Tomás Jiménez: How do we build thriving, cohesive communities in a world defined by the movement of people? This conversation explores what pluralism looks like in practice, at the city level, in local institutions, and in this political moment, and what the builder framework demands of civic leaders, universities, researchers, and communities alike. Hi, everyone. This is One Question, a podcast brought to you by Stanford University's Institute for Advancing Just Societies to explore big questions about what it takes for us to live together in a world where diversity is a fact of life. My name is Tomás Jiménez, and I'm the faculty director of IAJS, which drives solutions-focused research and partnerships for racial and ethnic justice. Today, we're joined by Eboo Patel. a civic leader, speaker, and author who advances the notion that diversity is a treasure and cooperation across our differences is the key to everyone's thriving. He's also the founder and president of Interfaith America. Thank you for being here, Eboo.
Eboo Patel: Great to be with you Tomás, thank you for having me.
Tomás Jiménez: It's great to have you. So we have a guiding question for today. And this is a question that kind of hangs over the whole conversation. How do we build thriving cohesive communities in a world that is defined by constant movement of people that precipitates the diversity and what you would call pluralism that we interact with in our everyday lives? But I want to start with your book. need to build field notes for a diverse democracy. And I want to start there because in many ways ⁓ it's where the Institute started. I don't know that I've ever told you this, but when Brian Lowery, who's a faculty colleague in the Graduate School of Business and one of the founding co-directors of the Institute,
Eboo Patel: And we were undergrads together at the of Illinois. ⁓
Tomás Jiménez: That's right, that's right. I remember you guys talking about that. know, fellow Illini, ⁓ you know, we were ⁓ leading a committee of faculty to design the Institute. When we decided we want to have an Institute that dealt with issues of race, ethnicity, caste, tribe, nation, we had to figure out what it was going to be all about. And I started reading a number of books that ⁓ were not necessarily about how you put together an institute organization, but kind of frameworks for thinking about questions of diversity and democracy. And I came across your book and it was a real spark. And so the- Yeah, no, thank you for writing it. And the builder metaphor is one that I've used a lot and give you full credit and borrow from your book to describe what we try to do in the Institute, which is really advanced solutions focused research.
Eboo Patel: Thank you.
Tomás Jiménez: Now I've had the benefit of reading your book, but for people who haven't read it, I wonder if we can start there and you can tell us a little bit about the framework.
Eboo Patel: So my first job out of college is ⁓ at ⁓ an alternative school for young people who had dropped out or been kicked out of high school. They were largely Puerto Ricans, ⁓ Mexican-Americans, African-Americans on the near northwest side of Chicago. And they would come to this alternative school for six months and then they would take the GED exam. I was all of 20 years old. ⁓ I had no experience in this field whatsoever. I was just a hair on fire person who was a critic of the social world, particularly the education system as it was, and I wanted to be involved somehow. That's how I wind up in this job. So there are four teachers at the school, there's 40 students. So the first day of school, every teacher kind of introduces him or herself and kind of gives three to five minutes of educational theory, right? So I stayed up and I do my Freirian thing. I talk about the banking system of education. I talk about how ⁓ they have been subject to a school system that has oppressed them and treated them as subjects rather than agents. You you can imagine kind of the whole progressive educator thing from the mid 1990s. So I get done with this and I'm very proud of myself. Okay. Very proud of myself for giving this speech. And this student comes up to me, his name was Angel Perez. I still remember his name and I remember this moment as if it was yesterday. He says to me, Mr. Patel, thank you so much for your speech. I can see you're a teacher who really cares. He says, listen, this is my third time in this program and it's my third time taking the GED. And if you don't pass on the third time, you can't take it again. And I just had a son. And if I get my GED, I make a dollar more an hour at Cub Foods. So I'm just asking you, can you help me get my GED? And I realized I had no idea how to do that. I had no idea. I had no idea how to be a teacher. Like, I didn't know how to help him learn how to read better or do math better or do social studies better. I was deeply schooled in critical theories about education. And I kind of knew that I didn't know how to teach. And so I was smoking mirrors. I was substituted. What I knew how to do, which was to critique for what I should have known how to do, which is to get him a GED. Now story ends well. He passes like literally gets the minimum score to pass, but that was a real moment for me. Right. And in most, in the vast majority of our professions, if you work at a nonprofit organization, the chances are you're being paid to help a kid get the equivalent of a GED. You're being paid to help a homeless person find housing. You're being paid to help an addict ⁓ go into recovery. And I, that is a whole different set of skills than critiquing or dismantling systems. And so it's like a real question. Are you able to do what you were supposed to do? Or is what you are best at telling other people what they're doing wrong? Small number of people in our society who get paid to tell other people what they're doing wrong. I think that there should be people paid in a society to critique. I think that that's important. But you cannot have a hundred critics for every builder. ⁓ ⁓ and our social change ecosystem has gotten way out of whack. And I know this in part because of how I was nurtured.
Tomás Jiménez: Say more about that. You said that the social change ecosystem has gotten out of whack. In what ways has it gotten out of whack?
Eboo Patel: Over the last 15 years, we have had a lot more arsonists than architects. The bathwater in the ecosystem of ⁓ center-left institutions, is where I, which is what I am in, which is the institution that I started. And I think it's a very important ecosystem. would say like it's Stanford in the near times are part of the center-left civic institution ecosystem. Right. I think we have let the bathwater get dirty. and it has empowered a set of people who went after the babies. And I think a society relies on its center-left civic institutions. Here's what I by center-left. I describe my own organization, which I found it this way. There are, if you are gay married, you're going to be very comfortable here. People are comfortably gay married here. And we also have Mormons and Evangelicals who might have a different approach to same-sex marriage. They get to be who they are. They are not ⁓ hounded or harassed here. But this is a center-left place where people are comfortably gay married. My main point is I think our society relies on these places. And I think that over the past 15 years, that ecosystem has taken on a critic mindset rather than a builder mindset.
Tomás Jiménez: What would you say to somebody who said that, you know, in social change movements, people play lots of different roles. a role to be played ⁓ among people who raise consciousness, who raise awareness. And then there are people who need to be the kind of builders and architects. If you want to like, take the builder metaphor, you know, you can walk into a place and say, I don't like the way this is designed, needs to be designed, it's not working for me. But I might not be the person to tear it down and the person to put in a new electrical and and plumbing, cetera. Somebody else should do that. But I can tell you, I don't like the house I'm living in and it's not working for me and it's destroying me. So how would you, you like me, I love to think in metaphors and talk in metaphors. So this may be a very poetic podcast, but how would you think about that?
