Nicole Rodriguez:
Hello, and welcome everyone. My name is Nicole Rodriguez. I am a proud Heller alumni. I graduated in 2014 with a MPP in Poverty Alleviation. I'm currently a research director for a state-wide policy think tank in New Jersey, New Jersey Policy Perspective. I am the President of the Heller Alumni Association Board. It is my absolute pleasure to welcome you all today for our program featuring Laurence Simon, Professor of International Development, and Founding Director of the Heller School's Master's Program in Sustainable International Development, as well as the Center for Global Development and Sustainability. Professor Simon will discuss his life's work, dedicated to advancing human rights and building institutions to solve problems of hunger, poverty in developing nations. Dr. Raj Sampath, Associate Professor of Philosophy of Justice, Rights, and Social Change at Brandeis will serve as moderator for today's conversation with Professor Simon.
Nicole Rodriguez:
We are delighted to welcome you, our alumni, parents, Brandeis National Committee members, and friends around the world. Thank you so much for joining much. I will just speak a little bit more about our wonderful speakers, and I'll go through their quick bios.
Nicole Rodriguez:
Professor Simon has taught at Brandeis for 30 years. During his tenure at Brandeis, as I said before, he founded the Heller School's Master's Program in Sustainable International Development and the Center for Global Development and Sustainability. He is Co-Editor and Chief of CASTE, a global journal on social exclusion. Prior to Brandeis, Professor Simon founded and led human rights organizations such as the American-Jewish World Service, GrainPro Inc., and was recruited to help shape the founding of the Google Foundation as senior advisor on global poverty. Professor Simon was Oxfam of America's first Director of Policy Analysis and Advocacy, a land-form consultant to Philippine President Corazon Aquino, and a World Bank United Nations Development Program advisor to the Sri Lankan National Poverty Reduction Program. Excuse me.
Nicole Rodriguez:
We also have Professor Raj Sampath, an Associate Professor of the Philosophy of Justice, Rights, and Social Change at Brandeis. He teaches in the Master's Program in Sustainable International Development, and in the PhD program in Social Policy at the Heller School. He is a lead investigator with the program on social exclusion at the Center of Global Development and Sustainability. Dr. Sampath's current research includes Critical Race Theory, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Intersectionality. I will pass it on now.So let us all please welcome Professor Simon and Professor Sampath.
Rajesh Sampath:
Thank you so much, Nicole, for that wonderful introduction. Thank you, Nicole, for launching this event. We greatly appreciate you and your leadership and stewardship of the Heller Alumni Association as an alum in our school. So this is my distinct pleasure. I'm very humbled to be here in the presence of an old friend and mentor. It's really just a sheer pleasure in my life every opportunity that I have to go down a path with Professor Laurence Simon. I'm going to refer to you as Larry, if that's okay. To reflect on his life. My opening remarks will be very simple to set the stage. We live in very complex times, needless to say.
Rajesh Sampath:
To be able to reflect on the career and the life of an individual who has dedicated himself to social justice and human rights, the two pillars, one can argue of Brandeis' identity, and to bring those experience and all the wonderful history that we have here, and the wonderful alumni, you all have shaped the intuition's values and ethos.
Rajesh Sampath:
I see Laurence Simon, Larry Simon as part of the historical tapestry. He's interwoven into the Brandeis' historical narrative not just as an individual faculty member like me, but as we'll learn through the course of this 30 to 40 minutes, his relationship between Brandeis and the Social Justice Movement is quite profound. Without further ado, we will begin. It's 12:05. We'd like to go, myself and Larry, and I'll pose three questions to him. There are three parts to our conversation, outlining chronologically but substantively three phases in his career from the beginning to now. Then we'll transition to a Q&A where we'll have about 20 minutes. So we're very excited to have this conversation with the broader community.
Rajesh Sampath:
Larry, take us down the memory lane. Take us to the beginnings of your experience. We want to hear about the early formative moments, experiences, events, starting with your family and your upbringing that when you look back now, 50 years later, you can go back and reflect more. If you go to back to your childhood, reflect on how those values shaped your moral compass, your ethical compass to then decide in the future to go into development and then do the development and your approach to development, which we're going to get into. The depths that you bring to this field called development? What is the relationship between those early formative moments and how it shaped your eventual career?
Laurence Simon:
Well, thank you, Raj, very much. Thank you. I've known him for many years, you're always too generous in describing some of the things that I've tried to d in my career. But I would like to begin first by just thanking the Alumni Office at Brandeis, and particularly Allison Sagan, for coordinating this event, and Nicole Rodriguez, the President of the Heller Alumni Association, and the Dean and Staff at Heller that have co-sponsored this event, which is really a gift for me to be able to talk with alumni and friends and current students. I know among people listening in, people from some of the organizations that I work with, including the American Church World Service. So I'm going to intersperse, Raj.
Laurence Simon:
When you're asking me a question, I'm going to intersperse my discussion about the question with some excerpts. They're brief excerpts from some things that I've written. It's not so much really a memoir. I struggled with the idea of memoir. But what I've been writing is more of I guess, a social commentary on things that I've witnessed or been involved in, in different different settings, different countries around the world. A few of the stories were actually previously published in a book called Practicing Development, which was edited by two of our pillar professors or retired professors now, Susan Holcomb and Marian Howard. So slide one, please.
