ORAL HISTORY:
DR. MINDY FULLILOVE
Mindy Thompson Fullilove, MD, was born 1950 in Orange, NJ. Her father was a prominent civil rights activist and her mother was committed to anti-racism in all aspects of her life and work.Her studies of urban epidemics -- what she called the “mad plagues of the 90s” -- led her to social psychiatry, the study of the ways in which social systems influence people’s mental health. Her observations of the destructive effects of mad plagues on inner-city neighborhoods led to the study of cities under the tutelage of the renowned French urbanist, Michel Cantal-Dupart. Dr. Fullilove has brought these three perspectives together to create a unique body of work. Her contributions to the scientific community include: early identification of the intersection of the crack and AIDS epidemics; documentation of the high levels of trauma among women in recovery from crack addiction and proposals to address that form of co-morbidity; the description of “root shock” in the aftermath of mass upheaval; the description of “serial forced displacement", and the identification of nine elements of urban restoration. Dr. Fullilove holds a B.A. from Bryn Mawr College and an M.S./M.D. from Columbia University. She is an emeritus professor of urban policy and health at The New School, where she taught from 2016 to 2024.
STAN WALDEN: Right. So we've started recording here. Um, my name is Stan Walden. It's, uh, June 4th, 2024 at approximately 10:00 AM and I'm speaking with Dr. Mindy Fullilove. Thank you for joining me, Mindy. Um, uh, just before we go any further, I want to confirm whether I have your permission to record this conversation.
MINDY THOMPSON FULLILOVE: You have my permission to record this conversation.
WALDEN: Thanks so much. Um, well, um, you know, I, in just getting ready for this, um, conversation we have now, uh, I was thinking, you know, you'd mentioned in a previous email, just, uh, your work elucidating the AIDS crisis as it's manifesting in the South, particularly in the US, um, in "America's Secret Epidemic." And then, you know, I checked the date when this was published, which was 2004. And then, um, I was wracking my brain trying to situate this other piece I'd read in my mind, um, in the past and, um, I looked on the New York Times Magazine website for this article. It's called "The Secret Epidemic." Um, and it's, again, situating the aids, uh, and HIV infections, um, in the US South. And this is written in, uh, 2017. So it's so funny—well, you know, it's horrifying. And, uh, but, you know, just so astonishing that the secret epidemic is still a secret between 2004 and 2017. Um, and I don't know if you have any reactions to that, you know, maybe it doesn't surprise you at all, but, um, you know, as I'm trying to, uh, you know, situate the crisis in relation to New York City and The New School community and kind of a young generation that will soon enter, you know, the workforce and professions where they have a lot of power to influence thinking and the way we situate, uh, ourselves between, uh, places and spaces. I don't know if you have a, a reaction to just, I mean, where things stand regarding this conversation and how people, uh, do or do not think about it.
FULLILOVE: Uh, we, we did a paper, uh, um, in the, just before I left San Francisco to come to New York, which was looking at, um, kind of what had happened in Oakland. And it was like, okay, that's right across the Bay. Huge epidemic in San Francisco. Lots of response. What's happening on the other side of the Bay, are people picking up their ears and saying, let's prevent this? Um, so our project was called Epidemic Response in Alameda, and our paper is called, "Many Were Called." Um, and it was, what was so interesting about that study was that we talked to all these community organizations, and it, it wasn't like, obviously at that point, it was 1989, 1987 to 1989 when we were doing this study. It wasn't like the government in the beginning of the eighties put out a uniform call and said, big epidemic, let's mobilize. Here's what you do.
So it was left to the organizations, and the organizations were mobilized by feeling that it was in whatever they called their domain. So, uh, so there were, you know, literally black buttons that said, "Black People Get AIDS Too," right? It was sort of like, oh my God, Black people get AIDS. And it was like, Hispanic people get AIDS and, women get AIDS. So every group was making this unique discovery that AIDS was in their purview, and then developing programs. So as opposed to what you ideally want in an epidemic, which is massive universal response, the creation of new relationships, the suppression of the infection, um, for everybody, it was kind of the opposite. It was sort of, "oh, I should be involved? Me? Our group? What, we get it?" Nobody, nobody wanted that. Um, and so, you know, people talk about the AIDS disaster, but I think that's at the heart of it that, uh, that public health, you're, there's a way you're supposed to run an epidemic.
