link between that and the idea of writers becoming more conscious of their audiences. And then that isn't just because graduate students and their teachers are also writers. It's because all writing benefits from this, that an academic writing, the phrase in the title of the book. When I say academic writing, I don't just mean the writing that goes on in graduate school or college or in that setting.

Leonard Cassuto [00:23:55]:
I mean, people who are writing seriously about something so that somebody else might be able to grasp it and learn from it. And all academic writers, I think, benefit from that kind of centeredness on the audience. It's an act of generosity, yes, but it's an act of of necessary generosity because what I think it really is is an act of sociability. And we are in society. We're in it together. So any writer who is writing about something serious for an audience is not just working for themselves. They're part of a larger enterprise. We're all in this together.

Leonard Cassuto [00:24:32]:
This is a point that I stress in this book and that by reforming the academic writing enterprise, we are doing our part to reform society, reform education and help society. So in this sense, I'm a communitarian.

Liza Holland [00:24:48]:
I think that's incredibly important. You know, and society in general takes needs to take more of the responsibility back for educating our students all the way up, you know, from birth to gray hair. Right? Because with the pace of change that we are seeing in our society today, you we have to foster lifelong learners. And the academics have dedicated so much time that they are the experts in the field. So being able to share the insights that they that they come out with with a more general audience, I think, really has value, especially in this day and age.

Leonard Cassuto [00:25:23]:
We need to educate each other. And, experts are everywhere. I think academia is certainly in the business of training and creating experts, producing expertise as well as the people who hold it. The however, expertise is everywhere. And I think if you're older than a certain age as I am and you need to accomplish something technologically, you're probably going to turn to an expert who's considerably younger than you are. And that person may have acquired their expertise outside of a classroom, But the need to communicate that expertise in a way that it can then be further communicated is the same. It's a social need. It's a public need.

Leonard Cassuto [00:26:04]:
And so I don't want to suggest that this book that I wrote is only for people who are teaching college. It's not the, as as I've been been stressing during our conversation, the the ideas that underlie the advice about how to write well are ideas that we're all invested in together And we all have some part in doing to want to one extent to to one one or another extent.

Liza Holland [00:26:34]:
I'm curious because you bring up technology. We in the writing fields had a, a real bombshell that landed last year in technology like ChatGPT. How do you feel that ChatGPT should have a role in writing today or moving forward?

Leonard Cassuto [00:26:50]:
Well, we're we're at the beginning of this one, of course. And so, the, preface this by saying that anything that, futurists like the 2 of us were putting on our futurists hat here, we're being necessarily speculative. But let's take a long view. All the work that I do in higher education is predicated on the idea that if we understand how we got to this place, we can do a better job of taking the next steps forward from this place. So chat gpt is a technology. It's a tool. It's an important and powerful tool. And it's it's new, exciting and interesting and also a little bit scary.

Leonard Cassuto [00:27:33]:
But, let's go back. Go, you know, a few 1000 years to before, human beings learn to write, we passed our stories. And again, I'm going to stress the importance of stories as units of communication. We passed our stories from person to person through or through an oral tradition. And when the first story started getting written down, you can see in their contours the signs of how they were told first by one person then to another. And, scholars study the orality of those of the, of those early stories. So, so writing was a pretty significant technology. It fixed those stories in place instead of being told that each person adding their own little bit to it.

Leonard Cassuto [00:28:19]:
Now suddenly the story has a, has this particular form and it could be passed from place to place in that exact form by having somebody literally copy it down. So the first books were copied by scribes and they were precious items for that reason. Now in that period and now we're in the in the kind of in the Middle Ages and, during the Middle Ages, the idea of what it meant to be brilliant, what it meant to be smart, what it meant to be, to be a genius was very closely tied to having a prodigious memory. And we can understand that because books were super precious items. Most people couldn't own them. So if you had a great memory, you were carrying a library around in your head, which was the only place to carry it. And so that social values would then privilege having a great memory and reward it as something that is where you're really smart. Well, that's completely logical.

Leonard Cassuto [00:29:21]:
Now if we compare that to now, I'm going to jump ahead for a minute that now everybody has a memory that they can carry around in their pockets. And, if you're, if you're listening to this, you can imagine me brandishing my phone. So we have this very powerful exosomatic that is outside the body memory that, anybody who learns a little bit can access. So now, having an, photographic memory is more of a party trick than it is a sign of genius. And certainly we respect the, we respect the skill, but it's not necessary to be called smart, to be able to remember everything. Instead, we're interested in what can you do with it now? And then go back to go back for a moment to the past that the invention of movable type that is the printing press being able to print books instead of copying them. That was a revolutionary technology. And we can imagine that gradually overturning the idea of what it meant to be smart.

Leonard Cassuto [00:30:25]:
And that was a pretty big idea, right? But we look back at it and we were kind of we're sort of ho about this because it's part of our past. It's led it's led up to where we are, to who we are. But that's what human beings do. We devise new technologies and we figure out how to use them so that we can do our work. I have no doubt that we're going to do that with the language learning models that like, like chat GPT and other other forms of of AI, generative AI And I and, human beings are clever. It's going to be very interesting to see how we work together to make this tool into part of a part of that. You know, another arrow in our quiver. I think we're starting to see that now.

