That’s according to recent research by Eun-Hee Kim, Ph.D., a Gabelli School of Business professor who studies the tensions between businesses’ climate pledges and shareholders’ concerns about costs and the bottom line.

While the carbon reduction plans of corporations have been widely studied, “we know less about what happens after companies adopt carbon targets” and how they may adjust them, said Kim, a professor of strategy and statistics.

Carbon Reduction Versus Profits

Companies have been setting carbon emission reduction targets for the past few decades because of pressure from climate-conscious investors, customers, their local communities, or regulators

After taking advantage of “low-hanging fruit” like energy efficiency improvements, companies may have to turn to more expensive efforts, like overhauling their technologies or business processes, Kim said, noting that these practices may eat into profits.

Moving the Goalpost 

Faced with pressure to appear environmentally friendly while also controlling costs,  companies will sometimes deceptively tweak their targets: while maintaining an “eye-catching”  overall goal, like a 20% reduction in greenhouse gases, companies will quietly lengthen the timeline for meeting it, Kim said. 

A five-year timeline might become a 10-year timeline, “effectively ‘kicking the can down the road’” and reducing the effort required per year, the study says. 

Deceptive Changes

She and a colleague from the University of Vermont examined this practice in a study of 546 firms’ carbon targets from 2011 to 2019. Published last fall, the study showed that this kind of deceptive change was most likely among firms struggling to meet an ambitious target, but also among firms with smaller targets who decide to adopt bigger ones. 

And a new study they are conducting casts a wider net, looking broadly at companies who changed their targets, whether or not they were deceptive about it.

Unsurprisingly, it found that carbon emissions grew among companies that relaxed their carbon targets. But, similar to the findings in their earlier study, they found that emissions also grew among companies that strengthened their targets, since they tended to stretch the timeline for meeting them and didn’t face “immediate pressure,” Kim said. Also, these firms didn’t make greater investments in carbon reduction after strengthening their targets. 

Aiming for Transparency

Her research shows the need for climate-concerned investors to look closely at a company’s carbon reduction targets and practices, and could inform regulatory efforts aimed at greater disclosure, she said. 

Media scrutiny can also be helpful: Her study from last fall found that if media outlets covered controversies around companies’ carbon emissions practices, the companies were less likely to deceptively change their targets.

Companies have recently become less enthusiastic about carbon targets, in part because of the priorities of the Trump administration in Washington, she said. But students’ interest in the topic remains strong, said Kim, who teaches a class in sustainability and business strategy.  

“As long as younger generation are interested, I feel that the research around [climate targets]would continue,” she said.

Titled Masculinity in American Politics, it collects essays from scholars across the country to address  a topic rising to the fore in the political sphere. The book shows how masculinity and its stereotypes affect campaigns and elections, sometimes in surprising ways. 

Campaigning on Masculine Themes

Among other things, the book shows how women candidates feel pressure to highlight masculinity in their campaign messages—with Latinas and Asian American women more likely to rely on masculine imagery.

It shows how precarious manhood—anxiety that one’s masculinity is under threat—can lead politically liberal men to embrace more aggressive policies, such as the death penalty and the use of military force.  

One of McDermott’s own co-authored essays centers on U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, who suffered a stroke in 2022 during his campaign and was treated for depression after taking office. The stigma surrounding disability hurt his masculine image—even though Fetterman “looks about as  masculine as you’re ever going to get,” she said. 

McDermott’s goal was to foster a more nuanced understanding of masculinity in American politics at all levels—all the more important because of the emergence of Donald Trump, “an unapologetic masculine figure,” she said. With this book, she’s continuing a research interest that began years ago—with a novel classroom exercise that generated surprising findings among her students. 

How did the subject of masculinity in politics capture your interest? 