Laurence Simon:
Yes, thank you. So as Raj has asked me, I'm going to talk a little bit about my upbringing. This is my father, Samuel Joseph Simon, his birth certificate actually said Seamus. Like many immigrants to America, their names got changed somewhere in the first few years after landing at Ellis Island. Though my father was the first born in the United States of a family from Kiev. He was born in 1903, a long time ago, lived a long life, into his 90s. He was born at 86 Hester Street, which is still, of course, a tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Laurence Simon:
Things were very poor in those days, and he being the eldest boy in the family, he actually had to drop out of primary school and go to work at about age nine. He thought, eventually go to work. I remember him telling me in actually a belt factory where he ran some kind of machine punching holes and belts at the age of nine and 10. Eventually did get a high school equivalency diploma. Next slide, please.
Laurence Simon:
The next slide is of Hester Street on the left hand side, the Lower East Side of Manhattan. On the right is very interesting. It's a photo of a Talmud class. For those not familiar with Jewish culture and religion, Talmud are the rabbinical commentaries and opinions written over centuries in interpreting Jewish law. Many of the immigrants in the Hester street area were Jewish, though of course, there were many other nationalities mixed into those crowded streets. It was very usual that the little kids like this would go to little room as you can see. It's certainly not a very splendid setting. But for them, they began to study Talmud. Next slide please.
Laurence Simon:
These are my grandparents. On the left is Molly Simon, again, Seamus. Molly spent months traveling from Kiev, then another month or two stayed in Italy while she was trying to earn enough money to purchase her her boat passage and of course in steerage class. All the time, she was carrying an infant in her arms, my Aunt Ader. When she did finally come to New York, she arrived like so many other immigrants in that era, since our early 1900, she arrived at Ellis Island, with so many other immigrants from many, many nations.
Laurence Simon:
When my sons were young, we would take them on the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. I would often gaze up at the statue and just imagine what an extraordinary sight that must have been to my grandparents after such a arduous voyage across the ocean. Molly was met by her husband, Maurice, who had come ahead. Like many immigrants, the husband came to New York first. But times were not at all easy for the new immigrants or my grandparents. They came basically without much in a way of money. With a growing family, Molly and her husband had seven children. I think, let's see Ater, Sam, Jack, Rose, Pearls, Dorothy, and Sarah. My father was the second born but the first born in the United States as I said. She still held three jobs daily, the last one at night cleaning a restaurant on the ground floor of the tenement in which they lived, at 86 Hester.
Laurence Simon:
The family had no photos of Maurice who died before I was born. So I actually don't know what he looked like very well. But I understand from the things my father would almost leak out of my father when we were growing up, that his father, my paternal grandfather, must have been kind of atypic stern Old World father. When I was a young adult, became fascinated reading memoirs and novels of first generation Jews mostly in New York. Their memories of their families and the change that took place among the children when they grew up in New York City. I think Maurice had a hard time adjusting to America with the mix of races and nationalities living cheek by jowl on the Lower East Side.
Laurence Simon:
Conditions, of course, were not very good in those years. One of the courses I teach at Brandeis is on introduction to demography, the social determinants of health and wellbeing. I once uncovered some of the old New York City Health Department records from the first decade of 1900s and specifically records from the Lower East Side. I know we're not doing a seminar on demographics in the moment, but I do have to just cite a couple of statistics because it kind of gives a feeling about the living conditions of many of the immigrants not only Jewish immigrants, but the Irish and the Italians that lived right on those same streets.
Laurence Simon:
The numbers show that the average tenement families slept 12 in a room, a room about 13 feet across, and that the infant death rate in the tenements in those early decade, the infant death rate was one in 10. It's astounding to think this was in the United States of America. Adults in those years died, in the Lower East Side Specifically side specifically died of TB and diphtheria. Surprisingly to us, of course, even died of smallpox and malaria. Of course poor sanitation contributed to other deaths, especially for the inference. On the right side of the screen are Aaron and Annie Rabinowitz, my mother's parents from Minsk. My grandfather was a tailor who didn't speak much English, but went into partnership with an Italian immigrant who also spoke little English. So I don't quite know how they ran their little business, but they seem to have been great friends and did pretty well. Next slide, please.
Laurence Simon:
The slide, these are my parents. quite honestly, when we look back at that, growing up with Sam and Sylvia Simon, my brother and I were really awfully lucky for they were extraordinarily kind and loving parents. Both were first generation born in the US. My father was a very quiet man. Some settings I thought, maybe even a bit meek, because he was very reticent to engage in political discussions outside of the extended family. But he always, I stress really always, quietly gave us gentle guidance on issues of social justice. My brother and I grew up, I was born in Brooklyn, but we moved to Queens when I was a young fellow. We lived in a garden apartment, obviously, a vast difference from the early childhood that my father in particular had. Garden apartment was, I always thought a curious title for these kinds of small apartment buildings because there were certainly no gardens, there were no flowers at all. But it was very clean and decent.
