PACE: Alright, so let’s start out Mike, can you tell me about your background prior to the Political And Civic Engagement program?

MG: Okay, I’ve been at Indiana University since 1995. I came to the university to run the American Historical Review, which is the leading journal in my discipline. That was a kind of midway through my career. I started graduate school in 1973. I got my PhD in American History with a specialty in American Legal History in 1979. I taught at Wellesley College at Case Western Reserve University and again, since 1995, here at IU. In the latter two positions, I have been a professor of History and a professor of Law. So, I have been fortunate to teach students who are Undergraduates, Graduate students, and Law students. In all the positions I’ve had, I’ve also been directly involved in interdisciplinary work. So, at Case Western, I created and ran a Legal Studies program. I’ve also spent much of my career as an administrator. So, I was Chair of the History Department there [Case Western], here [IU] I’ve run a journal. I’ve been the director of the Center for Law, Society, and Culture that’s housed in the Mauer School of Law. Chair of the Criminal Justice Department. And, most importantly, a Director of PACE, the Political And Civic Engagement Program.

PACE: Super impressive.

MG: So that’s my general professional background. In addition to that, I’ve always felt that it is my responsibility to take my knowledge—what I would call my expertise, in an age where expertise is being challenged—into the larger public world. So, I’ve been engaged in a variety of policy initiatives. For example, I was part of an interdisciplinary group that devised guidelines for genetic testing in child custody cases. And, I have written Amicus Briefs—where called Friends of the Court Briefs—in a variety of issues, most notably those in challenges to bans on same-sex marriage that began with a brief written for the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and culminated in a brief written for the United States Supreme Court in which the court declared those bans unconstitutional. So, I’ve tried to take my understanding of the law and the place of the law in American society into the classroom, into the public sphere, and then I’ve written a variety of books on the history of law—particularly the history of families. I’ve written about marriages, and their use of abortion, and child custody, and a variety of things. At present—this particular present—I’m writing a book on the history of child protection. So, that’s the professional background and scholarly interest and civic engagement kinds of activities that I have been engaged with and that seem linked to this program.

PACE: If you had to choose one of your professional achievements, out of many, what one would you say, probably, makes you the most proud and why would you say that?

MG: I think that is a very difficult thing to answer, and so, I’m going to equivocate. And, I would say that as a professional historian, the most important success I’ve had is convincing those in my field, and some out of it, that law is important in other realms than simply the marketplace. And that we need to understand the history of law, also, in the experiences of families. As a member of the academy, as a contributor to the educational as well as the research mission of the university, all the universities I have been at, I think creating PACE is my most significant contribution. Every year that I see the graduates in this program, I feel like my little contribution has led to some incredible students being prepared for lives of engagement that I think will affect the future in ways that I can only imagine but I think are critical and important. And so, I see those two things as not unconnected, but they’re different ones and I can’t suggest which is more important, but they’re both very important to me. And, as I look back on my career, those are the two things that stand out to me as things I think I can claim some kind of achievement for, though, it takes a village for scholarship as well as program building.

PACE: It sounds like you have been fairly politically and civically minded or involved throughout your entire life, especially in your more academic career – did something kind of trigger that for you while you were in college or high school or prior to that?

MG: I mean, that’s a very difficult question, too. I think what I could say to that for both personal reasons that I don’t understand, but also for the kind of environment I grew up. My father was a litigator, a lawyer, who was very involved in civic life in Sacramento, California, where I grew up. My mother was as well, and there was a sense that that was important. I remember being interested in politics young. My first political experience was going with my father, knocking on doors in 1964 – I was 14 – campaigning as much against Barry Goldwater as for Lyndon Johnson. Then, one thing happened after another, I was involved in activities in high school – I led a student strike over the dress code. I ran the Campus Daily in college and participated in the Anti-war movement and on and on. And so, there has not been a time of my life where I haven’t been involved, which is why I find the students who come to PACE people that I can admire, and understand a bit, because I see a little bit of myself in most of them.

PACE: How did you come to start the PACE program? What was the impetus?