The fields of psychology and sociology have long understood the difference between sex and gender—sex is biological and gender is the social construct, but political science still uses the term ‘gender’ to refer to sex. I wrote a book in 2016 that made that distinction after seeing it play out in the classroom. I was teaching a class on gender and politics, and I decided to give my students the Bem Sex Role Inventory, or BSRI, which measures how masculine or feminine one’s psychological profile is. A lot of the women found out their profiles were deemed more masculine than feminine, and even more masculine than the men in the class. It caused quite a stir, and the wheels started turning.

Why is this more nuanced view of gender in politics important?

The power structure in our country has always been based on traits traditionally seen as masculine, like dominance and forcefulness, at least according to the BSRI. Those are the traits that we value in leaders. Aggression is one trait, and I think it can be negative, neutral, or positive, depending on the direction it takes. By not examining that, we’re leaving out an awful lot of the explanation of what’s going on in our politics.

The book mentions inequities in politics because of the emphasis on masculinity. Can you elaborate?

Female candidates face a double bind because they need to show some masculinity to prove that they can lead and fight for you in Congress, things like that. At the same time, if they’re not feminine enough, they’re seen as overstepping traditional sexual norms. Plus, women aren’t recruited to be candidates at the same rates as men are, so those who don’t show masculine traits very strongly don’t put themselves forward to run; they doubt their own abilities to compete.

What do you hope people take away from the book?

That academics aren’t just trying to trash masculinity. That’s not what this book is about—it’s an objective look at masculinity, and in some ways its positive effects. I think a healthy masculinity means you have strong leadership skills, you have independence, you have your own beliefs and you’re willing to defend them, but you’re also willing to listen to other people’s beliefs and not just close it down with no discussion. And I think there are lots of political leaders who are like that.

You’ve mentioned you want to study the ‘manosphere’ next. Tell me more.  

This is the part of the internet that is dedicated to traditional masculinity and hyper-masculinity and promoting that, in reaction to this sense that males are being attacked and aren’t getting their fair share and things like that. I’m going to research whether it played a significant role in the 2024 election when Trump started going on these shows and promoting his campaign. The question is, to what extent did their ‘bro’ following then become politicized and possibly change the profile of the electorate?

The grant was a renewal of previous grants—five in all—awarded by the Mother Cabrini Health Foundation for GSE’s Clinical Mental Health Services in the Bronx Community (CCMH) program. The CCMH program supports the mental health of students in the Bronx, ages 7 to 17, and their families through telehealth counseling sessions and workshops. The foundation also renewed a separate grant that funds free classes for non-native English speakers.

“Amidst the current uncertain and polarizing sociopolitical landscape in the U.S., I am grateful to remain grounded through this grant as the CCMH team continues to accompany our clients in need,” said Eric C. Chen, Ph.D., a GSE professor of counseling psychology who directs the program.

“It aligns with Fordham’s Jesuit priorities of transformative learning and driving purpose and reinforces our commitment to ensuring that our work matters to others.”

The project, which first launched in 2021, is staffed by GSE master’s and doctoral students who work with students from 122 Bronx schools. The Mother Cabrini Foundation has contributed $1.7 million in funding since CCMH’s founding.  

The new grant is notable because it allows Chen to expand the scope of the project. 

This coming fall, two interns selected from the mental health counseling program will join the CCMH program. Once they receive training, the interns will conduct intake assessments and individual counseling for youth and adults, and also conduct workshops. An intern who speaks Arabic has already been selected, expanding services to English, Spanish, and Arabic speakers, many of whom are newly arrived immigrants.

The program will also continue to work closely with the seven Bronx community organizations that it partners with, including immigrant and disability rights advocacy groups Masa, Coalición Mexicana, and Sinergia.

A Lifeline for the Unheard

Maria Sol Anyosa, a doctoral student in GSE’s school psychology program who has conducted telehealth sessions with CCMH, called it “a lifeline for a community that often goes unheard, unseen, and underserved.”

“Being part of CCMH has allowed me to connect with individuals and families who carry immense burdens in silence, from trauma and grief to systemic inequities,” she said, noting that many clients come from undocumented families. 