And COVID, we didn't do perfectly, but it's much closer to how you're supposed to run an epidemic. You, you say, "oh my God, big problem. Let's do something. What are we gonna do? Okay, we figured it out, let's do it." Well, they could have done better, but it, but the AIDS is like, not, not that, right? And it's still not that. So, um, and the ways in which COVID failed are, um, reminiscent of the ways our response to AIDS failed. So we did a project which had to do with really giving people good information about COVID. So it was called the People's CDC. And we did a report, which has recently come out. Um, so you could find it on the American Journal of Preventive Medicine Forum. Anyway, it's called "Too many Left Behind" about how did our COVID response fail.
[05:28]
And it will, you know, I'm sure seem very reminiscent. If you were to compare our "Many Are Called" to "Too Many Left Behind," you see lots of parallels. So it's not surprising, and it's how we run, it's how we run things, except it's worse, I think. But because the influence of neoliberalism is even more intense and pervasive, the neoliberalism has destroyed even more organizations and institutions than had happened. 'Cause it had just started in 1981. So we had more robust systems, but also more hatred, more acceptance that you could leave somebody out to die.
WALDEN: Um, so there's that, you know, really pervasive and negative aspect of, you know, a really, uh, problem—uh, a really weak kind of network of care for people that makes these issues, uh, you know, it exacerbates the care for people in these crises. And then, of course, the effect of neoliberalism. Um, one of my entry points to this question of, um, AIDS and how it's remembered how it's treated and how it continues to unfold was, um, Sarah Schulman's "Gentrification of the Mind," um, and, uh, the work of, there's, you know, there's the, the systems at play, um, that, uh, you know, you just spoke to, but then there's people's, um, ability to conceptualize or engage, um, and kind of remember and address, um, uh, some of these, you know, the problems that they're facing and the realities that prevent them from overcoming some of these challenges.
WALDEN: Um, and, you know, you spoke to, again, in "Root Shock" about, um, you know, when you desiccate a neighborhood, people's ability to react. It's maybe not entirely gone, but it takes much more effort to react and, uh, it takes a lot more effort to come together. And so, do you, um, do you see, you know, as neoliberalism kind of takes its toll ever more, do you see people continuing to kind of overcome that? Um, or do you see that becoming ever more challenging? I wonder how you react to kind of the power of the people and, um, you know, the, the ways we connect and maintain community against these forces.
FULLILOVE: When I was writing “Root Shock,”I asked myself, how do you show what existed before?
WALDEN: Mm-Hmm.
FULLILOVE: What does it mean to be a strong community? And I thought it would be good to talk about the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
WALDEN: Mm-hmm.
[08:26]
FULLILOVE: Just 'cause I think, uh, it's so extraordinary. Rosa Parks gets arrested at five o'clock on Thursday, right? December 1st. And the Montgomery Boy [laughs] Bus Boycott starts at 6:00 AM when the buses start to roll on December 5th and 50,000 black people boycott the buses. Can you imagine that happening today?
WALDEN: No.
FULLILOVE: I mean, we did have huge outpouring after the murder of George Floyd, but the Montgomery Bus Boycott, they had to stay off the buses for over a year.
WALDEN: Yeah.
FULLILOVE: So we could get a huge outpouring of outrage, but the organization to support a sustained effort. You know, people baking pies to pay for things. We don't have anything like that today. And furthermore, when the bonds break, people reorganize, but they reorganize in tribal units that don't like each other.
WALDEN: Yeah.
FULLILOVE: So it's polarized.
WALDEN: Yeah.
FULLILOVE: In ways, hugely polarized. I mean, all the pundits agree, I think on the right and on the left. Their solutions to it are different, but they all agree that we have a badly fractured society.
WALDEN: Yeah.