Laurence Simon:
Let me tell you a little about when I was born in Brooklyn, this was in May of 1945. I was born just days after the last of the Nazi concentration camps in Europe were liberated. Yet I don't recall my family ever talking about the Holocaust in my presence. I think, as I look back, I think that they were enormously hopeful of America, that America would be a different kind of place than either Czarist Russia that their families had fled or, of course, what happened in Europe under the Nazis. I think that they wanted to insulate my brother and me from the horrors of the old world.
Laurence Simon:
So let me read just a short paragraph from something I'm writing about that. Grandfather Aaron, that's my mother's father. Never spoke to me about his life in Minsk, except to describe a certain dog he loved. But when we lived in Brooklyn, he did take me to shore. I remember the elderly men with long white beards, who were like my grandfather, Minskies as they called themselves. They were also more recent arrivals at the shore, survivors from Europe.
Laurence Simon:
To the child watching, young as I was, the history of our people felt almost palpable in their prayers, in the rhapsodic, even mesmerizing voice of the Cantor. In the opening of the ark, my own sense of awe glimpsing the Torah scrolls. Much later, I understood something more about the adherence to ritual among these survivors of history, grasping to their authenticity, old men davening, in an alien country, a refuge bounded by their faith, even by a faith that did not save their loved ones from the ovens. My father would have none of this though. Nothing of religion. Yet years later, I realized that my father was probably the most Jewish man I've ever known.
Laurence Simon:
So you see, my father felt, I think that if our history as Jews had any meaning it was that we were called to Tikkun olam, which means to repair the world or possibly even to say, to repair creation. Though he would never use that phrase, of course. But that was his life, far more constrained in work and career than mine would be. But I knew in my gut that he would be proudest of me if I lived a life seeking justice. But most importantly, my father, not just for Jews, but for all who suffered deprivation or oppression. Raj, I think that was the greatest influence in my early youth. Raj, you're muted. You're muted. There you go.
Rajesh Sampath:
Apologize. I couldn't unmute myself, only the host could. I was pleading for some help. Yeah, it wasn't.
Laurence Simon:
Okay.
Rajesh Sampath:
Also I was asked to speak up. Please ping the Q&A or the chat box if you feel that you can't hear me clearly, and any indication of whether this is better, would be helpful I move forward. I think we just glimpsed, I'm speaking to the audience. We really glimpsed a sense of when one speaks about their roots and their upbringing and their struggles, and the struggles of a people, in your context, the Jewish experience, the early immigrants, the first waves that came prior to World War II and Holocaust, and certainly the waves that would come afterwards. It's one thing to talk about the upbringing in forming one's personality, one's demeanor, one's manifestation in the world and how they comport themselves to other human beings and other people.
Rajesh Sampath:
But what I sense when I hear you, Larry, and there's an endearing sense that you have the utmost respect and deference of those roots, and how that actually informed your approach, not only to development, which by nature should embody the principle of Tikkun olam, but really truly everything you do and the way you relate to people. So I wanted to highlight that. The second part that we're moving towards is now that we've seen the foundations, and we've seen this remarkably beautiful and inspiring narrative about the family roots and the roots of the community, and the values that they embodied.
Rajesh Sampath:
We want to move to your early adult years and look at the intellectual ethos, the institutional places that you were in and how that might have shaped your ideas that as a scholar, a thinker, an activist, a practitioner. But what were those intellectual roots that formed not only Larry Simon, the adult, but Larry Simon, who I would argue brings this unique? I say this, because I've met a lot of people in the field of development now over 15 years, 10 years. But brings this unique ability to be introspective and deeply, deeply reflective about the suffering you spoke about embodied in your father, and bring that to light with regard to the actual work of development. So speak to the intellectual roots now, like you spoke with your familiar roots to the eventual career and development.
Laurence Simon:
Thank you. Thank you, Raj. So after I graduated from Queens College of the City University of New York with my bachelor's degree, which was in philosophy, after a while, I decided to pursue philosophy. I enrolled at The New School for Social Research. The New School is really quite an extraordinary place. It still is, of course, but back in those years, the philosophy department still had a fair number of the old, and they were old at that time, the old European scholars who had come to escape the Nazis from Europe, and were part of what they called in those years, the university in exile. Many of them probably thought that they would return after the war to Europe in some did and some kept their faculty appointments at the New School.
Laurence Simon:
These were people like Aaron Gurvich, one of the great names in phenomenology. I was probably a little bit too young to fully appreciate that at that time, but Hans Jonas, I was quite fascinated with his work and his teaching. The delightful Horace Callen, who was very old. He was actually a graduate student, William James, who died in 1910. Callen, when when I first met him, I was young, but he was quite elderly. But the professor I think who had the most influence on me was Hannah Arendt. If we can have the next slide please.
Laurence Simon:
I'm going to read a short excerpt again, specifically about Hannah Arendt. There you go. Thank you. Hannah Arendt once told a story to my graduate seminar, Political Philosophy at the New School, about two families she knew in Germany at the outbreak of World War II. I'm sorry, I seem to have lost the screen here. Let me see if I can get the ... Oops. Raj, can you hear me?
Rajesh Sampath:
I can hear you.
Laurence Simon:
Oh okay. Then I will continue because I've lost my ... Now, I've got it back. Sorry. Sorry for that. Technology. So I was saying that Hannah Arendt told a story about two families she knew in Germany at the outbreak of World War II. One was a well to do Berlin family whose sons had the advantages of well-refined milleu of great music, philosophy and literature. The other was a rural family whose son's formal education was limited by their station in life and by the relentless demands of farming.