MG: I tend to think, as a historian, of change as not being caused by one thing, but multiple causes. And I tend to think of change being a product of forces that come down and forces that come up. And I think PACE is no different than that. So, PACE began to germinate after the 2008 presidential election, which excited the passions of millions of Americans of all sorts, but particularly young Americans, and particularly college students. And so, that excitement, I think, represented a force in the culture that was powerful, but hard to know what to do with. And, I say that because I think many of the people that felt that way felt that their education didn’t necessarily give them either the knowledge or skill to act on that new passion that they had. And while that is what I would call percolating through the society, including this campus, one of the major donors of the university looked at that same phenomenon, a man named Edward Hutton, who is the namesake of the Honors college here, and a graduate of the university who grew up in Bedford, Indiana, and felt that the university opened the world for him and has wanted, over the course of his life, to pay back the debt he thought he owed. He saw all of these college students excited, too, and thought that there should be a program to encourage that because he has been an engaged person his whole career while he has been a very successful businessman. So, he turned to the provost at that time and said I have some money, can you create a program? And, for reasons I can’t explain to you, the provost turned to me and I thought it was an intriguing idea. So, I met with Mr. Hutton and we talked, and he basically told me that I will give you – not me, but a program – the money if you can convince me it achieves the goals I want, which is to get more Indiana University students involved in what we now call American public life. So, I thought that was both worthwhile, I though it tapped my sense of students who were perfectly satisfied in many ways with their history or political science or anthropology majors but also wanted something more than that – more focused on political and civic issues. And so, I accepted the challenge, I started creating a program in 2009. We created it by having dual sets of conversations which I think capture these forces at work that came into play to create a program like that at that time. And so, one was I setup—I tried to gather students into what I guess political campaign and marketing people would call focus groups. And so, I met a whole bunch of different students five or ten at a time and to talk to them about what kind of program would they want? And explain to them some of my ideas and what that program might look like if they could create it themselves which, they could, because it didn’t exist. But the wherewithal for creating it did. And so, for that, that is where I got an even clearer sense of this – I don’t know if the word ‘hunger’ is too strong of a word – but certainly this sense of a feeling that there were possibilities in their education that weren’t being realized for students who wanted to be engaged in the full dimensions of that word. Simultaneously, Mr. Hutton, the provost, recruited former representative Lee Hamilton and so I had to make periodic presentations to them about what I was doing, why I was doing it, and why it might be legitimate and effective. And so, they were supportive, but they also are very experienced people and so they had questions – the students had questions – they had questions and in the cauldron of trying to think through what kind of a program would meet those students interests and convince people like Lee Hamilton that this is a contribution to American public life that Indiana University could make - came PACE.

PACE: Of all of that, what would you say was the toughest part?

MG: I think the toughest part was trying to think quite concretely about how you create a program that is rooted in the liberal arts but emphasizes skills as much as knowledge. The whole PACE mantra – Theory to Practice – is a statement that comes out of that fundamental tension. What the program did not – what the program should not do – as far as I was concerned and the increasing number of people involved in it were concerned was to be a replica of a public policy program in a professional school. And so, it had to be true to its liberal arts origins and yet be more – for lack of a better term, hands-on – than a conventional liberal arts degree in the humanities, social sciences, or even the kinds of degrees given in schools of education or, on this campus SPEA or whatever, because part of the rationale for the program that made it convincing to Lee Hamilton and Edward Hutton was my argument that it should be available to students throughout the university, not only students in the college. That students in the college may dominate the people in it, but that is should be available to everyone and that meant thinking through how a SPEA student could take this program and benefit from it and not simply replicate what they learned in those – in their studies there. The idea is that it was a certificate because it complimented their primary study in a major or a school. And, in working that out, both intellectually but then programmatically through courses and all of that was, I think, the biggest challenge. And so, one example of a consequence of that is that despite advice to the contrary, we made an internship a requirement of the program because we thought that it could only work if students took what they learned in the classroom out into the larger world –

PACE: – bringing theory to practice.