Eboo Patel: In the last 15 years, to take your house metaphor, you had a hundred guys with sledgehammers, destroying things and they got to places in your house that you didn't want them to get to. Yeah. Right. And there were, and you're like, but I called a plumber, but I called an electrician, but I called somebody who was going to put up drywall and there just weren't that many of those folks or they were ⁓ shouted down by the people with sledgehammers. If we don't have a theory of what went wrong in order to rebuild the institutions that we love, then the people who hate the institutions will have a theory of what went wrong and they will use it as an opportunity to destroy. So unlike a hundred percent in the like Jill Lepore camp when she was like what has happened, you know, she said this the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education. She said, I feel a deep sense of guilt for not saying more when our campuses were caught in a choke hold and when we couldn't teach the way that we felt was required to educate people. She's like, I couldn't teach the way that I felt like I needed to teach. And I didn't say anything because I was scared. And there's lots and lots of people now who are saying that. I think this is an opportunity for those of us in a camp that believes in some version of social change, which includes more people, which lifts more people up, which encourages cooperation across differences to say the last 15 years was really terrible. ⁓ Because the social change ecosystem was profoundly imbalanced. It's not that critics are not needed. It's not that controlled burns sometimes are not useful, but that is not what happened. What happened was, everybody thought that that they were Nat Turner when what they really were was Ropes Pierre.
Tomás Jiménez: So if that's the critique of the critiquers, ⁓ tell us more about the kind of builder framework. What does that look like in practice? If you're, and you have been, I know, in front of a group of college students, even faculty, like what do you tell them about ⁓ the difference between what you see as having happened in the last 15 years and what ought to be?
Eboo Patel: So, I mean, part of what I want to repeat is like, I was this guy and actually like what I am sitting in right now, the organization that I've built came out of one of those moments. It actually happened at Stanford. So let me tell you the story. It was in June of 1998. I'm 22 years old. I'm a hair on fire, young critic and activist. And I've gotten interested in interfaith work because I have this realization that some of the social change heroes I admire the most, ⁓ Dorothy Day, Malcolm X, Mahatma Gandhi, kind of, you know, in some ways everybody's list, Thich Nhat Hanh, their most salient identity was their religious identity. And so I figured interfaith work was a way to kind of bring social change heroes together. So I go to this conference at Stanford and it's boring. You know, it's basically a bunch of senior leaders, you know, pontificating about theology on panels.
Tomás Jiménez: shocked that it was a boring academic conference. ⁓ ⁓ sorry, go ahead.
Eboo Patel: what I do. I pontificate on panels, right? So but I was 22 at the time. I'm, you know, I literally stood up during a plenary session, and I threw my fist in the air. And I was like, this is boring. This like, this sucks. Where's young people? Where's the edginess? Where's the social action? Where's the kind of vanguard energy? Like, this is what I'm doing in 1998. And you know, there's some shock in the audience and there's a smattering of applause because, you know, the young people are speaking out and, and, you know, progressive theologians like that, at least in theory. And I'm very proud of myself is one of the themes and all of this is how proud I am of myself, of like being an activist and a critic. And as the kind of session is ending and people are trickling away to their next boring panels, this woman approaches me, her name is Yolan Trevino. And she says, what you're talking about is very interesting. ⁓ this idea of interfaith work, being around social action and young people and having high energy, you should build that. You should build that. And she wasn't seeing as she like her tone wasn't a tone of challenge, but I realized like that is, that is what's happening here. She's basically like, why are you telling all these senior theologians to build an organization of young people from diverse religious backgrounds involved in social action? You should do that. And the voice I heard in my head is, or are you really not good enough to do it? Like is really what you're good at telling other people what they're doing wrong. And look, you don't spend 25 years doing something that is principally responding to a challenge. Okay. But, ⁓ and that's what I've done for the past, literally since 1998 for almost 30 years, I've built this institution and it begins in that place. It begins in the idea of, why don't you solve the problem instead of telling other people what they're doing wrong? I'm going to give you like an even more tangible example. So one of the organizations I admire the most, something called the Inner City Muslim Action Network, it's on the Southwest side of Chicago. ⁓ My friend Ramin Ash-Shibi and I started around the same time in the mid late 1990s. He's kind of my Muslim contemporary, Muslim peer. although he's much more impressive than me, he's a MacArthur Genius Award winner. ⁓ And he's built this like $20 million Muslim community development organization, ⁓ largely Muslim staff, largely Muslim board, helps mostly non-Muslims, which is one of the things that I think is so inspiring about it. Because in my mind, that's such an Islamic thing to do. in its surrounding area, the Inner City Muslim Action Network is in a neighborhood that's a food desert. So you know what they built? A store. A grocery store is a civic institution. And you can build a civic institution. This is a civic institution. Part of what I think is interesting over the past 15 years is all of the talk about systems. Now, clearly systems exist. But again, I think what I'm going to say here is a little provocative and maybe an area of disagreement. I think all of the talk about systems is actually highly disempowering. Because what can you do about a system except for complain about it? But a civic institution, you can actually build that. You can build a grocery store, can build a charter school, you can start a nonprofit, you can do that.
Tomás Jiménez: Let's talk about that a little bit and I want to kind of ⁓ maybe re-characterize the context of the last 15 years just a little bit and feel free to disagree with this. I say that no one particular political persuasion has a monopoly on the demolition approach to society's problems. So, you know, if you look at the discourse, even the language across the political spectrum, it's abolish, eliminate, cancel, get rid of, ban. We are legislating in parts of the country bans on certain ways of speaking, teaching, etc. And so there's a real anti-establishment strain that's running through ⁓ all corners, aspects of the United States right now. And so I'd say that there are lots of people who are wielding sledgehammers. And that's not a builder framework. so, you know, that would, my characterization of, you know, the last 15 years would be to actually think about the demolition approaches as being, you know, as owned by lots of different. ⁓ folks across American society right now. And it might be as a recognition, I think it is a recognition, that the economic system, the system of ethno-racial division, of religious division is not working for them. And I would assume that you might agree with that. We live in a society of enormous inequality, ⁓ economic inequality in particular, but all kinds of inequalities. And so those are, some people might argue, ⁓ systemic problems. And I get the idea and I show this critique that saying, you know, we need to end systemic, fill in the blank here is a bit hand wavy. And, you know, nobody can walk away as an individual, even groups feeling like I'm going to change the entire system. ⁓ So how do we hold both of those things in mind that there's something that needs to be done in the here and now? ⁓ And that what needs to be done in the here and now and that your example of teaching in that school and what the student was asking of you or the building of this grocery store in a food desert. Those examples are like people addressing problems that people have in the here and now. But can we get too caught up in plugging holes and addressing small problems without saying, this whole thing is not working for us? we need to do something about it. And how do we hold those things at the same time without flattening or eliminating one?