Laurence Simon:
As the war heated up, the sons of both families were conscripted into the Nazi army, but only the sons of the wealthy family went. Hear Professor Arendt posed the unanswerable question. It is a question I deviate from the script for a second here. It is a question that I think is very relevant to the to the ethical questions that we constantly ask ourselves, we should be asking ourselves about problems of development. Professor Arendt asked, Why did the sons in Berlin go willingly to the army while the farm lads refused and died in prison? What makes for a moral compass or the courage to refuse to participate in the machinery of oppression? Was it a fine education or a family culture grounded in basic decency?
Laurence Simon:
Years later, the questions continue. How do we or can we even intervene in oppression from the outside? Or is the world so interconnected, that oppression of poverty anywhere are linked everywhere, even to the modest bank account of a professor or to his graduate students? Unfortunately, the Vietnam War interrupted my studies at the New School. I left the new school to join the Anti-War Movement and frankly figure out how do I stay out of what I consider to be an immoral war.
Laurence Simon:
Some years later, I got a job as assistant to the dean at Fordham University, at the Lincoln Center Campus, which is in Manhattan. There, I met an old Irishman named Gary McOwen who took me under his wing and introduced me to the world of development. We found it and he of course as director and I, well, he kind of called me assistant director, but in truth, I really basically organized things like conferences for what we called the Third World Forum.
Laurence Simon:
Fordham was very much like Brandeis in many respects, the faculty of all faiths, a Jesuit institution, but faculty and students from all over the world and many nationalities, many faith traditions. The Third World forum received many distinguished guests, two of whom would have profound influence on me as a young fellow, and who helped clarify what I would consider my calling to work against oppression on a scale my father would admire. The two were the Archbishop of Recife and Olinda, the Northeast of Brazil, and Paula Freri, with whom I maintained a lifelong friendship and who became a real mentor to me during my work in Central America some years later. The next slide please. Thank you.
Laurence Simon:
On the left is the Archbishop Dom Hélder Câmara from the Northeast of Brazil. To the right, of course, is recognizable to many people in our group today, Mother Teresa. I had met Dom Hélder, was enormously impressed. Here, obviously a Jewish young fellow, meeting the archbishop, who came to Fordham. I was asked to take him around Manhattan, help buy and winter clothing and things like that. Over the next few weeks, got to know him very well. Years later, I met him again. I'm going to now read from this manuscript again.
Laurence Simon:
In August 1976, I traveled to Philadelphia to hear the Brazilian Archbishop Dom Hélder Câmara speak at the International Eucharistic Congress. A few years before, while on the staff of Fordham University, I was asked to escort the Archbishop around New York. Even as the Archbishop, Dom Hélder wore a plain brown cossack and wododen cross. Yet his aura of goodness emanated not from his outward appearance, but from the kindness of his countenance. But really, it came from the words spoken gently but firmly about the injustice of poverty and oppression. The poor in Brazil called him, the Bishop of the Slums. The military rulers of Brazil in those years called him the Red Bishop. He lived simply as Dorothy Day activist, leader in the Catholic Workers Movement would say, so that others may simply move. Dom Helder was often quoted as saying, "When I give food to the hungry, they call me a saint. But when I ask why they are hungry, they call me a communist."
Laurence Simon:
If Father Gustavo Gutierrez of Peru is the acknowledged Father of Liberation Theology. The late Archbishop Câmara is surely the activist priest whose life was on the line for his advocacy. So in Philadelphia that day, he spoke in a session on social justice with Mother Teresa, the Albanian born nun, whose calling within a calling was to live among the poor of Calcutta and serve the needs of the unwanted, the unloved and the uncared for, as she said. Mother Teresa, who in in 2016, was canonized by Pope Francis spoke about her congregation of the Missionaries of Charity which she had founded in 1950, and for which she had rightly received the praise of world awed by such selflessness.
Laurence Simon:
Charity for Mother Teresa was channeling God's love to bring peace into the lives of the destitute. Whereas for Dom Helder, social justice was the embodiment of God's love. Dom Helder spoke after Mother Teresa, and he spoke of her devotion. Then in the softest of tones, began the most passionate but oblique critique of charity, which has been repeated innumerable times in his writings, in his homilies, and heartfelt pleading for what a radical revolution of love really means.
Laurence Simon:
Charity alone, an act even of genuine kindness, but that might ignore the cause of the suffering it was meant to heal, aided the perpetuation of injustice, he said. For Dom Helder, God's love called him to go beyond charity, to repair the breach of justice that could not happen without reordering humanity's social reality. I'll never forget that with tears in his eyes, fixed above the audience, Dom Helder ended his talk that day with words of an old Brazilian folk song. When one man dreams alone, it is nothing but a dream. But when two or more dream together, it is not merely a dream, but the beginning of a new reality. These thoughts, these thoughts resonated powerfully with my own upbringing, with the values of social justice, for my father were the true meaning of our Jewish heritage, the takeaway of our people suffering and of our lives work to repair the bridge. Next slide, please.