FULLILOVE: And so, uh, systems of prejudice that are fairly stable, have been stable for hundreds of years, create a structure within which people can organize themselves. How are they gonna manage that? So the Montgomery bus boycott is against that structure of segregation, but the people within the black community were highly organized. And there were over those hundreds of years—weird and limited—but structures of connection between the Black community and the white community. So all that gets thrown up into the air in the intervening years because of a series of noxious policies. So now we have very limited social bonds, and we're polarized into groups that don't like each other. And we're facing climate change, um, which is gonna bring a powerful—I don't even know what you call it—wave after wave after wave of catastrophe, right? It's not like climate change is gonna change abruptly. There might be a cliff, but, you know, so far I haven't heard anybody say that. Who knows what's gonna happen. But we know for sure we're gonna have, like, what we had last year, we had 28 billion dollar disasters in 2023. So billion dollar disaster—let's say we have another year of 28 billion dollar disasters in another year and another year, but it's gonna be more, more billion dollar disasters. What would you call that? That's just like, I don't know what you would call that, but we're gonna get hit and hit and hit and hit right. And hit and hit. So a very highly fractured, highly polarized populace is gonna get hit and hit and hit and hit. It has no resources, no solidarity, no kindness, no generosity. Hit, hit, hit, hit. Doesn't that sound awful?
WALDEN: It does not sound inspiring. I'm trying to find if there's a way to, [laughs] I mean, do you, how do you, what gives you hope in that light? I mean, is it the kind of small scale—
FULLILOVE: People always ask me that, what gives you hope? The answer is I study K-Drama. [laughs]
WALDEN: Yeah.
FULLILOVE: I study K-Drama because, um, the Korean Peninsula has been hit and hit and hit over a thousand years.
WALDEN: Mm-Hmm.
FULLILOVE: And people have a concept that they are a people and they should keep it together. And K-Drama is really about, okay, you got hit, but this is what you're supposed to do next that gets it back together. K-Drama is really about getting it back together. It's about restoration. So it's good to watch a story about restoration, and they have techniques like, "oh, that's what you do."
WALDEN: Did you stumble into that? Or did you, how did you kind of, how did that come to your awareness?
FULLILOVE: Netflix.
WALDEN: Yeah.
FULLILOVE: You know, COVID and Netflix.
WALDEN: Yeah, okay.
FULLILOVE: Need I say more? [laughs]
WALDEN: Yeah. Yeah. There you go. No, it speaks for itself. And, and, okay. I mean, that's interesting. My, my question was gonna be, you know, do you see in other, I mean, are you speak—sounds like you're speaking specifically about the US given the fractured, uh, society. Like, do you see—
FULLILOVE: Well, it's pretty fractured here in the US, but neoliberalism, it's everywhere. Neoliberalism is not always as quite as intense as it is here. Uh, they aren't as advanced in people hating each other necessarily, but they're becoming more and more hostile small groups. In Germany that's happening, in France that's happening.
WALDEN: Yeah. I don't know if this is too, if I'm kind of, um, like belaboring or like forcing the point, uh, and you can kind of correct me or react, um, as you see fit. But I, when I was reading again, "Root Shock," um, you know, you're speaking to, you know, fracturing of African American, uh, communities and kind of diminishing of kindness, um, that had been there previously when neighborhoods were more intact prior to urban renewal efforts. Um, it just struck me because I think in, you know, my kind of personal process through this project of AIDS at The New School, you know, I'm kind of contending with, um, I think what a lot of people idolize as like a pre-AIDS kind of life and, um, the fall ensuing fallout. And I think just trying to navigate as a young gay man in the city and kind of what often feels like a hostile sort of kind of culture. Um, and yeah, I think for me, uh, you know, this like, uh, I think just the idea of like a, um, a crisis that impacts community, uh, that divides people in a way that doesn't, that can engender, uh, like a lack of civility or just like a lack of kindness or care, I think, is it, um, I don't know. That was one reaction I had. Um, and of course, it's like the urban renewal and its impact on African American communities is so different than, um, I guess like my experience as a gay man in the city, a white gay man. But I, I just thought there's an interesting parallel of like, uh, like a cataclysm and an eroding of kindness and a culture of care. Um, so that's was something I'm interested when you, uh, noted the book, um, uh, America's Secret Epidemic, to see how that manifested, if at all, um, in terms of like people's perception of, um, like, uh, caring or, um, unkindness or, um, hostility even around kind of, uh, culture of AIDS.
[16:19]
FULLILOVE: You know, uh, root shock is not African American.
WALDEN: Yeah.
FULLILOVE: It's human.
WALDEN: Mm-Hmm. Yeah. Yeah.
FULLILOVE: That's why the picture that I have of the lady who's being displaced in France—
WALDEN: Mm-Hmm.
FULLILOVE: Her face is exactly the same as the lady who's being displaced in Pittsburgh.