Eboo Patel: So I so many things here, Tomás. What I see myself doing is helping to strengthen the world of civic institutions, many of which operate from the central left, as I as I defined before. But I also have a great deal of admiration for particularly religious civic institutions which operate from the center right, you know. So so ⁓ Latter-day Saint institutions that serve everybody or Catholic institutions, etc. And I think we have a particular responsibility to be builders. So when people say to me, why are you, you know, why are you so hard on your side, so to speak? And I don't mean that in a partisan way. I mean that like, you know, you know, I think of my kind of realm, so to speak, as two to three inches left of center to one inch right of center, so to speak, maybe. four inches left of center to two inches right of center, right? ⁓ You know, why are you so hard on that world and not on the other world, say the MAGA world? And my response is the Joker is supposed to burn down the city. Why am I mad at that son of a gun? He's doing what he's like. He promised to burn down the city. What use would it be for me to be mad at that person? I am interested in Batman being better. We're Batman. Right. Angel Perez needed Batman, like needed somebody to teach him how to read better to pass the GED. And so that's the first thing. ⁓ The second thing is I absolutely agree with you that there are macro level forces, know, that that we are that, you know, massive techno techno. mean, this we're living through a once every half millennium shift.
Tomás Jiménez: Yep.
Eboo Patel: and at the same time, like we all have agency.
Tomás Jiménez: I think that's what I'm maybe encouraging us to this conversation is think about ⁓ the tactics as the problem and how they're used for multiple kinds of political purposes for, you know, for different causes that, again, no one, I think, has a monopoly on these things.
Eboo Patel: those of us who, I'll just go through the list here, belong to elite institutions, of which I am one, right? Like Interfaith America has its own kind of elitism, but I'm a Rhodes Scholar, you know, like people should expect things of me. People should expect things. Like I think if you go to an elite institution, you have signed up for civic responsibility. And people get to expect things of you and part of what they get to expect is you're an architect. You're an architect. my one of my kind of main purposes here is to ask the question, what is the purpose of this institution and this role? It's kind of a very center, right? It's kind of a moderate conservative question. Like what's the purpose here, right? It's a Yuval Levin question from his book, A Time to Build. ⁓ What is the purpose and are you fulfilling the purpose? It's actually a deeply spiritual question also. It's the Gandhi question. What is your duty and are you fulfilling it? And in my mind, those of us who have civic roles, particularly in elite institutions, we have signed up to be the builders that other people can count on. I think the single best example, is Dr. Robbie on the pit, right? Like when you, or here's another like very tactical, tactile example. It's a pilot. When you step on a plane, there's an implicit... understanding that you have about what a pilot's responsibility is. And it's not just about takeoff and landing. It's also that the pilot's job is to keep everybody calm. I think Angel gets to expect of me that if I'm a teacher in his school, I can help him get a GED. And that is what I think the standard should be. The standard is ⁓ is Batman worse than the Joker? The standard is, is Batman living up to his purpose? And the truth of the matter is like in progressive social change revolutions over and over and over again, this is a pattern, right? And part of what I think is fascinating about the American Revolution and the South African anti-apartheid revolution is those were amongst the only times that the revolutionaries were able to establish a decent government. Now decent for the time, right? Clearly slave holding isn't decent. Clearly excluding women isn't decent. For the late 18th century, the United States of America was more free than most other geographies on the planet. The point is, General Washington was able to become President Washington. And in most situations, so in the French Revolution, you have people like Lafayette at the beginning of the revolution in 1789, but by 1791, it's Robespierre in charge. And then what happens in 1799? Here comes Napoleon. And I think a version of that has happened right now. You have a social change revolution, which begins in the early 2010s, right? That doesn't actually improve a center left government, which is an Obama government. It actually goes full ropes, Pierre. And is it that surprising that in 2016 or 2024, you end up with an equivalent of a Napoleon?
Tomás Jiménez: I'm gonna switch gears a little bit and I wanna pull on a... It is a fun metaphor, but I'm gonna run with another metaphor. So you talk about the Joker burning down the city and we need more Batman and Batwomen. And so we are at the Institute embarking on a new initiative called the Flourishing Cities Initiative.
Eboo Patel: metaphor isn't it tomas it's a metaphor isn't it
Tomás Jiménez: And it is trying to address the migration driven diversity that is a fact of life across the world. It's a fact of the human experience. People have moved since there have been people. And that the movement of people ⁓ introduces diversity and that that diversity, ⁓ when not managed well, poses real challenges. And even when, well, it poses real challenges even even when it's managed well, it also holds enormous opportunity. And so if we are, you know, living in a time when the city is burning down, in that context of an avalanche, it's part of the burning as a reaction to the human reality that I just described, right? I think you would agree that, and tell me if you don't, that diversity, it's a fact of life. We live with it. It's a fact of life. so You can think about it as an aspiration and there's a version of that and you talk about pluralism, we can get into that. But it's something we're living with. So how do we live with it? Well, how do we live with it in a way that allows everyone to thrive? And that's kind of the spirit of the Flourishing Cities Initiative and also, you know, ⁓ amplifying and supporting research that is trying to show solutions, that's showing what we can actually do to address those challenges and harness the opportunities. But if the city is burning right now, And there will be a time when we are living with the ashes. What do we need to rebuild? Where would you start? And what things could remain relegated to the ashes?
Eboo Patel: Yeah, that's such a great question. So, so, you know, in the United States, of course, we have, we have a powerful experience of this. And it's my single favorite civic institution in American history. And that's Hull-House in Chicago, ⁓ Which is like 10 blocks from where I sit right now, which is to say, ⁓ have, ⁓ we have this history of this woman, Jane Adams, and her circle of female friends, Ellen Starr, this like group of women who's who say, listen, we have this massive migration coming into Chicago ⁓ and we should view these people as citizens rather than strangers. We should view them as contributors rather than deviants. And in order to do that, they need a place to gather where their identities are respected. I mean, it's actually like, think it is so instructive for our time. They are migrants who have settled but who are moving. In other words, their settlement is potentially temporary. They have a place where there's a public kitchen, where there's a kindergarten, where there's a playground, where there are baths, where there's literary societies, there's sewing societies where people are able to share from their Jewish, their Catholic, their Polish, their Lithuanian, their Irish, their Italian backgrounds, their foods, their literatures, the things that they care about. listen to other people and cooperate across difference. And there are other examples of that across the country. And so that becomes kind of the mother institution for this whole network of institutions now, many of which are, for example, Catholic charities, ⁓ institutions in local cities that proactively welcome immigrants and refugees from different backgrounds. are respectful of their identities, which is remarkable given that, you know, you have a Catholic institution saying, we're going to respect your Muslim or your Baha'i or your Buddhist or your Hindu identity. We're going to create a space where you can feel as at home as possible. And we're going to nurture the qualities of contributing citizenship in you. And there's a couple of things I want to say about this. One is this is a great example of how a civic institution becomes a system because it is impossible to conceive of American civil society without the influence of Jane Addams and Hull-House and virtually every dimension, right? Like in adoption, in childcare, in juvenile justice, in food safety, labor and workers' rights, they were a place that pioneered it. locally with a migrant population and that those concrete programs become what we think of now as kind of our social system infrastructure. So it was built, you know, 125 years ago. Of course, it's creaky. Of course, it's old. That model is still instructive. Can we build? And this is is central to we need to build. It's in my book. Can we build a network of civic institutions that model better ways of doing things that then become systematized?