Laurence Simon:
So after even during my years at Fordham University, Lincoln Center, my experiential learning really began. Because the people that I met there, the priests and sisters and many others who had come to Fordham from Latin America or going to Latin America, some as missionaries, and some as scholars, really propelled me to go and visit and begin in a very, very modest and humble way to begin some work with these extraordinary people. So for instance, here I am sitting on the porch. This is actually after I joined Oxfam, which was about this time, Oxfam America.
Laurence Simon:
So we did a good deal of work i Central America. This is in Nicaragua, one of the Miskito Indian communities out on the Caribbean coast. I'm sitting there holding my glasses and lived with the people to understand better their lives and the challenges ahead. So in about 1977, I think I began work at Oxfam and did a good deal of work as I mentioned, the Central American Caribbean. I became the first Director of Policy Analysis and Advocacy for Oxfam.
Laurence Simon:
To give a context for what Oxfam's work in Central America and Latin America was at that time, little bit before in 1969, there was a Medellín Conference of Latin American bishops, one must remember that the Catholic Church, the priests really wrote into Latin America into the continent with conquistadores. Until the mid 20th century, the relationship between the bishops and the oligarchs, the rulers of Latin American countries were very close. It wasn't until 1969 that the Latin American bishops at their meetings every 10 years, which this time was at Medellín in Columbia, chose what they call the option for the poor. This went out like an earthquake around Latin America.
Laurence Simon:
The Catholic Church basically said, "The oppression of our people, the increasing landlessness, the increasing poverty, the disenfranchisement from their natural inheritance, is such that the Church must now side or choose what they call the option for the poor." This built upon a movement within the church that had already gained a good deal of strength among the priests and sisters and religious communities around the continent.
Laurence Simon:
This was what was called liberation theology or theology of liberation and one that tried to take the teachings of the church and the preaching of the church back to its origins, in what the theologian's deliberation like Father Gustavo Gutierrez felt were the original words and original intent of Jesus. So for me, my ties to the church from Fordham days gave me a superb vantage point to witness the revolution or the post revolutionary efforts in Nicaragua after the Somoza dictatorship fell.
Laurence Simon:
It also gave me a first hand experience in non political assistance that Oxfam provided to the agrarian reform in Nicaragua to the literacy crusade, working with my mentor, Paolo Freri who was very influential there. This was really quite extraordinary because the most Nicaraguans, middle class people even, lived right really on the Pacific Coast, never went inland. There were very few roads that even went into the rainforest area. The volunteers who were all mostly teenagers and young adults who went out into the rainforest in the rural areas to teach literacy, basic literacy, so many of them I met actually sounded kind of like King Lear. When the volunteers would say to me, "I never knew how poor our people are." That was really a sea change for them. Next slide please.
Rajesh Sampath:
Larry, just a quick check on the time I got pinged it, we want to try to transition probably in about seven or eight minutes. I don't want to rush you. I hate interrupting.
Laurence Simon:
I will skip over some material. But just with respect to liberation theology, I would just say and closing that part of the discussion here that it did spread. As Raj, you well know, spread to many other religious traditions, where the Protestant traditions or other religions and even became very prominent in the African American and the theological discussion. So the African American James Cone, who passed away a couple of years ago, had grown up in Arkansas was a major theologian liberation teaching at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Among books are God of the Oppressed, the Cross and the Lynching Tree, a Black Theology of Liberation. Then I think in these days that we talk about implicit racism in institutions, it would be great to build Cone's work into that. So next slide please. One more please. Okay.
Laurence Simon:
So I'm now going to turn to the American Jewish World Service. I know there are some friends from AJWS who are listening to this today, including, I believe Robert Bank who's the current president and CEO. I'm not going to, in the interest of time, not going to read from the manuscript that I have about that. I'd be happy to send some of this to people if they want to write to us. The reason I began AJWS is because when I was still with Oxfam and I was working in southern Africa, in the Horn of Africa and disaster zones and in places, working with the African National Congress, which was in exile in Lusaka, Zambia at that time, Oxfam was contributing, obviously, non political aid, aid for childcare, and so forth.
Laurence Simon:
Never did I find in all my years in traveling and working in developing countries, never found an identifiable Jewish presence there. It occurred to me for many reasons, which I wish we had time to go through, that this was maybe the time that the Jewish community of America, at least, would begin, if you will, a Jewish Oxfam. That is a non political, non sectarian organization founded within and supported largely by the American Jewish community that we do work with any peoples around the world, whose lives were deprived and compromised by human rights violations. This is the great Ellie B. Sell to the right of me in this photograph. He was one of our founding board members and an extremely important fellow who helped us to help me and others to really start the organization. Next slide please.
Laurence Simon:
This is one of the things that we were asked to do near the beginning of the American Jewish World Service. In the mid to maybe around 1985, '86, the world price for sugar basically collapsed. In the Philippines, one of the biggest sugar growing areas in the world actually was the island, it's a very large island of Negros Occidental. When Mrs. Aquino came to power, through contacts, of course, because I didn't know her directly, she had asked me to take on some responsibility, to come and see whether or not we could help to diversify crops away from sugar on Negros.