“These families live in constant fear, navigating unique and isolating challenges while doing everything in their power to create a better future for their children. Their resilience, courage, and strength have touched me deeply, reminding me why I chose this field and how vital it is to provide compassionate, accessible care.”

Jolene Trimm, Ph.D., GSE ’23, a post-doctoral fellow at Milestones Psychology who worked at CCMH as a GSE student, credited the program with helping her sharpen and gain skills and allowing her to grow from a clinical counselor to a supervisor. 

“I have worked with CCMH from its start, and it has been amazing to see such real-world, very impactful work grow rapidly in a short time,” she said. 

“Fordham prepared me to be both a researcher and clinician, with the hopes that I would use my knowledge to support the needs of diverse individuals in the community. CCMH  has allowed me to do just that.”

ChatGPT: Less Empathy for Men

She and her co-authors found that self-identified men will likely receive less empathetic responses, compared to women, when they type their mental health concerns into AI platforms like ChatGPT. It’s one example of how “human biases or stereotypical impressions are inevitably fitted into the training data” that AI models are based on, Ren said.

The study is one of the few in the nascent area of gender, technology, and mental health. It comes as AI is moving beyond business-related uses and increasingly entering the interpersonal sphere—for instance, serving as a virtual confidante providing pick-me-up comments and a dash of empathy when needed.

An Easy Avenue of Support

Sometimes seeking support from an AI chatbot like ChatGPT is more appealing than speaking to family or friends because “they could be the source of the anxiety and pressure,” Ren said, and seeking professional therapy may be taboo or unaffordable.

At the same time, she noted AI’s potential to “backfire” and worsen someone’s mental state. For the study, said Ren, “we wanted to see whether or not AI can actually be helpful to people who are really struggling mentally … and be part of the solution,” and they chose potential gender bias as their starting point. 

Analyzing AI for Empathy

Titled “Unveiling Gender Dynamics for Mental Health Posts in Social Media and Generative Artificial Intelligence,” the study was published in January in the proceedings of the 58th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

Ren co-authored the research with business scholars at the University of Richmond and Baylor University, and she’ll present it on Monday at Fordham’s International Conference on Im/migration, AI, and Social Justice, seeking audience feedback that helps with preparing it for publication in a business journal.

The researchers analyzed 434 mental health-related messages posted on Reddit, in its subreddits for mental health, mental illness, suicide, and self-harm. They included posts by self-identified men and women and those who specified no gender.

The researchers fed those posts into three AI platforms—ChatGPT, Inflection Pi, and Bard (now Google Gemini)—and then used a machine learning system to analyze the bots’ responses for their level of empathy. They also included other people’s posted responses to the Reddit messages to have a point of comparison.

The combined results show that women’s posts received more empathy than those by men or people of unspecified gender across all platforms—from AI and from people responding on Reddit.

Purging Bias from AI

Eradicating such bias, she said, is a matter of carefully selecting the data used to train AI models, as well as having moderators—either human or virtual—who keep an eye out for biases creeping into the system.

“Many younger people, like minors, are using it, because [technology] is their comfort zone,” showing the need for regulation, she said.

Any empathy provided by AI is “clearly different from how trained medical professionals provide empathy in face-to-face settings,” the authors write. But AI technologies can at least provide temporary comfort to those who are struggling, the study says.

“Regardless of gender, everyone wants to be seen, everyone wants to be understood,” Ren said. “So we are looking at the very basic form of that, which is empathy.”

For one thing, make sure that school is a place where they want to be.

That’s one takeaway from a new Fordham study of Bronx public school leaders trying to advance equity in their schools and ensure they’re welcoming and supportive for every student.

For these schools, that meant overcoming the effects of poverty, exclusion, and bias, or whatever else might be keeping students away. Schools in the study “thought about this really holistically” and reduced absenteeism as a result, said the study’s author, Elizabeth Stosich, Ed.D., associate professor in the Graduate School of Education and associate chair of the Division of Educational Leadership, Administration, and Policy.