WALDEN: Yeah. Yeah.
FULLILOVE: Then the fireman who's just sitting and stunned after the collapse of the World Trade Center, his face is the same.
WALDEN: Yeah.
FULLILOVE: It's not African American. It's a human experience.
WALDEN: Of course. Of course.
FULLILOVE: It doesn't have to be urban renewal.
WALDEN: Right.
FULLILOVE: I define root shock as the destruction of all or part of one's emotional ecosystem.
WALDEN: Mm-Hmm.
FULLILOVE: So whatever they, whatever somebody had, is what they had.
WALDEN: Yeah.
FULLILOVE: So if they lost part of it—
WALDEN: Mm-Hmm.
FULLILOVE: They lost part of it. It doesn't have to have been great.
WALDEN: Mm-Hmm.
FULLILOVE: The nostalgia is for what was lost.
WALDEN: Yeah. Yeah.
FULLILOVE: But if you think about the AIDS epidemic and how many people died so fast, so it wasn't a small part of what they had.
WALDEN: Mm-Hmm.
FULLILOVE: And it wasn't like everybody died on the same day.
WALDEN: Right.
FULLILOVE: It would've been one kind of catastrophe. It was, you know, it was really from '81 until the antiretrovirals come in. Mm. Which if memory doesn't fail me as '96, that's around there, right?
WALDEN: Mm-Hmm. That sounds right. Yeah.
[17:59]
FULLILOVE: It was just, you know, facing a death sentence.
WALDEN: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
FULLILOVE: And people dropping like flies all around you.
WALDEN: Mm-Hmm.
FULLILOVE: It was so horrific. I wasn't in the middle of it.
WALDEN: Mm-Hmm.
FULLILOVE: I was catastrophe adjacent.
WALDEN: Right.
FULLILOVE: All those years.
WALDEN: Yeah.
FULLILOVE: And so it was a huge shattering of what existed, and people pulled it together.
It's a terrible word, but I've just been watching this show, and they keep talking about manliness. "Be brave. You're a man." But there was a real show of manliness during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, [laughs] of, we're facing a catastrophe. We're gonna pull it together. We're gonna use every resource at our command, and we're gonna survive as best we can.
WALDEN: Yeah.
FULLILOVE: I'm really using "manliness" to describe the way in which a man displays his courage and faces up to the darkest hour of his life. So the whole group of gay men were manly. They face the darkest hour of the community's life with exceptional courage and guts, but really they watch people die around them for 15 years. Like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
No community would come through that intact. You can't lose that many people and come through it the same way you were. And there's a certain kind of post-trauma—nobody shows up to help the gay community in its restoration. It was like the black community after urban renewal. You know, they said, well, that was progress. Aren't you glad we made progress? [laughs] But nobody said anything to the gay community. 'Cause you know, secretly a lot of people were glad they died—which was a horrific additional trauma. So, how do you come through that? Your community—it's not the same. So what are you? The gay community has a lot of different things, but one part of the culture is about being fabulous. If you're not out on the forefront, being fabulously courageous, what are you being fabulous about?
It's another stereotype, but the gay community can be rather judgmental. I was joking with a friend of mine who's heterosexual, he was saying how little he had to take on a trip. He said, "men don't need to take a lot of stuff." I said, clearly you've never traveled with gay men. [laughs] They have to take a lot of clothes so they can look fabulous. So if you're not, you're not, I'm just saying, there's many parts of the community. And so if you're being snippy and judgmental, I think your outfit is not cute. Right? Which everybody enjoys, but it's also, you pay a price for the fabulousness, right? That you pay a price for the very much New York gay culture.
WALDEN: Mm-Hmm. Mm-hmm.
FULLILOVE: Am I being, is this too stereotypical? Am I going over the line?
WALDEN: No, I think, um, no, I mean, like, you're speaking to reality. So, um, I, I, I, I, you know, the, like you said, you're catastrophe adjacent and, um, and, and, you know, see it seeing its, uh, impacts from both sides in real time. Um, I think what's the interesting, uh, part to me and how I kind of see the difference between then and now, it's, you know, you know, I'm taking classes at Parsons, like two blocks away from the AIDS memorial, and then I'm, you know, in my classroom, people are like under like questioning why, like, why, why should we, like, think about this? Um, and so I wonder—
FULLILOVE: That's what I'm saying about nobody showed up for the restoration.