Tomás Jiménez: Yeah, I really appreciate that ⁓ example. And I think it captures something that we've been talking a lot about the Institute with this flourishing cities initiative, which is that ⁓ the idea that cities are kind of petri dishes of democracy. So 1932, Lewis Brandeis says that states are the laboratories of democracy. And he's writing this decision on federalism. And he says that uh... that you know you can stay and paraphrasing here states can kind of experiment and and if the experiment fails it doesn't lead to the demise of the republic and so i i'd well i've been saying that if states are little laboratories then cities of the petri dishes and i wonder if we could go inside yes some of the petri dishes that you you're an ethnographer you travel all over the world you've been to dozens if not hundreds of cities When you and what you just described, I take it as kind of pluralism at work, right? Hull-House and Jane Addams and the movement that she and her colleagues spawn. And so when when you go around today, ⁓ tell about where you see that legacy of Hull-House of building civic institutions that create connections that allow people across ⁓ various kinds difference to thrive. Where do you point at and say that's pluralism at work? and that's something that should become a system.
Eboo Patel: Athletic leagues. So, so, know, both my boys play basketball. Uh, uh, one's in college now doesn't play basketball in college, but, I have I have a 15 year old and, and it is the most cross-class, easily the most cross race and cross-class thing that he does by orders of magnitude is, is play high level basketball in Chicago and around. even though it's on a travel team, which you have to pay money for,
Tomás Jiménez: Tell me about that.
Eboo Patel: you're still playing all kinds of teams from all kinds of places with all kinds of class and racial and ethnic demographics, right? And so, and the reason I say this is that this is an institution. A basketball league is an institution. A baseball league is an institution that requires people stepping up and contributing oftentimes as volunteer coaches. So, and this is, I think, part of the American genius. It's the Tocquevillian aspect of pluralism, right? So I think of pluralism as having three great categories. One is Madisonian. What is the political architecture of our ability to disagree and still cooperate? It's Madison. It's the constitutional system, checks and balances. The second is Tocquevillian. What are the civic institutions where we encounter people with different ideas and divergent ideologies and cooperate with them? So that's little leagues and it's PTAs and it's 4-H clubs. And then the third is cultural pluralism, which is the fact that identities ⁓ are deeply meaningful to people and those identities become cultural expressions and often mixed together in America and new cultural expressions. Think jazz, think the blues, think hip hop, think gumbo, et cetera, right? Like virtually any interesting ⁓ form of music or cuisine in America, like two essential parts of a culture, music and cuisine, are mixtures in the United States, are mixtures. And identifiable mixtures, like you can trace back the Islamic influence on the blues. The call to prayer has a bent note in it, and hearing the call to prayer over and over over again by West African Muslims and American slave fields in the 17th and 18th century, undoubtedly influences the shaping of a new musical form in the blues. And so the point that I'm making is that is, we actually see this in occurrence all the time in the United States. And I think part of my frustration over the past 15 years is why not lift the good things up and ask the question, how do we do more of these things? So American hospitals are a miracle. Like in, like right now, Eight blocks from where I am is Northwestern Hospital, and five blocks from where I am is Rush Hospital. And there's a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Hindu, and a Jain operating on a Catholic at a hospital started by Presbyterians whose CEO is an atheist. And I'm just making that up, but it's probably true. Right? And that happens all the time. It happens all the time. We should cherish it. We should recognize it. We should tell the story and we should ask the question. how do we do more of this? So when the tie something together, this is why I don't think to myself starting a grocery store in a food desert is plugging a hole. I think to myself, starting a grocery store in a food desert is building a model that can become a system. I think that there is something powerful about a direct articulation of purpose. That's it. And I think it it cannot be said too much. In other words, If Stanford students, Harvard students, or Vanderbilt students have heard it 10,000 times, it's okay for them to hear it 10,001. That if you have the privilege of going to a society's elite institutions, here's part of what it means. Other people can count on you to improve their lives. I'm not criticizing you. I'm not coming after you. I'm not calling you names. I'm just saying, if you go to an elite institution, other people should be able to count on you.
Tomás Jiménez: Yeah, yeah, no, I think that's right. I think there's a, that we have an obligation, but I think this is true of all of us, and here I'm kind of maybe standing on a soapbox that I assume you would stand with me, but that all of us have a responsibility to care for each other in the way that various religious traditions and philosophies teach us to. And that, as you pointed out, when we have particular opportunities, those opportunities should be for the benefit of a larger whole and not, you know, we should not see them as just sort of human capital building opportunities so that I can burnish my own brand and take care of myself, but that I should be contributing something to ⁓ something much bigger than me with what I have. Stanford and other universities are not institutions of higher knowing, they're institutions of higher learning. And being an institution of higher learning and the individuals within those institutions have to be curious and ask questions. And so I wonder what's one big question that's capturing your curiosity right now? Leave us with a question.
Eboo Patel: When will diversity work? Which I think went down the wrong path, which I call demonized demeaned divide. had the wrong intellectual foundations. It had the wrong playbook. ⁓ It did some very bad things over the past 15 years. When will it be ready to put, to get back on the path of the great American intellectual and civic tradition of pluralism, which is respect for diverse identities, relationships between different communities and cooperation on concrete projects for the common good. When will that happen? And that's a genuine question, which is to say, I think that we are watching the fall of a paradigm that ought to fall. But will the even the title of the work that that paradigm said that it did, diversity work, will it be so radioactive for so long that we are unable to do that form of work in a different valence? That's one of my questions. It's a very personal question. I'm writing a book on this right now. I've devoted my career and my life to doing a particular kind of diversity work. Again, like the cherishing of diverse identities, cooperation across difference. ⁓ It makes me sad to think that, it makes me very sad to think that, ⁓ because of how diversity work has been done in recent years, the whole field can be radioactive to a set of responsible parties, particularly because I think diversity work is the American project, like literally, e pluribus uno, right? Like that is, if you think about the American dream, one part of it is about economic mobility. Another part of it is about ⁓ individual freedom. And the third part is about people. from diverse identities and divergent ideologies being able to cooperate together to build a nation. And I really believe in that part.