Poverty and COVID Hurt Attendance

Her study was published in November in Frontiers in Education. From 2021 to 2022, she examined the efforts of four district leaders and eight school leaders in one of the 12 community school districts in the Bronx. It’s a district where absenteeism is an especially tough problem because of high rates of poverty and the death rate—one of the city’s highest—during the coronavirus pandemic, she said.

The schools she studied were trying to advance equity through continuous improvement, a management approach from the corporate and health care spheres that more and more schools are adopting. Among other things, it emphasizes a bottom-up approach to understanding an organization’s problems and making changes.

Getting Creative: Laundry, Fun Fridays, and Campfires

What did that look like in the schools? One of them set up a laundry because some families lacked access to one, hindering their kids’ attendance. Teachers identified the student groups in each school who felt the most ignored—in one case, English learners—and found ways to engage them. One school launched “Fun Fridays” full of meetings by clubs that reflected students’ interests—strategically scheduled on a day when students tend to be absent.

Teachers cooked with students or began art projects; one of them set up a faux campfire around which students could tell stories. “They really got creative, and it spurred new ideas,” she said.

Asking Students What They Truly Need = Success

Crucially, all of these initiatives came from talking to students themselves, Stosich said.

“By going to students and asking what they truly need, and then redesigning school in that image, that is how they engage in more really transformative work to support student success,” she said.

Also important was creating inclusive, supportive school environments for students from historically marginalized racial and ethnic backgrounds, she said: “They thought about, yes, getting students into school, but then creating the experiences that would pull them in and keep them through both a more engaging and culturally responsive curriculum and instruction.”

While absenteeism remained a stubborn challenge, the districts’ schools showed a lot of improvement compared with similar districts in the area, she said.

‘Start Small to Learn Fast’

Stosich noted the importance of a long-term focus on equity, in addition to short-term efforts. Continuous improvement has a “start small to learn fast” approach, involving a series of short-term inquiry cycles combined with empathy interviews and data gathering to get at the roots of an issue and find the best solutions, she said.

“Oftentimes in education and other fields, we start with a solution,” she said. “We’ll adopt some practice across the whole district or across the whole school before we even know if this would lead to improvements. It can lead to a lot of burnout and ‘initiative fatigue’ among educators who are not convinced that the next new thing is going to be any better than the last new thing.”

The reasons for absenteeism evolve and change, and vary from one school to another, she said, “so spending time to really understand the problem is essential.”

Kramer has written widely about the importance of sound for appreciating history, art, literature, and current events. Why this approach? Because thinkers dating from Aristotle have treated sight as the most important of the five senses, leading sound to be a little, well, overlooked.

“When you begin to concentrate on sound, all kinds of things come up that traditionally would never have come up,” he said.

In his most recent book, Experiencing Sound: The Sensation of Being, he continues his focus on the humanistic side of sound studies, a field that emerged in recent decades because of advances in sound technology. The overall message is that sound is “the medium by which we measure the sense of being alive,” he said.

The book comprises 66 short essays about “all of the remarkable ways in which sound has affected human lives … and also affected the way in which people feel about being alive,” he said. His hope, he said, is “for people to start listening to the world as hard as they look at it.”

Some encapsulated essays from Experiencing Sound:

The Wind on Mars

In 2018, a NASA Mars lander detected something no earthling had ever heard: the Martian wind. It conveyed that Mars was a world in a way the quiet, windless moon is not. “The sense of a world cannot be established only by what we can see, as we can see the lunar landscape,” Kramer writes. “A planet can be seen, pure and simple. But a world can be seen only if it can be heard.”

The Talking Dead

A voice recording conveys life and presence in a way that the visual (i.e., someone’s portrait) does not, as exemplified in 1890, when the voice of the deceased poet Robert Browning was played at an event commemorating him, creating the air of an “extraordinary séance,” one journalist noted. His grieving sister viewed it as a kind of sacrilege, Kramer writes—for her, “it was too alive for comfort.”