MG: Theory to practice. And that could only work if students had the choice to find an internship that aligned with their intellectual and professional interests, that we couldn’t create internships with organizations in Bloomington and guarantee them every fall, we will give you five students. That would undermine the logic of the program. Rather, we had to – each one – would be sui generis in some way and they didn’t have to be in Bloomington. They could be wherever, and we have had interns in places around this country and across the globe. And that’s another challenge - it seemed, in theory, that a program in political and civic engagement did not have to be grounded in the political and civic life of any individual country; it could be a larger thing. But to think about that concretely was impossible, to be global in that sense. So, it’s a program that decided to have an internship and focus on American public life with the understanding that that was an introduction to public life in other places. And with a sense that the curriculum had to be rigorous in the classroom but also had to take seriously the notion of experiential learning – learning through practice in the internship. That’s one of the reasons that the first year we developed the initial version of the issue forum, because it was another way to learn through experience; to begin to see how political and civic engagement to be different than some other ways of learning, could embrace something like democratic deliberation, the process was important as well as the subject. So, that was the biggest challenge. The other challenge was just getting it through the bureaucracy and in that case, the institution – I would say – was generally very supportive but part of the questions, the concerns raised, because a program – a certificate, like a degree program – had to be approved all the way up through the highest levels of the university. There was not a concern with “civic engagement” because that suggested participation with nonprofits. There was a concern with “political engagement” because that suggested a concern – an encounter – with American political life. Including things like working on political campaigns. This is a public institution should students be granted credit, I was asked by members of committees, for doing political acts. So that was an argument that had to be made that yes, they should because that’s the way you learn about American politics is to practice it. We are not training students to be one political persuasion or another, but we’re trying to train them to understand how the political process works. And how it intersects with, and is distinct from, civil society and thus, civic engagement. And so, making that argument that a public institution should do this, it was difficult. It was more difficult because most programs like PACE are not at Research I universities. They’re at different sorts of colleges and if they are at Research I universities, they’re primarily in schools of public policy. That is true at Princeton, Virginia, and Syracuse, and several other models that we looked at. So, making it a liberal arts program housed in the college, but available to students throughout the university, and creating a curriculum that allowed students to engage in the full array of American political life was the most difficult part of getting the program approved. In my general experience, the most difficult part of getting a program going is getting the money. The odd thing about this experience was that we had the money, we just had to get ‘it’ whatever ‘it’ was. And so, one of the other challenges was the kind of thing that you wouldn’t think about until you think about creating a new program - but you have to create a name. And so, that took a lot of work because you want a name that stands out but that is also meaningful. And so, we, as a former college newspaper editor, I really liked writing headlines. And so, I used those skills and Joelene Bergonzi who helped me do this and Lisa-Marie [Napoli] who joined early on, we all worked through this and we had various kinds of names, I must admit that I forget all the permutations and variations but the result was this name that I think serves the dual purpose of explaining what the program is and is also useable as an acronym – and you have to do that – so there are levels of difficulty, right? And so, creating a new program, you face all of those because there is no there there. I mean, one of the reasons I wanted to do it is that I like the challenge of doing something that has not been done. I do it in my research, I hope I do a little bit in my teaching, and I certainly have done it in my university service.

PACE: What was the approximate timeline from ‘here’s the money’ to ‘here’s the program started as PACE?’

MG: I think it took us about a year and a half to get it through the final approval. The program started, if I recall correctly—and as the historian, I should know dates—but I think it started in the Fall of 2009. And it started with a provisional approval because going all the way up to the State Board of Education, which has to approve any degree or credential program takes a while and so they allow you to start, so the first people were guinea pigs in a whole variety of ways. So, it started, I think, in the Fall of 2009 and so the Fall of 2019—so, this past Fall—was its ten- year anniversary – this year is its tenth anniversary.

PACE: How did you go about sourcing staff members, or professors to teach these classes—did you have specific qualities you were looking for? Or, did people just come to you after hearing this program was starting up?

