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Student Life Q&A with Chancellor Andrew Martin

(Bri Nitsberg | Student Life)
Chancellor Andrew Martin sat down for an interview with Julia Robbins, the former Editor-in-Chief, on Tuesday, April 4 for his first Q&A with Student Life since 2018. Questions touched on the University’s investments in fossil fuels, how ChatGPT will affect the future of academia, and the University’s responses to sexual assault allegations. The Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
Student Life: Politico reported in 2021 that 10 of the 20 largest college and university endowments had fully or partially divested from fossil fuels. Why has WashU not divested from fossil fuels? And is there any plan to do so in the coming years?
Andrew Martin: This was a decision made by the board of the Washington University Investment Management Company, on which I serve ex officio, that we are not going to do what are called either positive screens or negative screens with regard to our endowment. So, rather than saying we’re not going to invest in a particular area, or we’re going to invest a lot in another area, we’re going to look at every investment on its merits.
SL: Can you respond to many students’ calls that the leaders in our communities should be making decisions that are in the best interest of preserving the earth for the young people who will be living in it in the future longer?
Martin: Your question is predicated on the assertion that where universities intentionally choose to invest their assets using negative screening is going to have a benefit on the environment. I think that that’s a pretty tenuous causal chain. I think the question is, what is the University doing to help the environment and sustainability? And on that front, we have made massive investments over the last 25 years.
SL: Jon A. Shields, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times that argued that the vacuum of conservative thought taught through an intellectual lens on campuses can lead conservative students to lean on alt-right leaders. How, if at all, do you think administrators and professors at institutions of higher education, including WashU, should look to develop more access to intellectual conservative thought?
Martin: I haven’t had a chance to read the article, so I can’t comment on it directly. But as we think about our institutional values, it’s all about engaging with complex issues of the day through multiple perspectives. I haven’t done any survey of the curriculum, so I don’t know if there’s not enough exposure to these classical conservative ideas. [However,] it would certainly be in our institution’s interest for our faculty to lead engagement with our students on these particular issues as intellectual exploration.
SL: Do you think it would be worth surveying courses to see what exposure exists already for these ideas and potentially seek out professors who can provide insight into traditional conservatism?
Martin: The curriculum is owned by the faculty, and this is a really important tenet of shared governance. One of the things I can’t do as Chancellor is say, “We’re gonna have a requirement to do X,” or, “You can’t teach that,” and that’s a good thing. It’s important that we invest [in] that power with the faculty. I do think it would be healthy for our faculty to look at the curriculum and see whether or not the curriculum was meeting the needs of the students.
SL: The WashU Undergraduate and Graduate Workers Union protested several days ago against the University’s handling of sexual misconduct allegations against two different professors at the University. WUGWU demanded greater transparency from the University in how it investigates cases of sexual misconduct and demanded an external investigation for the allegations. Can you provide a response to their demands and also address whether the University is changing how it investigates and handles cases of sexual misconduct?
Martin: I can’t speak about any particular investigation. What I can say is that we take these allegations very seriously. We do comprehensive investigations, and depending on where the facts lead us, we sanction individuals appropriately. But we can’t provide transparency in these situations for the simple reason that if any member of our community was accused of this type of behavior, they would want their privacy protected as well.
SL: Is the University changing how it handles future investigations of sexual misconduct?
Martin: Every case is different, and we are going through a process both on the medical campus and on the Danforth campus to look at the way in which we are investigating these cases when it involves faculty members and trainees in laboratories in particular. At present, we haven’t changed anything that we’re doing, which isn’t to say that we’re not going to change how things are done.
SL: Just a few years ago, many WashU students could live on campus for all four years if they wanted to. Now, only two years of on-campus housing are guaranteed. Is the University looking to expand its on-campus Residential Life offerings?
Martin: Yes. We are exploring ways in which we can continue to grow and diversify our housing portfolio. It is non-trivial for two reasons. One, we’re geographically constrained. But we also have to work with our governmental partners — and particularly Clayton, with regard to the South 40 and University City — with some of the housing that we have that’s a little bit off campus.
SL: Are there talks of the University purchasing land that Fontbonne currently owns?
Martin: No.
SL: ChatGPT has shown the world that the future of academia will need to meet new concerns of academic integrity and adjust to the fact that many marketable skills can now be carried out for free by AI. How does the University plan to adjust its pedagogy in response to students using ChatGPT at school and entering a workforce that is being changed by these technologies?
Martin: This is an issue that we are having lots of active conversations about. I think there are two issues. The first is the academic integrity issue, which in a sense, is a little bit easier. The academic community is going to define what’s appropriate and what’s not appropriate, just like we do with other tools. I think the bigger, more important conversation is how we are going to ensure that our students are able to harness AI for whatever it is they want to be doing, both academically and professionally and beyond. And we’re having those conversations in lots of different places, and it’s appropriately led by the academic leadership of the University. But we’re certainly not burying our heads in the sand and saying, “We’re going to do things like we’ve always done them,” because that’s not where the world is going.
SL: Student Life reported in 2018 on the challenges that people with physical disabilities face in navigating certain buildings on campus and other parts of the campus’ infrastructure. What progress has the University made in the years since to ameliorate these issues, and are there plans to make the campus more accessible for people with physical disabilities in the years to come?
Martin: I can’t speak about the gradient of how things have changed over the last five years, but I do know that we are deeply committed to ensuring that the campus is accessible. I certainly know one challenging space is the Women’s building, which is something that is on our docket to address. The problem is, we have to decant what is in the Women’s building someplace else before we can do the Women’s building, and we don’t have a lot of spaces sitting around right now. But in terms of our institutional values and commitment, this is at the top of the list.
SL: In your 2018 interview with StudLife, you posed the following question as something you wanted to address in your time as Chancellor: “How do we ensure that students who are learning incredibly valuable areas of study like philosophy and classics and sociology are able to connect their undergraduate education with their goals and aspirations, some of which, of course, have to do with getting a job?” Can you comment on what progress the University has made so far and what you hope to accomplish in the coming years in this regard?
Martin: I think the area where we’ve made the biggest progress is moving to a model where we have a single career center. This is important for two reasons. [The first is that] I want every one of our students to be able to access the full set of resources we have at the University. The system we had before, where things were siloed by school, was limiting to some of our students. And the second driver had to do with employers. Employers are interested in talent across the spectrum, and a centralized career center will let students from all four of our undergraduate schools have a conversation with someone who can say, “These are the types of positions that you can get — maybe some things you need to do to augment, and here are some relationships that can help you get on your way.”
SL: What are some of the challenges you foresee the University facing in the coming years?
Martin: I think the biggest challenge facing the University is the way in which we portray ourselves and tell our story about what we’re doing to serve the public. I’m deeply committed to the idea that Washington University has public service as its core mission. But we need to do a better job making sure that the investment we’re making in our broader community, both here in St. Louis and in the state of Missouri, is better understood.