Annals of Slavery

In her 1861 memoir Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs describes hiding in an attic’s crawlspace for seven years to avoid being sexually abused by her enslaver. For Jacobs, the street sounds she could hear from the crawlspace were a thread that linked her to life, Kramer writes—until she was able to escape to the North, “what freedom she had was carried on the sound of voices in the street.”

The Contralto Mystique

The author William Styron, in his 1990 memoir Darkness Visible, is dissuaded from attempting suicide when he hears a soaring contralto singer in a movie. It stirred family memories and had a power that was “literally maternal,” Kramer writes, because it reminded Styron of the voice of his late mother singing the same music.

Prisons of Silence

The human need for sound was apparent to Charles Dickens, who wrote “the dull repose and quiet that prevails, is awful” after visiting America’s first penitentiary, Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, where all prisoners were held in solitary confinement in enforced silence. And in a 20th-century Russian gulag, the enforced silence was described as physically stifling by prisoner Eugenia Ginzburg: “I would have given anything to have heard just one sound.”

Minding the Senses

“[K]nowledge comes as much through the ear as through the eye,” Kramer writes. Henry David Thoreau knew this, apparently, with his descriptions of murmuring wind, creaking footsteps in the snow, vibrations in the ear, and the jingling of ice on trees. Even so, today someone returning from a walk will be asked “What did you see?” rather than “What did you hear?” “This,” writes Kramer, “needs to change.”

Jasmine just had her 18th birthday behind bars and now she’s facing an uncertain future. “I’m kind of on my own, and I don’t really know what to do,” she said on the first episode of “Roadmap for Change: Trauma Recovery and Juvenile Justice.” 

The new podcast from the Center for Trauma Recovery and Juvenile Justice is co-produced by Keith Cruise, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Fordham and co-director of the center, which is a partnership among Fordham, the University of Connecticut Health Center, and other institutions. 

Through the podcast and the center’s other work, Cruise is on a mission to elevate the voices of young people like Jasmine, and to infuse trauma-informed care into the juvenile justice system. 

Creating a Trauma-Informed Juvenile Justice System

Stories like Jasmine’s are not uncommon in juvenile detention. On average, kids who come into contact with the justice system have experienced four traumatic life events, and according to a 2021 study, 23% of detained girls and 9% of detained boys meet diagnostic criteria for PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder. (The respective rates in the general population are just 8% and 2%.) 

The center is affiliated with the National Child Traumatic Stress Network and is funded through the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. It trains juvenile justice professionals across the country—like judges, lawyers, probation officers, and social workers—to understand and respond to the trauma they see every day while working with young people and their families. 

As a co-director, Cruise helps to manage the center’s work plan and develop training, information, and resources. He hopes to shift the conversation away from short-term punitive measures and toward deeper healing of youth and families while also promoting community safety. 

“When youth get arrested and charged in juvenile court, the focus tends to be on the behaviors they’ve engaged in and their level of aggression and acting out,” said Cruise. “We hope to raise awareness that behaviors are shaped by what a youth has experienced in the past … and if trauma can help to explain delinquent behaviors, that opens up new avenues for intervening.” 

To that end, Cruise said, the center supports universal screening for trauma for kids in the juvenile justice system, along with increased access to treatment, including grief therapy, which the center trains professionals to provide. 

“One of the most common traumatic events that youth experience in their lives is traumatic loss. They’ve lost a family member, a loved one, or a close friend, usually due to community violence, gang violence, or a violent crime that resulted in death,” Cruise said. 

Elevating the Voices of Adolescents and Their Families

Cruise hopes the podcast will amplify the experiences of adolescents like Jasmine so that everyone involved in the juvenile justice system can approach their work with greater understanding. 