Laurence Simon:
So I came and I came with a team of people, including an Israeli agronomist, and others. So this is Sonny Alvarez, the Minister of Agrarian Reform, talking with me on to the right top it's Serge Chenigan, who was at that time the National Federation of Sugar Workers head. Our team took a very close look at the proposed land reform in Negros. Obviously, I don't have time to go into it. But basically, next slide please. We reported back to Mrs. Aquino, President Aquino and told her that with all due respect, of course, we could not support the diversification of the crops, because the land holding patterns and the poverty of the cane cutters in Negros was such that we would only be reviving an agricultural economy that would exploit, deeply exploit the labor and the lives of many thousands of cane cutters or agricultural workers for maybe another hundred years. Next slide please.
Laurence Simon:
We'll skip over this. This is for Fred Cuny, who was one of the great figures in disaster response from Dallas, Texas. He had asked us at AJWS to provide some assistance in Sarajevo during the war. I'm afraid we'll just skip this story. The next slide is an outgrowth of American Jewish World Service was the development in conjunction with Israeli grain storage scientists, the development of hermetic storage, which Israel had developed for their own storage techniques, which was the first technology for grain storage that met the terms of the Montreal Protocol. The Montreal Protocol for the elimination of ozone depleting substances like methyl bromide.
Laurence Simon:
AJWS pioneered this research throughout Africa and other places. After I left AJWS, I continued this and Fred Cuny and I had actually founded, he did with his technical assistance, and I did as the founding chairman of GrainPro, which is today, the world's leading company manufacturing and helping to solve problems using hermetic storage. Next slide please.
Laurence Simon:
Let's now going to just jump to hopefully just a few moments to of course, our time together at Brandeis. I came to Brandeis and with the permission of the current dean at that time, at the Hill School and the provost of the University at that time was Irving Epstein. We started a training program for the next generation of developing practitioners and those that would emerge as policymakers. Here's my good friend, Dr. Raj Sampath of course and Azizo Ate who was from Togo, and is very, almost indicative of the kinds of students that we've had, thousands of students over the last now 26 years. I was director of the program for 20 years and about five of those years also as Associate Dean for Academic Planning.
Laurence Simon:
Azizo grew up in Togo, in real poverty, in a family that was illiterate. He emigrated to the United States, worked for the US Postal Service for some years, and then decided that his calling was to work on poverty around the world. He ended up being a diplomat in the US State Department. Now he is a PhD student at Rice University in African Religions and Theology. Next slide please.
Laurence Simon:
Raj, here, I'd love your take on this too. We began a Center for Global Development Sustainability. We do many things around the world, I encourage people to take a look at our website. But the area that I'm most involved in certainly, and Raj is our lead investigator on social exclusion throughout the world. One of the things that we began to do were a conference, a series of conferences about caste in South Asia and even in America. These are some photos from just one of the conferences, this one with Cornel West. Next slide please.
Laurence Simon:
We began an academic journal, which was mentioned in the introduction, the man in the middle is a Cario Thorat from the Dalit community. Dalits in the caste system, used to be called Untouchables. He is our co-editor in chief of the academic journal. We also encourage young emerging scholars on caste issues to write for the journal as well as senior scholars. The next slide please. I guess that's it. A lot of things I left out, of course, but we'll have to take them up another time, Raj.
Rajesh Sampath:
Thank you, Larry and for the audience, I have the unenviable position of trying to compress a lifetime of work into this short session so we can transition to the Q&A, but just 60 seconds of my own reflections of what we just heard. I've been involved with commemorations of Larry, in various venues over the years. I can literally do a 12 hour-version of what Larry was was sharing with us, and that really is just scratching the surface. So I really appreciate Larry your attempt to bring all this together.
Rajesh Sampath:
I'd say as we transition to the Q&A and the discussion, which we'll go, till I was told, at 1:15. What we heard is the endearing reflection of the family roots and the experience of the Jewish values on social justice and being attuned to suffering led to the engagement with poverty and suffering on the ground, especially in the Latin American context. A lot of people know Larry Simon, for his historic contributions to the field development, which is roughly in the period he's talking about only 40, 50 years old.
Rajesh Sampath:
To subtend within that this remarkable compassion you showed and the compassion you received from a whole nother tradition, the Catholic tradition and the Christian tradition, generally speaking, in the Latin American context, the ecumenical interfaith dialogue where liberation theology transcends its religious roots, and really become a fight for justice and liberation of the poor.
Rajesh Sampath:
So we now want to give Larry the opportunity because it was compressed, to maybe talk, when we have the conversation, I'd like for some folks to maybe press Larry a bit. Not press but to inquire into the current work, but those two founding achievements for Brandeis. The Master's Program in Sustainable International Development and the Center for Global Development and Sustainability, and its two pillars, which Larry didn't have a chance to elaborate on.
Rajesh Sampath:
But if we can get questions that focus on the now and also where this now fits, Larry in your vision, for The world and for the United States and for the world. As I mentioned earlier, we're facing a confluence of extremely difficult vectors that are challenging humanity and our sustainability on the planet. So we want to move from the present also to the future and get Larry's thoughts on that. Okay. So I see Allison, if you want to come in, or Nicole, how do we want to manage the Q&A? I see one statement here. Okay.
Nicole Rodriguez:
We have a couple of questions.
Rajesh Sampath:
Good, good. Okay. So yeah.
Nicole Rodriguez:
Since our time has been a bit compressed. If you have any questions, please type them in the chat or in the Q&A, and we'll do our best to get to them. If we have a lot, please make sure that your questions are short so we can get to everybody.