Tomás Jiménez: I think that's a great place to end it. Eboo Patel, thank you so much for this conversation.
Eboo Patel: Thank you Tomás.
Tomás Jiménez: you
Eboo Patel: One question is brought to you by the Institute for Advancing Just Societies produced by Ethography, ⁓ Georgia Limcaoco and Nikolas Liepins with by Caleb Liu
Eboo Patel: Great to be with you Tomás, thank you for having me.
Tomás Jiménez: It's great to have you. So we have a guiding question for today. And this is a question that kind of hangs over the whole conversation. How do we build thriving cohesive communities in a world that is defined by constant movement of people that precipitates the diversity and what you would call pluralism that we interact with in our everyday lives? But I want to start with your book. need to build field notes for a diverse democracy. And I want to start there because in many ways ⁓ it's where the Institute started. I don't know that I've ever told you this, but when Brian Lowery, who's a faculty colleague in the Graduate School of Business and one of the founding co-directors of the Institute,
Eboo Patel: And we were undergrads together at the of Illinois. ⁓
Tomás Jiménez: That's right, that's right. I remember you guys talking about that. know, fellow Illini, ⁓ you know, we were ⁓ leading a committee of faculty to design the Institute. When we decided we want to have an Institute that dealt with issues of race, ethnicity, caste, tribe, nation, we had to figure out what it was going to be all about. And I started reading a number of books that ⁓ were not necessarily about how you put together an institute organization, but kind of frameworks for thinking about questions of diversity and democracy. And I came across your book and it was a real spark. And so the- Yeah, no, thank you for writing it. And the builder metaphor is one that I've used a lot and give you full credit and borrow from your book to describe what we try to do in the Institute, which is really advanced solutions focused research.
Eboo Patel: Thank you.
Tomás Jiménez: Now I've had the benefit of reading your book, but for people who haven't read it, I wonder if we can start there and you can tell us a little bit about the framework.
Eboo Patel: So my first job out of college is ⁓ at ⁓ an alternative school for young people who had dropped out or been kicked out of high school. They were largely Puerto Ricans, ⁓ Mexican-Americans, African-Americans on the near northwest side of Chicago. And they would come to this alternative school for six months and then they would take the GED exam. I was all of 20 years old. ⁓ I had no experience in this field whatsoever. I was just a hair on fire person who was a critic of the social world, particularly the education system as it was, and I wanted to be involved somehow. That's how I wind up in this job. So there are four teachers at the school, there's 40 students. So the first day of school, every teacher kind of introduces him or herself and kind of gives three to five minutes of educational theory, right? So I stayed up and I do my Freirian thing. I talk about the banking system of education. I talk about how ⁓ they have been subject to a school system that has oppressed them and treated them as subjects rather than agents. You you can imagine kind of the whole progressive educator thing from the mid 1990s. So I get done with this and I'm very proud of myself. Okay. Very proud of myself for giving this speech. And this student comes up to me, his name was Angel Perez. I still remember his name and I remember this moment as if it was yesterday. He says to me, Mr. Patel, thank you so much for your speech. I can see you're a teacher who really cares. He says, listen, this is my third time in this program and it's my third time taking the GED. And if you don't pass on the third time, you can't take it again. And I just had a son. And if I get my GED, I make a dollar more an hour at Cub Foods. So I'm just asking you, can you help me get my GED? And I realized I had no idea how to do that. I had no idea. I had no idea how to be a teacher. Like, I didn't know how to help him learn how to read better or do math better or do social studies better. I was deeply schooled in critical theories about education. And I kind of knew that I didn't know how to teach. And so I was smoking mirrors. I was substituted. What I knew how to do, which was to critique for what I should have known how to do, which is to get him a GED. Now story ends well. He passes like literally gets the minimum score to pass, but that was a real moment for me. Right. And in most, in the vast majority of our professions, if you work at a nonprofit organization, the chances are you're being paid to help a kid get the equivalent of a GED. You're being paid to help a homeless person find housing. You're being paid to help an addict ⁓ go into recovery. And I, that is a whole different set of skills than critiquing or dismantling systems. And so it's like a real question. Are you able to do what you were supposed to do? Or is what you are best at telling other people what they're doing wrong? Small number of people in our society who get paid to tell other people what they're doing wrong. I think that there should be people paid in a society to critique. I think that that's important. But you cannot have a hundred critics for every builder. ⁓ ⁓ and our social change ecosystem has gotten way out of whack. And I know this in part because of how I was nurtured.
Tomás Jiménez: Say more about that. You said that the social change ecosystem has gotten out of whack. In what ways has it gotten out of whack?
Eboo Patel: Over the last 15 years, we have had a lot more arsonists than architects. The bathwater in the ecosystem of ⁓ center-left institutions, is where I, which is what I am in, which is the institution that I started. And I think it's a very important ecosystem. would say like it's Stanford in the near times are part of the center-left civic institution ecosystem. Right. I think we have let the bathwater get dirty. and it has empowered a set of people who went after the babies. And I think a society relies on its center-left civic institutions. Here's what I by center-left. I describe my own organization, which I found it this way. There are, if you are gay married, you're going to be very comfortable here. People are comfortably gay married here. And we also have Mormons and Evangelicals who might have a different approach to same-sex marriage. They get to be who they are. They are not ⁓ hounded or harassed here. But this is a center-left place where people are comfortably gay married. My main point is I think our society relies on these places. And I think that over the past 15 years, that ecosystem has taken on a critic mindset rather than a builder mindset.
Tomás Jiménez: What would you say to somebody who said that, you know, in social change movements, people play lots of different roles. a role to be played ⁓ among people who raise consciousness, who raise awareness. And then there are people who need to be the kind of builders and architects. If you want to like, take the builder metaphor, you know, you can walk into a place and say, I don't like the way this is designed, needs to be designed, it's not working for me. But I might not be the person to tear it down and the person to put in a new electrical and and plumbing, cetera. Somebody else should do that. But I can tell you, I don't like the house I'm living in and it's not working for me and it's destroying me. So how would you, you like me, I love to think in metaphors and talk in metaphors. So this may be a very poetic podcast, but how would you think about that?