WALDEN: Right.
FULLILOVE: Why do we need to think about it? It's over.
WALDEN: Right. And I wonder, I'm curious to know, as you were working in the field, um, uh, you know, seeing, uh, patients and, uh, gathering data, and, you know, particularly, I understand you did a lot of, uh, research in Harlem and the South Bronx, um, and I'm sure elsewhere in the city, um, you know, how were you, were you also experiencing kind of, um, any sort of difference in how people were reacting to the crisis depending on neighborhood or location or population? Uh, how, like, I'm curious to know how any gaps might have manifested, um, in terms of people's, like, sense of how this was manifested in the city.
FULLILOVE: Well, all the [racial] minority communities had just gone through the catastrophe of planned shrinkage, which was the deliberate withdrawal of fire services so that poor neighborhoods would burn down. There are parts of the South Bronx where health areas have lost 80% of their housing. So if you think about what I'm saying about the gay community, that had already happened in the minority communities, and that was part of the dispersal of drug addiction and AIDS in those communities. So the networks were completely shredded. So these are networks of poor people, which are even more essential than networks of rich people. Rich people can buy services, poor people have to barter in their networks. So they had much less to respond with. And, you know, drug addiction gets in the way of people's better natures, because if you're addicted, you have a physiological craving which trumps everything. So within the context of that kindness is very peripheral. It doesn't mean there isn't any, it's just not the driving force. The driving force is how do I get more drugs? The whole, “you rob your grandmother for drugs” is not a myth.
So you have communities that are, that have been badly hit, and they're also hit by de-industrialization. So the economic foundation for the communities is gone, people didn't have work, which also fed the drug epidemics, . So they're coming into this situation, but in a much weaker place, having not had any resources, not having any jobs, having their neighborhoods broken, and having high levels of addiction. Soit's quite different in the sense of what do people have with which to respond? How are you gonna get it together? That said, the people that are still able do take over, do everything they can.
[25:40]
WALDEN: Mm-Hmm, mm-hmm. Did you, was there any, um, you know, in, uh, various texts I've read, you know, there's a lag between, um, you know, the, the general kind of mass media's understanding of AIDS as a white gay male, uh, problem, and then slowly over time, you know, it's an IV drug user problem, and so on and so forth. Um, was there, did you encounter a lag between where the crisis, like, an understanding of where the crisis was situated in the city, maybe initially per neighborhood? Um, and then maybe, like, did you have to contend with making people aware of, "no, it's actually like the problem's also here and here and here"?
FULLILOVE: Uh, yeah, there, that was certainly a problem. I mean, it's like what I was telling you about the epidemic response in Alameda County.
WALDEN: Mm-hmm.
FULLILOVE: People suddenly realized it was in their space.
WALDEN: Mm-Hmm.
FULLILOVE: There was a real lag, which is why the whole response to AIDS—
WALDEN: Mm-Hmm.
FULLILOVE: Is lagged. It doesn't really become a massive heterosexual epidemic that affects wealthy white people.
WALDEN: Mm-Hmm.
FULLILOVE: So it's always marginalized.
WALDEN: Sure, yeah.
FULLILOVE: People were fighting to expand the boundaries.
WALDEN: Mm-Hmm.
FULLILOVE: We did a project for the part of the Ryan White reauthorization where we looked AIDS care for women.
WALDEN: Mm-Hmm.
FULLILOVE: We called it the WEAR Project: Women's Equity and AIDS Resources. So we went to a number of cities to look at what had been developed. One of our colleagues who was involved with the study used it for her dissertation research.
We have this process of doing situation analysis, and you have to name the situation: what did you see? And she named it “Islands of Success in the Midst of Inadequacy.” So it was interesting, there would be these places where women could get everything they needed which was beautiful to see, people would be really prospering. And then all these other places, it was really hard. You could get your AIDS care in one place, but they didn't have mental health services or addiction services or pediatric services. So women—
WALDEN: Where did you say this was, in what part of the country?
FULLILOVE: We went to various cities.
WALDEN: Okay. Okay.
FULLILOVE: So it was, it was a mess.
WALDEN: Mm-Hmm.