MG: There are two answers to that question. The first is in getting staff we requited. So, Joelene was an advisor in Political Science, but she had done with professor Hershey in Political Science, she had worked on a program that was the kind of version of this and so Professor Hershey was incredibly generous in supporting the transformation of that program into PACE. And so, they both became enthusiastic supporters of the program. I had known Lisa-Marie for a while through the Community Justice and Mediation Center. So, we got to talking and it led to her becoming a staff member—first an instructor, then a staff member. So, there was that. Recruiting faculty has been a continuing challenge in the program and it’s a challenge because faculty members have a primary appointment in a department or a school and the way the university finances go—and I won’t go into great detail on it—but classroom enrollment means money flows to the department. One of the things that—just to get into the weeds for a minute— that we’ve done to make PACE viable in that kind of environment is that since we do not have a degree, its only a certificate, we don’t have full-time faculty – meaning people on a tenure track. We worked out an arrangement where credit hours go towards the instructor’s university home— their department or their school—not to PACE because PACE doesn’t collect credit hours. So, that allowed faculty members in starting with Rob Kunzman in the School of Ed to teach because his school did not lose credit hours for his class. They lost the credit hours that he would have gotten from the School of Ed. And so, we have tried to use that rationale and so we’ve slowly begun to get faculty members to teach courses in the program and it has been an expanding case. And every director has faced the recruitment challenge of trying to get tenure track faculty to teach because that’s one way to bring additional expertise into the program. The other thing we’ve been fortunate to do is to be able to hire what the university calls “non-tenure track” faculty like Lisa-Marie was at the beginning, like Carl Weinberg is now and so they have become some of the primary instructors of the program teaching more PACE courses individually than tenure track faculty who might teach a course or so. So, recruiting has been a challenge and it has only gotten more challenging over the years as many departments in the university, and in particular in the college, have faced declining enrollments, declining majors, declining minors. And so, that has made that more difficult. But, the program has been able to be in an attractive site for a variety of faculty members in different disciplines and different schools to teach students that they would not normally encounter. And so, that has been the biggest draw in trying to recruit faculty.

PACE: At the beginning, you obviously had this mission—this purpose—for developing the program. Over time, how have you seen—have you seen—that initial purpose change at all?

MG: I would say that when we started the program, we had an idea of what we wanted to do and an ideal of what the program should be. And what has happened over time is that those have been developed into more than ideas and more than an ideal. So, I think that through the years when I directed the program, through the years when Sandy Shapshay directed the program, through the start of Lisa-Marie’s directorship each of us have thought of that, of what I might call the mission of the program in complimentary and different ways, and we have tried to add on. I think the basic ideal of trying to give students a set of knowledge and skills that allows them to be not only effective members of their communities—active in American public and civic life—but to think of that as a lifelong commitment has gotten more – has been articulated much more clearly over the years in the curriculum, in the programing, in the understanding that we have of PACE. So, I would say for instance that when we started the program in 2009, the idea that PACE would be the lead in organizing a campus get-out-the-vote campaign was not on our radar. But it is perfectly compatible with the arguments we made about why a program needed to have students engage in American political life as well as American civic life. So, I see the program fulfilling over the years its initial idea as new people bring new ideas, new concerns, students as well as faculty. The way I’ve been talking about it talks about me and the faculty, but one of the things that I feel most – that’s one of the most important parts of the program is that this is a program that believes in student-centered learning and empowering students to help dictate, to a degree, the meaning and the content of PACE. And I think that goes back to that initial notion that the program was created both to address student interests and concerns and also a university commitment to that. And I think that’s part of that, too. And so, it has been that collaboration between members of the program who are students, member of the program who are faculty, and members of the program who have administrative jobs that I think has enriched it. So, I see it as, again, not setting a goal and meeting it, but having a core vision and different people using their skills and knowledge and interests to think about how that vision might be realized in different kinds of ways. And so, it seems to me that the image that as we talk that comes to mind is a flower opening up—it’s just expanding and there’s no reason there should be a limit to it. The limitations are resources, not ideas, not passion, not concern about how you enhance American public life in an educational program and in the work that the people in the program go on to do after they march through the Sample Gates.

PACE: How long were you director of PACE and what made you transition out of that role?

MG: I was director for, I think I would call it two full terms. I think they were three-year-terms and I did two of them. I was the first director, so I am the founding director, and so there’s that. The reason I left was that I believe, and I have believed throughout my career, that I have a very privileged job—I’m a university professor with tenure—and my fundamental job is to do research and writing. And that research—and teaching—and that research and teaching has always changed. I do different projects; I do different things. When I’ve run things, whether it’s a program or a journal or an organization, I’ve believe that we all have a limited number of ideas and we have a limited number of sorta levels of enthusiasm for it, you shouldn’t stay too long. You should do the best you can in what you are doing and then move out and let someone else come in because these programs are not personal, they’re part of an institution. And so, I decided that two terms was enough, that I had taken this from an idea into a functioning program and that it was time for another person to see what she or he could do with that. And that’s the way in which I have approached everything I’ve run – I’ve always, to use the political term, term-limited myself, because I think that that’s healthiest for a program and that there is always change in the people who are making major decisions because that allows for fresh perspectives and fresh viewpoints and I think one of the reasons that PACE has been so successful is that there has been a constant infusion of new ideas with students, the faculty, and also with the changing cast of directors. And so, I decided to leave not because I was dissatisfied with the program or whatever, but quite the contrary, that I thought I had perhaps given to it as much as I could, I continue to participate in the program, but I’ve thought that it’s always better to leave before you’re doing the same things over and over again and are not – and you lose the enthusiasm to innovate and change and I’ve never been in that position because I’ve always left when my passion was still strong, but I thought it was time to go and I have seen examples over the course of my career where people have not done that and they are not paths I would not follow.