Eboo Patel: In the last 15 years, to take your house metaphor, you had a hundred guys with sledgehammers, destroying things and they got to places in your house that you didn't want them to get to. Yeah. Right. And there were, and you're like, but I called a plumber, but I called an electrician, but I called somebody who was going to put up drywall and there just weren't that many of those folks or they were ⁓ shouted down by the people with sledgehammers. If we don't have a theory of what went wrong in order to rebuild the institutions that we love, then the people who hate the institutions will have a theory of what went wrong and they will use it as an opportunity to destroy. So unlike a hundred percent in the like Jill Lepore camp when she was like what has happened, you know, she said this the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education. She said, I feel a deep sense of guilt for not saying more when our campuses were caught in a choke hold and when we couldn't teach the way that we felt was required to educate people. She's like, I couldn't teach the way that I felt like I needed to teach. And I didn't say anything because I was scared. And there's lots and lots of people now who are saying that. I think this is an opportunity for those of us in a camp that believes in some version of social change, which includes more people, which lifts more people up, which encourages cooperation across differences to say the last 15 years was really terrible. ⁓ Because the social change ecosystem was profoundly imbalanced. It's not that critics are not needed. It's not that controlled burns sometimes are not useful, but that is not what happened. What happened was, everybody thought that that they were Nat Turner when what they really were was Ropes Pierre.
Tomás Jiménez: So if that's the critique of the critiquers, ⁓ tell us more about the kind of builder framework. What does that look like in practice? If you're, and you have been, I know, in front of a group of college students, even faculty, like what do you tell them about ⁓ the difference between what you see as having happened in the last 15 years and what ought to be?
Eboo Patel: So, I mean, part of what I want to repeat is like, I was this guy and actually like what I am sitting in right now, the organization that I've built came out of one of those moments. It actually happened at Stanford. So let me tell you the story. It was in June of 1998. I'm 22 years old. I'm a hair on fire, young critic and activist. And I've gotten interested in interfaith work because I have this realization that some of the social change heroes I admire the most, ⁓ Dorothy Day, Malcolm X, Mahatma Gandhi, kind of, you know, in some ways everybody's list, Thich Nhat Hanh, their most salient identity was their religious identity. And so I figured interfaith work was a way to kind of bring social change heroes together. So I go to this conference at Stanford and it's boring. You know, it's basically a bunch of senior leaders, you know, pontificating about theology on panels.
Tomás Jiménez: shocked that it was a boring academic conference. ⁓ ⁓ sorry, go ahead.
Eboo Patel: what I do. I pontificate on panels, right? So but I was 22 at the time. I'm, you know, I literally stood up during a plenary session, and I threw my fist in the air. And I was like, this is boring. This like, this sucks. Where's young people? Where's the edginess? Where's the social action? Where's the kind of vanguard energy? Like, this is what I'm doing in 1998. And you know, there's some shock in the audience and there's a smattering of applause because, you know, the young people are speaking out and, and, you know, progressive theologians like that, at least in theory. And I'm very proud of myself is one of the themes and all of this is how proud I am of myself, of like being an activist and a critic. And as the kind of session is ending and people are trickling away to their next boring panels, this woman approaches me, her name is Yolan Trevino. And she says, what you're talking about is very interesting. ⁓ this idea of interfaith work, being around social action and young people and having high energy, you should build that. You should build that. And she wasn't seeing as she like her tone wasn't a tone of challenge, but I realized like that is, that is what's happening here. She's basically like, why are you telling all these senior theologians to build an organization of young people from diverse religious backgrounds involved in social action? You should do that. And the voice I heard in my head is, or are you really not good enough to do it? Like is really what you're good at telling other people what they're doing wrong. And look, you don't spend 25 years doing something that is principally responding to a challenge. Okay. But, ⁓ and that's what I've done for the past, literally since 1998 for almost 30 years, I've built this institution and it begins in that place. It begins in the idea of, why don't you solve the problem instead of telling other people what they're doing wrong? I'm going to give you like an even more tangible example. So one of the organizations I admire the most, something called the Inner City Muslim Action Network, it's on the Southwest side of Chicago. ⁓ My friend Ramin Ash-Shibi and I started around the same time in the mid late 1990s. He's kind of my Muslim contemporary, Muslim peer. although he's much more impressive than me, he's a MacArthur Genius Award winner. ⁓ And he's built this like $20 million Muslim community development organization, ⁓ largely Muslim staff, largely Muslim board, helps mostly non-Muslims, which is one of the things that I think is so inspiring about it. Because in my mind, that's such an Islamic thing to do. in its surrounding area, the Inner City Muslim Action Network is in a neighborhood that's a food desert. So you know what they built? A store. A grocery store is a civic institution. And you can build a civic institution. This is a civic institution. Part of what I think is interesting over the past 15 years is all of the talk about systems. Now, clearly systems exist. But again, I think what I'm going to say here is a little provocative and maybe an area of disagreement. I think all of the talk about systems is actually highly disempowering. Because what can you do about a system except for complain about it? But a civic institution, you can actually build that. You can build a grocery store, can build a charter school, you can start a nonprofit, you can do that.
Tomás Jiménez: Let's talk about that a little bit and I want to kind of ⁓ maybe re-characterize the context of the last 15 years just a little bit and feel free to disagree with this. I say that no one particular political persuasion has a monopoly on the demolition approach to society's problems. So, you know, if you look at the discourse, even the language across the political spectrum, it's abolish, eliminate, cancel, get rid of, ban. We are legislating in parts of the country bans on certain ways of speaking, teaching, etc. And so there's a real anti-establishment strain that's running through ⁓ all corners, aspects of the United States right now. And so I'd say that there are lots of people who are wielding sledgehammers. And that's not a builder framework. so, you know, that would, my characterization of, you know, the last 15 years would be to actually think about the demolition approaches as being, you know, as owned by lots of different. ⁓ folks across American society right now. And it might be as a recognition, I think it is a recognition, that the economic system, the system of ethno-racial division, of religious division is not working for them. And I would assume that you might agree with that. We live in a society of enormous inequality, ⁓ economic inequality in particular, but all kinds of inequalities. And so those are, some people might argue, ⁓ systemic problems. And I get the idea and I show this critique that saying, you know, we need to end systemic, fill in the blank here is a bit hand wavy. And, you know, nobody can walk away as an individual, even groups feeling like I'm going to change the entire system. ⁓ So how do we hold both of those things in mind that there's something that needs to be done in the here and now? ⁓ And that what needs to be done in the here and now and that your example of teaching in that school and what the student was asking of you or the building of this grocery store in a food desert. Those examples are like people addressing problems that people have in the here and now. But can we get too caught up in plugging holes and addressing small problems without saying, this whole thing is not working for us? we need to do something about it. And how do we hold those things at the same time without flattening or eliminating one?