Nicole Rodriguez:
Professor Simon, just so that you know, there's been so many beautiful, warm remarks about you and your work and your influence on a lot of people. So it's really exciting to see how many hearts and minds that you've touched over the years. But our first question comes from let's see, David's Shahar and I'm sorry, if I did not pronounce your name, right. He writes, "When we first met in Jack Shonkoff's Office years ago, I asked you how the global development and morality missions of the Heller School are being integrated with the curriculum of the International Business School at Brandeis." He'd like to ask you the same question. Are your profound lessons penetrating into the culture of the School of International Business?
Laurence Simon:
David, it's great to hear from you, at least in this format. I'd love to have a much longer chat with you and catch up on things. That's a really tough question. Because on the one hand, we are all part Brandeis. I think the International Business School, and I know the current Dean quite well, are profoundly committed to issues of social justice. There is, and I think this what you're kind of alluding to or pointing out, that there is kind of a cultural difference, or at least in terms of how we present ourselves. Heller adopted to the motto, "Knowledge advancing social justice," years ago. That says it all.
Laurence Simon:
IBS, of course, is more business-oriented, gives courses on international finance, excellent learning takes place there for their students, varied international student body. I think there is a commonality. So to give you a quick example, the university's India initiative, I don't remember the full name of it, but it's an initiative university wide of how we approach India with respect not only to student recruitment, but actually the issues that we should be looking at.
Laurence Simon:
The head of the India initiative is an IBS professor who comes to our programs on caste. Caste can be a very divisive conversation in some quarters because those who defend caste in India are really the equivalent of what we would in our culture, in our nation, we would call white privilege, for some even white supremacy. Yet we don't find that in the faculty, even the faculty of Indian ancestry at the international business school. They're very supportive of this work. So it's not a very adequate answer, David, but it's maybe the best I can do and in this short period of time.
Rajesh Sampath:
Thank you, Larry. I'm going to pick up here from Nicole because I think I can consolidate a couple of questions, we're going to aim for about 1:10. So we have about 15 minutes and then we'll bring Nicole back for some closing reflections about the session.
Rajesh Sampath:
Larry, I want to combine again, onto David's follow-up questions with our good friend, Roy DuBerry. He's posing the question to you, if we can get a couple of these and then I can move to the next. When we think about race and caste, if you think about the ubiquitous conversation of racial justice here in United States before the election, during and after he wants to know if Isabel Wilkerson, who's been a contributor to the CASTE Journal and a conversation with her new work. Then from Roy, can you speak Larry about caste in light of the recent US election, particularly as it relates to the so called white working class vote?
Laurence Simon:
Well, the the first part of the question is easier for me, Roy. Roy is an inspiration for me and for all of us at Brandeis. He is a Brandeis University alum, undergraduate year. He was one of the foremost leaders, in the Ford Hall sit in, that really helped to propel the university to take seriously the issues of racial disparities even on campus, and really helped to create the the African African American Studies Department at the university, which is one of the great departments in the world in this field. Isabel, we have not been in direct contact with Isabel Wilkinson who has a new book called Caste, Something about the origins of our discontent, I think the title is, she's a journalist. It's an excellent book. No, she's not written for the journal yet.
Laurence Simon:
What we're very pleased about the book is because while she's primarily trying to talk about the African American history as a caste or maybe even use the term untouchability in the American context, she's also making comparisons to caste in South Asia, particularly in India and Nepal, where it's still very strong. Our journal was founded of course, before her excellent book was published. We call our journal, CASTE: A Global Journal on Social Exclusion. Because we are looking at not only caste as it developed in South Asia, but in other caste-like social formations, birth-based social hierarchies in other parts of the world, and including in the United States of America. We have a superb editorial advisory board, including people like Cornel West and others who are obviously very well versed in African American discrimination and history, in the United States. Roy, I'm going to defer the second part of the question to a conversation with you on the phone, which we can have later today, if you like. I keep wondering about that myself. Okay.
Rajesh Sampath:
Great. Thank you, Roy. Thank you, Larry, for your insights on the intersection of race and caste. I have to cluster now. We see a flood of questions. I wish I can manage all of these, I apologize, but I'm going to have to cluster them. Please keep them coming. But just know that there's only so much we're going to be able to accomplish in the next 10 minutes or so.
Rajesh Sampath:
Larry, the clustering is let's transition to the center, its founding. I know we have the journal certificate, but broadly speaking, we're hearing questions about COVID, and climate change. Remember all the vectors I mentioned, conflict of so many forces, but we have wonderful alumni of ours. So there's a practitioner side, which is good intentions and development that lead to failures. We can think about accountability, let's think about the ethics of development together. But from Silton, who is a wonderful alumni, he's in Amnesty now, he's joining a PhD program. He's also integral to our center. Wants to know about your future trajectories for the center, where are we going in terms of the research? Another wonderful alumni, Paula Day, who's at Purdue, "How can I stand for the right thing? How do I practice recognizing those moments of call to action in our everyday life when it comes to embodying social justice, not just thinking and believing it?"