“The stories from youth and families themselves are really important,” said Cruise. “Good trauma-informed care treats youth and families as the experts in their own life stories and co-collaborators in what they need to recover and heal. We need to learn from their voices and their experiences.”

Listen to “Roadmap for Change: Trauma Recovery and Juvenile Justice.”

“There was nothing risky, and I was disappointed,” said Timothy Malefyt, clinical professor of marketing at the Gabelli School of Business.

“The Super Bowl is the place to talk about issues and really make a statement, and you just didn’t see that,” he said. “It used to be a launching place. Advertising can be such a powerful medium for social change.”

Instead, this year the ads mostly avoided controversy, sticking to humor and nostalgia. And the viewers seemed to like that.

The fan favorite was Budweiser’s nostalgic ad featuring a young horse that saves the day, which topped the USA Today Ad Meter. Malefyt described it as “a hero’s journey, Little Engine that Could-type story” that gets back to basics and avoids any pressing issues.

The ads were a far cry from a 2014 Coke commercial promoting diversity or even Apple’s 1984 ad that introduced the Macintosh personal computer, he said. Budweiser perhaps played it safe with its ads, two years after facing backlash from a Bud Light campaign featuring transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney.

This year, the commercial coming closest to making a real statement, he said, was the Nike ad emphasizing female success in a male-dominated world. The spot features WNBA stars Caitlin Clark, A’ja Wilson, and Sabrina Ionescu, along with other elite female athletes, with a voiceover by rapper Doechii, who delivers the final line: “Whatever you do, you can’t win. So Win.”

It made Malefyt think of Kamala Harris, without being outright political.

Nike has been absent from the Super Bowl for almost three decades. “Nike is losing market share, so they need a big win themselves,” said Malefyt.

He found the most powerful ads to be from pharmaceutical companies: Novartis with a bold ad about breast cancer screening and Pfizer with a little boy beating cancer. “The drug ads were provocative … powerful. But maybe people are inured now to ads that say something.”

Humorous spots came from Doritos, featuring aliens; Pringles and Little Caesars with flying hair, mustaches, and eyebrows; and Mountain Dew with singing seals, including Seal, the singer. In its “Built Different” campaign, Duracell featured a battery reboot for Tom Brady, showing him suffering an on-air power failure and needing the help of a Duracell scientist.

Celebrities were in abundance, which Malefyt called a “safe bet.”

But why play it so safe?

Malefyt pointed out that most of the commercials were in production last fall, in the heart of a contentious presidential election season. “So of course they were very careful to stay away from anything political at all.”

While pursuing her doctoral studies, Fordham history professor Stephanie Huezo, Ph.D., was intrigued to learn about those who were “teaching people to read and write during a war, when they were fleeing military operations,” she said. Thus began her research that led to her current book project on how popular education has helped people organize and effect change—in both El Salvador and the United States.

Revolutionary Learners

Huezo is on leave this semester writing the book, tentatively titled Revolutionary Learners: Grassroots Organizing and Political Consciousness in Salvadoran Communities (1980-2020). Her work is supported by a prestigious Career Enhancement Fellowship, funded by the Mellon Foundation and administered by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, which focuses on strengthening democracy and civil discourse.

The Salvadoran Civil War killed more than 75,000 people over a 12-year period. The war ended in 1992 with UN-mediated peace accords between the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) and the Salvadoran government, which gave neither side a conclusive victory.

It was soon after the outbreak of the civil war—when the government had shut down hundreds of schools—that communities in FMLN-controlled areas turned to popular education, a grassroots approach to spreading literacy and political awareness, Huezo said. Professional teachers, professors, union organizers, and others trained the popular educators, hundreds of whom taught the poor and oppressed in rural communities and FMLN guerilla camps.

Many of those who were teaching the popular teachers had no more than a sixth-grade education. They often worked in abandoned buildings or under mango trees, sometimes forced to share paper and pencils—if any were even available, as Huezo described in an article last year.