Eboo Patel: So I so many things here, Tomás. What I see myself doing is helping to strengthen the world of civic institutions, many of which operate from the central left, as I as I defined before. But I also have a great deal of admiration for particularly religious civic institutions which operate from the center right, you know. So so ⁓ Latter-day Saint institutions that serve everybody or Catholic institutions, etc. And I think we have a particular responsibility to be builders. So when people say to me, why are you, you know, why are you so hard on your side, so to speak? And I don't mean that in a partisan way. I mean that like, you know, you know, I think of my kind of realm, so to speak, as two to three inches left of center to one inch right of center, so to speak, maybe. four inches left of center to two inches right of center, right? ⁓ You know, why are you so hard on that world and not on the other world, say the MAGA world? And my response is the Joker is supposed to burn down the city. Why am I mad at that son of a gun? He's doing what he's like. He promised to burn down the city. What use would it be for me to be mad at that person? I am interested in Batman being better. We're Batman. Right. Angel Perez needed Batman, like needed somebody to teach him how to read better to pass the GED. And so that's the first thing. ⁓ The second thing is I absolutely agree with you that there are macro level forces, know, that that we are that, you know, massive techno techno. mean, this we're living through a once every half millennium shift.
Tomás Jiménez: Yep.
Eboo Patel: and at the same time, like we all have agency.
Tomás Jiménez: I think that's what I'm maybe encouraging us to this conversation is think about ⁓ the tactics as the problem and how they're used for multiple kinds of political purposes for, you know, for different causes that, again, no one, I think, has a monopoly on these things.
Eboo Patel: those of us who, I'll just go through the list here, belong to elite institutions, of which I am one, right? Like Interfaith America has its own kind of elitism, but I'm a Rhodes Scholar, you know, like people should expect things of me. People should expect things. Like I think if you go to an elite institution, you have signed up for civic responsibility. And people get to expect things of you and part of what they get to expect is you're an architect. You're an architect. my one of my kind of main purposes here is to ask the question, what is the purpose of this institution and this role? It's kind of a very center, right? It's kind of a moderate conservative question. Like what's the purpose here, right? It's a Yuval Levin question from his book, A Time to Build. ⁓ What is the purpose and are you fulfilling the purpose? It's actually a deeply spiritual question also. It's the Gandhi question. What is your duty and are you fulfilling it? And in my mind, those of us who have civic roles, particularly in elite institutions, we have signed up to be the builders that other people can count on. I think the single best example, is Dr. Robbie on the pit, right? Like when you, or here's another like very tactical, tactile example. It's a pilot. When you step on a plane, there's an implicit... understanding that you have about what a pilot's responsibility is. And it's not just about takeoff and landing. It's also that the pilot's job is to keep everybody calm. I think Angel gets to expect of me that if I'm a teacher in his school, I can help him get a GED. And that is what I think the standard should be. The standard is ⁓ is Batman worse than the Joker? The standard is, is Batman living up to his purpose? And the truth of the matter is like in progressive social change revolutions over and over and over again, this is a pattern, right? And part of what I think is fascinating about the American Revolution and the South African anti-apartheid revolution is those were amongst the only times that the revolutionaries were able to establish a decent government. Now decent for the time, right? Clearly slave holding isn't decent. Clearly excluding women isn't decent. For the late 18th century, the United States of America was more free than most other geographies on the planet. The point is, General Washington was able to become President Washington. And in most situations, so in the French Revolution, you have people like Lafayette at the beginning of the revolution in 1789, but by 1791, it's Robespierre in charge. And then what happens in 1799? Here comes Napoleon. And I think a version of that has happened right now. You have a social change revolution, which begins in the early 2010s, right? That doesn't actually improve a center left government, which is an Obama government. It actually goes full ropes, Pierre. And is it that surprising that in 2016 or 2024, you end up with an equivalent of a Napoleon?
Tomás Jiménez: I'm gonna switch gears a little bit and I wanna pull on a... It is a fun metaphor, but I'm gonna run with another metaphor. So you talk about the Joker burning down the city and we need more Batman and Batwomen. And so we are at the Institute embarking on a new initiative called the Flourishing Cities Initiative.
Eboo Patel: metaphor isn't it tomas it's a metaphor isn't it
Tomás Jiménez: And it is trying to address the migration driven diversity that is a fact of life across the world. It's a fact of the human experience. People have moved since there have been people. And that the movement of people ⁓ introduces diversity and that that diversity, ⁓ when not managed well, poses real challenges. And even when, well, it poses real challenges even even when it's managed well, it also holds enormous opportunity. And so if we are, you know, living in a time when the city is burning down, in that context of an avalanche, it's part of the burning as a reaction to the human reality that I just described, right? I think you would agree that, and tell me if you don't, that diversity, it's a fact of life. We live with it. It's a fact of life. so You can think about it as an aspiration and there's a version of that and you talk about pluralism, we can get into that. But it's something we're living with. So how do we live with it? Well, how do we live with it in a way that allows everyone to thrive? And that's kind of the spirit of the Flourishing Cities Initiative and also, you know, ⁓ amplifying and supporting research that is trying to show solutions, that's showing what we can actually do to address those challenges and harness the opportunities. But if the city is burning right now, And there will be a time when we are living with the ashes. What do we need to rebuild? Where would you start? And what things could remain relegated to the ashes?
Eboo Patel: Yeah, that's such a great question. So, so, you know, in the United States, of course, we have, we have a powerful experience of this. And it's my single favorite civic institution in American history. And that's Hull-House in Chicago, ⁓ Which is like 10 blocks from where I sit right now, which is to say, ⁓ have, ⁓ we have this history of this woman, Jane Adams, and her circle of female friends, Ellen Starr, this like group of women who's who say, listen, we have this massive migration coming into Chicago ⁓ and we should view these people as citizens rather than strangers. We should view them as contributors rather than deviants. And in order to do that, they need a place to gather where their identities are respected. I mean, it's actually like, think it is so instructive for our time. They are migrants who have settled but who are moving. In other words, their settlement is potentially temporary. They have a place where there's a public kitchen, where there's a kindergarten, where there's a playground, where there are baths, where there's literary societies, there's sewing societies where people are able to share from their Jewish, their Catholic, their Polish, their Lithuanian, their Irish, their Italian backgrounds, their foods, their literatures, the things that they care about. listen to other people and cooperate across difference. And there are other examples of that across the country. And so that becomes kind of the mother institution for this whole network of institutions now, many of which are, for example, Catholic charities, ⁓ institutions in local cities that proactively welcome immigrants and refugees from different backgrounds. are respectful of their identities, which is remarkable given that, you know, you have a Catholic institution saying, we're going to respect your Muslim or your Baha'i or your Buddhist or your Hindu identity. We're going to create a space where you can feel as at home as possible. And we're going to nurture the qualities of contributing citizenship in you. And there's a couple of things I want to say about this. One is this is a great example of how a civic institution becomes a system because it is impossible to conceive of American civil society without the influence of Jane Addams and Hull-House and virtually every dimension, right? Like in adoption, in childcare, in juvenile justice, in food safety, labor and workers' rights, they were a place that pioneered it. locally with a migrant population and that those concrete programs become what we think of now as kind of our social system infrastructure. So it was built, you know, 125 years ago. Of course, it's creaky. Of course, it's old. That model is still instructive. Can we build? And this is is central to we need to build. It's in my book. Can we build a network of civic institutions that model better ways of doing things that then become systematized?