Leonard Cassuto [00:31:13]:
And I think that the the the message to teachers is don't try to ban this. Try to use it so that we can all, as teachers and learners, including writers and and, and readers, get better at what we do.

Liza Holland [00:31:30]:
I agree with you wholeheartedly. I just I've this feeling about, oh, we just need to ban everything is such an ostrich move to me, you know, putting your head in the sand because you know, I've also seen other people say, this is not gonna replace writers, but it may replace writers that don't use chat gpt and tools like that.

Leonard Cassuto [00:31:52]:
Yeah. And then it's taking over certain tasks. But it's not going to replace writers. Writers who are engaged only in a certain task, some of them have already been replaced. But people doing certain kinds of work get replaced every day.

Liza Holland [00:32:09]:
Exactly. And it does happen.

Leonard Cassuto [00:32:12]:
This is this is an I don't I don't mean to be callous or cruel here. It's instead that we're we're a society and we and it's our job to find good work for everybody in it. So I'm not suggesting that those people should just go to the side of the road and starve. But, but rather that as a society, as we figure out new and different ways to do things, then we need to be able to use the skills that are in our population. People who set type that is typesetters. There's the when, when digital, when digital printing came along, there was no more use for that skill anymore. And as a society, we have an obligation to make retraining opportunities available to people whose work is made redundant. So I don't I want to suggest we need to be concerned about those individual people.

Leonard Cassuto [00:33:03]:
But it doesn't mean that we need to keep setting hot type. We have a job when we have a tool that can do the work faster and better. So that's, that's part of what tool using human beings do and what social human beings ought to do. We those things work together.

Liza Holland [00:33:25]:
Absolutely. So getting back a little bit to, you know, kind of your reform in graduate school, education and academia tends to be a a very big boat to turn. Right? But on the other hand, you change things couple of degrees, and and all of a sudden, you're on a different course. What have you found to be the biggest challenges in promoting this more student centered model of graduate education?

Leonard Cassuto [00:33:51]:
Well, it's it was once compared to me following the metaphor you used as turning a dinosaur around in a small room and the challenge. So academia is conservative with a small c. That is to say, I don't mean politically conservative. I mean, conservative as in resistant to change. And there's a way that that's good because we don't want our venerable institutions to blow about with the winds of every fad. And, I will pause for a moment to point out that academia is, the, one of really, very few, if not, if not the only American institution that has ties to the Middle Ages. So we're talking about something that's that's really venerable and has, an understandable attachment to tradition. But graduate education is conservative even by academic standards.

Leonard Cassuto [00:34:49]:
And I'm going to say that that's too conservative. There is a tendency to resist change to a point where there's a refusal to look at why we need it. And the reason why we need it is foremost for students that if graduate school is going to serve the needs of students, we need to understand what those needs are. And if it doesn't serve the needs of students, then exactly what reason do we have to expect that students are going to want to consume it? So that is the basis of my work. And the resistance, the kind of attachment to tradition and resistance to change is the biggest obstacle that I encounter. And I encounter it in many forms. It keeps me busy and, but it also keeps me interested.

Liza Holland [00:35:37]:
I like that so much. It's a long term game, isn't it? But, but, yeah, that that return on investment has become much more of a consideration when you're looking at higher education in the days and times that we live now. So in your efforts to make this change, what would you like decision makers to know? And you can define decision makers.

Leonard Cassuto [00:35:58]:
Well, there are decision makers are everywhere through the pyramid. That is an individual teacher is a decision maker. And, so is a principal, so is a professor, so is a dean, so is a provost, and so is a commissioner of schools. So we have decision makers everywhere. And, I guess if I if I'm talking directly to them, I'm not giving specific instructions because as a, as somebody who is a trained expert, I respect expertise in other people's when it's when it's different from my own. That is, I don't pretend to know how to reform the k through 12 system. But I do know that, for example, the k through 12 system would benefit from increased ties with the college and grad school system, which is a mutual responsibility, not one that is that rests entirely with K12. It has often been said by me that the it's hard to find a business that is more indifferent to its main supplier than college teaching.

Leonard Cassuto [00:37:08]:
So I think that we we all need to attend to the unity of purpose that we have, that, that K1213 to 16 and beyond are part of the same enterprise. And so that's that's something that I really want to encourage everybody, all the stakeholders in these enterprises to see. And also, and this is now going to the message of this, this book that I just finished, that we can have a lot of fun if we do our work with an idea of who we're doing it for. That writers are going to be not only better writers if they think about the person at the other end or the people at the other end who are reading it. But it's also possible to have more fun with it. I had a lot of fun writing this book I just finished because I was thinking about who I might entertain or even amuse while I was writing it. At the same time that I was trying to instruct, persuade, do all the things that serious writers do. And I think not only is the book better, better for it, but I had a good time and I think we can all have a good time.

Leonard Cassuto [00:38:20]:
We can all enjoy our work more. If we think about the social ties that bring us together as educators and also as people who are learning while we're doing it.

Liza Holland [00:38:33]:
Well, that is a great a great thought process to end our conversation with today. I think I could probably talk to you all day long. So thank you so much for taking the time and being a part of Education Perspectives.

Leonard Cassuto [00:38:46]:
I appreciate your having me. And, and yes, the I think, we are birds of a feather. Let us fly together.

Liza Holland [00:38:53]:
I love that. Be curious all.

Liza Holland [00:38:57]:
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