‘Trying to Build a New Society’

Salvadoran communities and the FMLN were looking beyond mere survival. During her interviews in El Salvador, Huezo spoke with a woman who became an educator after being inspired by the FMLN saying they were “trying to build a new society” through education, in preparation for eventually taking power.

Teachers used the generative method of a Brazilian educator named Paulo Freire, leveraging students’ existing knowledge to build literacy while also helping them understand their country’s history and develop critical thinking.

“That’s really what popular education does—it not only teaches people how to read and write by using simple words that fit into one’s daily life, but also understand the root of a situation in order to then work to change it,” Huezo said.

Long-Term Impacts of Popular Education

Popular education strengthened young people’s commitment to resisting the repressive Salvadoran government and gave people the education they needed for organizing food distribution and other local efforts, according to Huezo. The education had longer-term impacts as well, as communities that organized during the war also supported the country’s first-in-the-world ban on metals mining, passed in 2017 (but recently repealed).

“There’s more awareness of the power of organizing because of what happened” during the civil war, Huezo said.

Popular educators from Central America have helped seed organizing efforts in U.S. immigrant communities as well. In her book, Huezo will describe how these communities’ activism helped bring about Temporary Protected Status, a federal government designation that spares immigrants from deportation for humanitarian reasons. (The Biden administration gave the program an 18-month extension in early January.)

Huezo described popular education as empowering not only for students but for their teachers—and for anyone trying to effect change. By sharing their knowledge, teachers lose the attitude of “I’m no one” and come to appreciate what they have to offer, even if they didn’t get far in school.

The larger lesson, she said, is that “even though we might feel like we don’t have a lot to give, we do.”

That’s the topic of a recent book by Richard Teverson, Ph.D., assistant professor of art history, who puts a spotlight on something that tends to be overlooked in histories of conquering powers: the hopes and dreams of the conquered.

Studying such “past futures” is growing more popular in the humanities and social sciences, said Teverson, author of Visions of the Future in Roman Frontier Kingdoms 100 BCE–100 CE, published in September by Routledge. “You can’t get a full picture of a decision that someone makes in the past,” he said, “unless you have a sense of what they thought could happen.”

Teverson gained this sense by examining public art created during the empire’s expansion. He got the idea for the book from his students—when they wrote in a midterm exam about the imagined futures reflected in the Arch of Constantine in Rome, he decided to apply this idea at the former empire’s edge and beyond it, to structures created by people who later came under Roman rule.

Nations or groups being taken over deserve to have their aspirations understood rather than being told to simply “get on board” with their new ruler’s vision, he said. 

“Even people who you might think are on the losing side of history have a future that they’re envisaging and, especially if it’s no longer feasible in some way, are engaged in a really complicated idea about how to fit their aspirations to reality,” he said.

Protecting Rights Through Art

In 14 BCE, as Alpine tribes were falling to Roman conquest, the local ruler Cottius made a deal with the Romans to absorb his kingdom into the empire and remain as magistrate.

To proclaim the new order, he commissioned an archway that, Teverson argues, was designed with the future in mind: As opposed to the Romans’ usual depictions of peacemaking, which might show a vanquished barbarian kissing the hand of a Roman general, the arch contains a relief of Cottius shaking hands with the Roman emperor Augustus.

It also shows tribes receiving citizenship tablets—a way of codifying certain rights and privileges in case they were later challenged, Teverson argues. “This seems, to me, pretty direct in its aspirations and its concern for documenting a ritual of political transfer,” he said.

‘A Divinely Ordained Future’

Another example comes from Kommagene, in modern-day Turkey, a kingdom conquered by Rome in 17 CE. Before that, as wars involving Rome and other powers clouded the kingdom’s future, its ruler, Antiochos I, built a hilltop complex containing icons and images meant to convey a glorious destiny for the kingdom.

That was also his goal, Teverson argues, when the king took the unusual step of including an engraving of his own horoscope so that worshippers would compare it with the night sky and be reminded, “‘Oh, we are working in a kingdom that has a divinely ordained future,’” he said.