FULLILOVE: What women were up against, unless they were lucky enough to be in one of these places. The ridiculousness was that there was a fully-developed model of how to do it right that we weren't implementing across the board. The additional difficulty was Ryan White had a lot of community engagement. So you would say, well, why don't the women just go to the meetings and say what they need? But, you know, the women had kids, they had this, they had that. And so exerting that kind of political power was difficult. But also they were up against the well organized white gay men. So the communities pitted against each other, who got the Ryan White AIDS resources, who was in charge—did the men care about the women? So even as the structures are developed, the basic racism of America and the basic polarization of America gets replicated in weird ways among people with AIDS and that also becomes part of the problem.
WALDEN: Wow.
FULLILOVE: Oh, it's a difficult situation.
WALDEN: Yeah. Yeah. Um, can you talk about how your work maybe transition from, you know, you said it's been many years since that you were directly involved with that work, and, you know, did things kind of evolve organically? I understand in reading, uh, parts of the, uh, "America's Secret Epidemic," there's challenges with funding at various junctures or just getting maybe more buy-in. But, um, I'm curious to know just how your work evolved from there.
FULLILOVE: [30:04] It was Rodrick Wallace's paper, "[A] Synergism of Plagues," which you should read.
WALDEN: Yeah.
FULLILOVE: Which is a foundational paper that I read in 1989 before we moved to New York—it said that the burning down of the Bronx was the engine of the AIDS epidemic in New York, or one of the engines of the AIDS epidemic in New York, and an engine of the AIDS epidemic in the world. And I had done residency training in the South Bronx, so I knew exactly what he was talking about. So it was like, oh, is that what that was that I saw? Is that how that worked?
It was quite a revelation. But of course, as a psychiatrist, I, what did I know about cities or neighborhoods—he's talking about this vast thing. I only know about individuals and families and a little bit of systems training, but not like a neighborhood. So it was on my mind to understand the connection. And then in 1993, I met Michel Cantal-Dupart, who's a renowned French urbanist and architect, and he was opening this conference on AIDS, substance abuse, and homelessness. And he said that, doctors know that if you're gonna treat a boil on the skin, you have to treat the whole body to understand the whole thing. And he said, it's the same for a city, it's the same for neighborhoods. If you're gonna work in a neighborhood, you have to understand how it's related to the city.
And I thought, oh, I'm a doctor. I know that. [laughs] So I went up to him and said, would you please teach me about cities? And he said he would. So it didn't really start until 1996. Um, but in the meantime, I started to study the psychology of place. We had a project looking at some housing rehabilitation that was going on in the Bradhurst neighborhood of Harlem. I wondered what is the person's relationship to place which was to me, a necessary theoretical underpinning of looking at what was the impact of what the rebuilding the Bradhurst project was doing. And so I started studying the psychology of place. So I had been doing that for a while and starting to publish on that at the point at which I undertook my studies with Cantal. So that's how, so it sort of, you know, branched off over time.
WALDEN: I really enjoyed reading about your relationship and, uh, your studies with, uh, Michel. Just super interesting to hear, um, you know, a psychiatrist working with an urban, like an urban planner, um, and researcher. So just very exciting from a young architect's point of view. Um, and have you ever worked with Brian McGrath at Parsons, or have you—
FULLILOVE: No, I haven't.
WALDEN: Okay. It's too bad. I feel we really would've benefited from your work. Um, he teaches an urban, uh, design and theory, urban theories course, and urban design studio where we, you know, we are engaging with people in the neighborhoods and, um, you know, doing some interviews, um, with the people that we meet on the street. Um, and, uh, yeah, so just very inspiring and motivating. Um, so I, I love that part of Root Shock. Um, I think the psychology of place is interesting.
Um, you know, part of the project is, um, it's the site, The New School, um, you know, both, you know, its campus, but also its community, um, and kind of the places where we orbit around. Um, and the, you know, I think it's important to situate such a sprawling crisis or try to situate it in the context of one place to see where, uh, what things kind of come to the surface, you know, that way it becomes a little less abstract and more concrete and maybe something we can actually address and talk about. Um, I feel like the, like an institution, like university and The New School in particular is interesting and I'm trying to contend with it. Um, because, you know, I'm, I'm graduating, I'm passing through. Um, it feels, you know, we're kind of it from the perspective of a student. It's an itinerant place. Um, you know, we spend a few years and move on, so why bother looking at here? But I also think that's maybe the most interesting thing about it is that it is always changing. Um, I wonder if you have a reaction to, you know, you're, you, um, you're focusing a lot on like housing and homes and neighborhoods, and I wonder how you think about, um, like a, an educational institution, for example, um, like The New School or, you know, any university you might have been affiliated with.