PACE: That’s great advice for anybody to take!

MG: Well, you know, I mean it’s – one of the great privileges of my job is that I can stay a professor of history and law at Indiana University and do a variety of different things and its just a rare opportunity. Many people cannot switch around because they do not have the alternatives, but I do, and part of my work I have to keep teaching, I have to keep writing—but that all can change. So, I feel very privileged to have this kind of position and then to have an opportunity like PACE. Again, as I said at the start of our conversation, this is one of the – as I look back on my career which is now forty years – it’s one of the two most significant things I have been a part of.

PACE: You’re obviously still involved in the program, what would you say your role sorta is? Obviously, you teach the capstone class, do you have any other sorta, you know –

MG: I see my role as an active participant in the program’s planning and decision making and I offer advice as a faculty member to the program. I’m on a variety of boards at this university and other places and I think that’s one of the major parts of the kind of position I have. So, I see myself as a supporter of the program and a contributor to helping is address the issues that confront it and there always issues and there are always concerns and I just want to be supportive so I see it in that way as well as being a classroom teacher in the program.

PACE: Looking back on the past ten years, is there any events that you would consider to be the biggest success in the program? Is it yet to be had?

MG: I think the biggest achievement of the program is the way over the last several years, it has become a vital part of the university. When we first started, we had to explain what PACE was and no one had heard of it. And now, people recognize the name, students, staffers, advisors, faculty members, administrators. And so, it has found a role in this university in a variety of ways and that has meant that it is more than simply a undergraduate program to teach a particular subject, it has a larger vision and a larger mission than when we started. We hoped it might achieve that, but that was not guaranteed. And so, rising enrollments, creating auxiliary programs like the program for leadership – the leadership minor. These are ways in which I think the program, again, has blossomed and fulfilled its mission and I think that’s the main achievement and I see no reason why that will not continue; the limit is resources, not the vision of the program itself. I hope and I expect that more students will come to PACE, that more faculty will come to PACE, and that it will continue to be a dynamic program because the fundamental mission of the department – of the program – is as if not more vital today than it was in 2008 when the germ of this idea began. And so, I think that PACE has risen to that challenge, but the challenge continues, and it may, in fact, deepen over time. And so I expect that to happen and I expect that the only way that the program can do that is to continue to innovate, to continue to remain committed to a core mission but to change the means by which that mission is achieved.

PACE: If you had one piece of advice to give incoming PACE students, what would that be?

MG: I think the most important thing for a student, particularly in a program like this is to take intellectual risks, to try courses that they might not thought of, to be the person in a class who voices her or his view about a difficult topic, to take advantage of the experiential parts of the program and expand their willingness to engage. So, to me the most successful students are those who have opportunities and seize them even if they’re not always comfortable and even if they seem a little frightening. And, I can say in my own experience as a student and as the other things I’ve done, that I – there are very, very few times when I feel that taking a risk was a mistake and there are some times where I feel that not taking a risk that was the mistake. I urge risk taking first, and especially in a program like this that supports risk taking and supports students broadening out, trying new things, exploring new ideas. And so, if there is any advice, that would be the advice.

PACE: If you had one piece of advice for current PACE faculty and staff, what would that be?

MG: I think its actually the same thing, it’s just in a different way. I think that for all of us engaged in these kinds of activities, you can never be satisfied with what is you have to try and figure out what can be. And so, that’s why I would make a distinction between mission and execution. The mission can stay the same, but the execution should change. And so, there has to be constant growth to be satisfied with what is, is to start to wither and so that’s, I think, where risk comes in and challenges passion for the program and its potential.

PACE: And I would say that that same advice would go for future PACE faculty and staff?

MG: Of course, of course. It should be a recognizable but different program in ten years. And if it's not, then it has probably failed to realize what it might have been.