Crafting ‘the Futures They Need to Survive’

Through this and other stories of artistic expression, Teverson illustrates how people “craft the futures they need to survive” in the face of uncertainty about what’s coming. It’s an idea that resonates from ancient Rome to today’s marginalized communities who may have a picture of their own future in mind—but face strong headwinds in making it a reality, he said. 

An example might be city planners envisioning a future for a neighborhood—like Harlem, where Teverson lives—without consulting with the residents, he said. “If you want to understand the problems of Harlem, you need to, in some ways, ask yourself, well, what does Harlem think its future is going to be?” 

While writing the book, he was thinking of the looming problem of climate change and the questions that future generations might ask about the future we’re trying to shape today.

“Maybe even in my daughter’s lifetime,” he said, “they’re going to look back and [say], what were you planning in 2024?”

“I’m grateful that they gave me a shot to come here,” said Bernard Anderson, a mixer at Greyston. “[When I] came here,” Anderson said, “I stopped going to jail.”

He and other employees who have flourished at Greyston tell its story in a documentary recently co-produced by Gabelli School of Business professor Michael Pirson, Ph.D. It’s the latest outgrowth of research by him and his colleagues about how businesses can succeed by tuning in to their employees’ humanity.

Addressing the Great Resignation

Key to this approach is promoting employees’ dignity, according to an Oct. 30 Harvard Business Review article co-authored by Pirson, Gabelli School professor Ayse Yemiscigil, Ph.D., and Donna Hicks, Ph.D., an associate at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

The article describes how to lead an organization with dignity—by defining it clearly, recognizing people’s inherent value, and acknowledging dignity violations, among other things. The goal is creating workspaces “where people feel seen and heard, and where they can collaborate at the next level” because of it, said Pirson, the James A. F. Stoner Endowed Chair in Global Sustainability at the Gabelli School.

Yemiscigil said it’s an urgent topic because of the so-called Great Resignation and “the epidemic of low employee engagement.”

“There are all sorts of indicators showing that the way that we manage and lead organizations is not working for the majority of people,” she said.

Creating a dignity culture, Pirson and Yemiscigil said, involves such things as listening to understand people, acknowledging employees as whole human beings, and giving employees a greater voice in the organization. “It doesn’t take long” for this culture to take hold if there’s enough intention and commitment, Pirson said.

Inspired by Sesame Street

Helping companies make this shift is the idea behind the documentaries Pirson started co-producing about four years ago after he happened to meet some of the (human) cast members of Sesame Street through a Gabelli School connection. Inspired by the show’s emphasis on human potential, he set out to feature companies that exemplify humanistic management, working with co-producer Alison Bartlett, a writer, director, and Emmy-nominated actress who was a Sesame Street cast member.

His second short film, Zen Brownie, focuses on Greyston Bakery, a supplier of Ben & Jerry’s founded in 1982 by Bernie Glassman, a physicist and Buddhist monk. (One of Glassman’s friends, Oscar-winning actor Jeff Bridges, narrates.) The bakery’s dignity-based open hiring policy creates “a virtuous cycle of trustworthiness,” Pirson says in the film. “Trust that you place in other people typically gets trust back” and often inspires the recipient to want to live up to that, he says.

Studying Student Behavior

His team has shown the documentaries at film festivals; they’re looking for a distributor and planning a few more films. He and Yemiscigil are also working on studies, soon to be submitted to the Journal of Business Ethics, that show how dignity can boost employees’ motivation and engagement as well as teams’ performance. Some of their findings come from a study of 800 Gabelli School students preparing for a consulting competition, working in teams.

Dignity is important not only for companies but for society because it frees us to think more about large-scale problems, Pirson said, giving climate change as an example.

Without “dignity wounds” occupying our minds, he said, “we move from a defensiveness into a space of abundance where we can create, and that is what’s necessary for our species to actually survive.”