[35:22]
FULLILOVE: Yeah, I, I've thought a lot about education. Early on in my career, I thought that school failure was the paradigmatic psychosomatic illness where you had to figure out if it was psychological or somatic. There are obviously a lot of somatic reasons for school failure, but also lot of psychological ones. And so I spent a lot of time working on school failure and had the opportunity to replicate a very successful model of addressing school failure at the medical school at UCSF, and then again at Columbia, which is probably my biggest achievement in school failure. And also then we developed a model for addressing a problem at the level of doctoral studies of people not finishing their dissertations. They're then called All-But-Dissertation. We called it the ABD project, which asked, how do you get people through that phase of the dissertation?
Where do people get stuck and where is the, what is the level of the problem? In medical schools, we were able to completely eliminate all the preventable failure, we were able to eliminate all of that. There was a kid whose grandmother died the day before he started medical school. And she was the person who had raised him. I mean, he just wasn't going to do well. So he repeated the year, that's okay with me. He did fine as a doctor. We couldn’t prevent his failure of the first year, but of the time when students were having trouble, we were able to intervene and prevent the failure of the first year.ost of it is preventable. There was a disconnect between the professors and the students. If you can bridge that, then everybody, not only does everybody prosper, they super prosper. Like who they would've been in an ordinary system, they can now become better than that. They get launched better.
WALDEN: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
FULLILOVE: At The New School, I've really enjoyed being part of the PhD program in Public and Urban Policy because it had kind of fallen apart. And then we had to figure out how to put it back together. And that was a lot of fun 'cause we had the opportunity to put it back together with people from Parsons and people from the global program and international affairs as well as public policy. So sort of cross-fertilization and uh, really trying to think, what do we need to teach people to be ready to look at crisis after crisis after crisis? What are they gonna need to be, what are the skills they need to take into that?
FULLILOVE: They can't be too bogged down in theory, in my view.
WALDEN: Mm-Hmm.
FULLILOVE: They have to be very flexible, um, on the ground.
WALDEN: Mm-Hmm.
FULLILOVE: The New School is under assault, I think from neoliberalism. I think neoliberalism has decided to take down progressive universities or the progressiveness of universities and to control thought. The dying gasp of capitalism is, "don't let anybody think this isn't working." [laughs] It's like, well guys, this is actually gonna be hard to do 'cause guess what? It isn't working.
WALDEN: Mm-Hmm.
FULLILOVE: So The New School is really in the cross hairs of that. I don't think it was in the cross hairs of that in the eighties and nineties. So it's interesting. It is just interesting to look at an institution that set itself up to be different. And that was different. When I retired, they gave me a print. I was wondering, are they gonna gimme a gold watch? But no, they gave me this print and I personally think the print is really weird and ugly. [laughs]
WALDEN: Oh no.
FULLILOVE: Yeah. Like what do I do with this? So ugly, and just not me. But the thing is, it's sort of The New School equivalent of a gold watch. You get a really weird modernist print—The New School.
WALDEN: Yeah. Case in point, I suppose. [laughs]
FULLILOVE: Exactly. Yeah, exactly.
[40:01]
WALDEN: That's funny. Yeah. I think another draw to this ongoing question I have, and I think what was interesting about thinking about AIDS and how it interacted with The New School was just, you know, okay, how did it inter impact people? How did it impact this neighborhood and the economy of the neighborhood? You know, affordability, the kind of people who could live there. Uh, you know, students may have been able to live in the neighborhood, but now they're less likely to do that because of expense. Um, and you know, in other conversations I've learned so much about The New School history of a place of continuing education and adult education to an international university that, you know, needs international students to pay tuition, et cetera, et cetera. Um, so to your point, it's, it's exactly that. It's an interesting, you know, this question provokes, you know, analyzing an institution, as you said in the cross hairs. Um, super interesting. Um, I know you have a meeting, um, at 11 and I wanna make sure that we don't go over. Um, so I'm happy to wrap up here. Um, and I just really thank you for your time. Um, we, I'll stop the recording and then we can maybe just chat for a second.
FULLILOVE: Sure.
[end of recording, 41:30]