Tomás Jiménez: Yeah, I really appreciate that ⁓ example. And I think it captures something that we've been talking a lot about the Institute with this flourishing cities initiative, which is that ⁓ the idea that cities are kind of petri dishes of democracy. So 1932, Lewis Brandeis says that states are the laboratories of democracy. And he's writing this decision on federalism. And he says that uh... that you know you can stay and paraphrasing here states can kind of experiment and and if the experiment fails it doesn't lead to the demise of the republic and so i i'd well i've been saying that if states are little laboratories then cities of the petri dishes and i wonder if we could go inside yes some of the petri dishes that you you're an ethnographer you travel all over the world you've been to dozens if not hundreds of cities When you and what you just described, I take it as kind of pluralism at work, right? Hull-House and Jane Addams and the movement that she and her colleagues spawn. And so when when you go around today, ⁓ tell about where you see that legacy of Hull-House of building civic institutions that create connections that allow people across ⁓ various kinds difference to thrive. Where do you point at and say that's pluralism at work? and that's something that should become a system.
Eboo Patel: Athletic leagues. So, so, know, both my boys play basketball. Uh, uh, one's in college now doesn't play basketball in college, but, I have I have a 15 year old and, and it is the most cross-class, easily the most cross race and cross-class thing that he does by orders of magnitude is, is play high level basketball in Chicago and around. even though it's on a travel team, which you have to pay money for,
Tomás Jiménez: Tell me about that.
Eboo Patel: you're still playing all kinds of teams from all kinds of places with all kinds of class and racial and ethnic demographics, right? And so, and the reason I say this is that this is an institution. A basketball league is an institution. A baseball league is an institution that requires people stepping up and contributing oftentimes as volunteer coaches. So, and this is, I think, part of the American genius. It's the Tocquevillian aspect of pluralism, right? So I think of pluralism as having three great categories. One is Madisonian. What is the political architecture of our ability to disagree and still cooperate? It's Madison. It's the constitutional system, checks and balances. The second is Tocquevillian. What are the civic institutions where we encounter people with different ideas and divergent ideologies and cooperate with them? So that's little leagues and it's PTAs and it's 4-H clubs. And then the third is cultural pluralism, which is the fact that identities ⁓ are deeply meaningful to people and those identities become cultural expressions and often mixed together in America and new cultural expressions. Think jazz, think the blues, think hip hop, think gumbo, et cetera, right? Like virtually any interesting ⁓ form of music or cuisine in America, like two essential parts of a culture, music and cuisine, are mixtures in the United States, are mixtures. And identifiable mixtures, like you can trace back the Islamic influence on the blues. The call to prayer has a bent note in it, and hearing the call to prayer over and over over again by West African Muslims and American slave fields in the 17th and 18th century, undoubtedly influences the shaping of a new musical form in the blues. And so the point that I'm making is that is, we actually see this in occurrence all the time in the United States. And I think part of my frustration over the past 15 years is why not lift the good things up and ask the question, how do we do more of these things? So American hospitals are a miracle. Like in, like right now, Eight blocks from where I am is Northwestern Hospital, and five blocks from where I am is Rush Hospital. And there's a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Hindu, and a Jain operating on a Catholic at a hospital started by Presbyterians whose CEO is an atheist. And I'm just making that up, but it's probably true. Right? And that happens all the time. It happens all the time. We should cherish it. We should recognize it. We should tell the story and we should ask the question. how do we do more of this? So when the tie something together, this is why I don't think to myself starting a grocery store in a food desert is plugging a hole. I think to myself, starting a grocery store in a food desert is building a model that can become a system. I think that there is something powerful about a direct articulation of purpose. That's it. And I think it it cannot be said too much. In other words, If Stanford students, Harvard students, or Vanderbilt students have heard it 10,000 times, it's okay for them to hear it 10,001. That if you have the privilege of going to a society's elite institutions, here's part of what it means. Other people can count on you to improve their lives. I'm not criticizing you. I'm not coming after you. I'm not calling you names. I'm just saying, if you go to an elite institution, other people should be able to count on you.
Tomás Jiménez: Yeah, yeah, no, I think that's right. I think there's a, that we have an obligation, but I think this is true of all of us, and here I'm kind of maybe standing on a soapbox that I assume you would stand with me, but that all of us have a responsibility to care for each other in the way that various religious traditions and philosophies teach us to. And that, as you pointed out, when we have particular opportunities, those opportunities should be for the benefit of a larger whole and not, you know, we should not see them as just sort of human capital building opportunities so that I can burnish my own brand and take care of myself, but that I should be contributing something to ⁓ something much bigger than me with what I have. Stanford and other universities are not institutions of higher knowing, they're institutions of higher learning. And being an institution of higher learning and the individuals within those institutions have to be curious and ask questions. And so I wonder what's one big question that's capturing your curiosity right now? Leave us with a question.
Eboo Patel: When will diversity work? Which I think went down the wrong path, which I call demonized demeaned divide. had the wrong intellectual foundations. It had the wrong playbook. ⁓ It did some very bad things over the past 15 years. When will it be ready to put, to get back on the path of the great American intellectual and civic tradition of pluralism, which is respect for diverse identities, relationships between different communities and cooperation on concrete projects for the common good. When will that happen? And that's a genuine question, which is to say, I think that we are watching the fall of a paradigm that ought to fall. But will the even the title of the work that that paradigm said that it did, diversity work, will it be so radioactive for so long that we are unable to do that form of work in a different valence? That's one of my questions. It's a very personal question. I'm writing a book on this right now. I've devoted my career and my life to doing a particular kind of diversity work. Again, like the cherishing of diverse identities, cooperation across difference. ⁓ It makes me sad to think that, it makes me very sad to think that, ⁓ because of how diversity work has been done in recent years, the whole field can be radioactive to a set of responsible parties, particularly because I think diversity work is the American project, like literally, e pluribus uno, right? Like that is, if you think about the American dream, one part of it is about economic mobility. Another part of it is about ⁓ individual freedom. And the third part is about people. from diverse identities and divergent ideologies being able to cooperate together to build a nation. And I really believe in that part.
Tomás Jiménez: I think that's a great place to end it. Eboo Patel, thank you so much for this conversation.
Eboo Patel: Thank you Tomás.
Tomás Jiménez: you
Eboo Patel: One question is brought to you by the Institute for Advancing Just Societies produced by Ethography, ⁓ Georgia Limcaoco and Nikolas Liepins with by Caleb Liu