Rajesh Sampath:
Couple more questions on caste and ethnic pluralism and diversity in today's India. You and I have a lot to say about that, the current context. It's comparable to perhaps other democracies, including around when it comes to minority rights, social exclusion. Then I'll pause here before I move to the next phase. Let's just do that. Let's just think about the center, caste, future trajectories. Then we'll move to another cluster pf questions that take us maybe further afield from the caste question.
Laurence Simon:
Okay. Thank you, Raj. Yhank you to those asking these questions. We're a fairly young center at the Hiller School. We've been at it, of course, for a few years already. Each year, we develop our relationships with partner organizations, universities, international, local nongovernmental organizations, and so forth. There are two areas, I would say we are continuing to build, as aggressively, as well as aggressively as the pandemic is allowing, frankly, in terms of our overseas work. That has slowed dramatically, because many of the partner organizations in Ghana and other places that we are trying to work with or have been working with, of course, are very taken up now, their staff and their grant funding and so forth with pandemic dislocations.
Laurence Simon:
But one of the areas that we wish to continue to build, in my experience in development and I think, my colleague Joseph Hassan, who was the lead investigator on that area of building resilience in developing countries in community level and so on. One of the problems is that many of the best development programs take place within national or local nongovernmental organizations, and even like non governmental organizations in the United States, non governmental groups working on international development, the evaluation, monitoring evaluation and evaluation of very weak link still. So we have gotten appeals from a number of organizations around the world, local, national level NGOs, to help them to develop that. Now, not everybody can come to Brandeis to learn in the SID program, of course.
Laurence Simon:
But we do feel that we have the capacity to assist selected organizations in training their staff, and maybe helping to do some of the baseline studies upon which their funding opportunities are really going to be judged, whether or not they have any significant impact, given the funding they receive. Whether it's from bilateral organizations or from their national government. So we're beginning to do that work. I hope, once again, the pandemic allows, we hope to get out there again and to do more in this area.
Laurence Simon:
The other direction, of course, is the work that Raj is leading us with. But I'm very intimately involved in that, is these issues of social exclusion around the world. We could talk for hours, of course about that. Just very quickly, the other question that intrigued me, and I'm not sure I got all of the questions, Raj, that you clustered together. That is how do we embody some of the values that I've spoken about, and that I think my students over the many years now at Heller and SID have all come to us with the same sets of values about social justice and fairness in the world.
Laurence Simon:
I think what binds us all together, those of us working in this area is a sense that we need to be and proudly so cosmopolitans, that we all come from more specific traditions. Some of these traditions around the world do not recognize universal human rights as universal, that they are more relative to culture and society. While there's an interesting debate to have on that, I do think that the way we embody this is to understand, and defend, and to sensitively encourage a greater understanding of the universality of human rights and the accommodations that we do need to make for each of our cultures to help people come into the modern world at the same time honoring their traditions.
Rajesh Sampath:
Great, thank you, Larry. I apologize again to the folks posing questions. I may not refer to your name specifically, but I see Matha, Rajashri, Jae Han, Jeffrey Asher, a colleague, has done work on micro finance, and Richard Frasca has attended our CASTE conferences. So that the general themes I see here, Larry, if you want to help us think through it, one of your forthcoming chapters on a series on Ambedkar, the great founder of the Dalit Liberation Movement, as you mentioned, a great thinker and scholar.
Rajesh Sampath:
Going back to what you're saying about liberation theology in the Latin American context, we can think about black theology and the black struggle here in United States from Civil Rights onwards. What are you thinking now about this engagement with liberation theology and perhaps post development, meaning indigenous practice to really challenge this neoliberal Western dominated conception of development?
Rajesh Sampath:
That has to be coupled with a sense of social activism, because a lot of us who identify as minorities have felt we've been underdressed since the history of minorities. But certainly now whether you go across different contexts or see if you can speak to the Sri Lankan context, for example, maybe come back to the Indian context on caste and religious minorities, black struggle here in the United States, and other minoritized groups, when you think about the Native Americans. What's your view of civic activism? Because you've worked in so many complex environments, environments that would consume most practitioners because of their complexity. Yet you've persevered for so long, given the wonderful narrative you shared with us. Civic activism today, in the context that I've referred to, let's just say the US, India and Sri Lanka.
Laurence Simon:
Well, it's another tough question my friend, for me to try to comment on, I think. Powell Freri, who was an influence on my early career, and then certainly kept in close contact with him throughout the rest of his life, was very, very concerned about activists. The reason was maybe because it was his interpretation of what activism meant, at least to him, and maybe his experience in Brazil.
Laurence Simon:
He was concerned because he said that the most important feature or part of praxis, as he and obviously a whole tradition of talking about praxis, the most important part is reflection. It's not just this knee jerk reaction to something and you hit the streets. We're not talking now about Black Lives Matter and the protests taking place right this minute probably on streets in America, given the election going on and so on. Longer term, more fundamental challenges that we face in terms of social change for justice requires a deep process of reflecting upon what the problem is itself and trying to understand, as we try in development, to try to understand not just how to provide a little fix or a little money here, a little money there.
Laurence Simon:
But to try to understand what could help build a capacity in developing countries to get to the causation of the problems, to analyze, to see the causations of the problems and reflect upon them deeply. Then yes, of course, take action. We need that type of self reflection, I think in the United States.
Laurence Simon:
As Barry said, it can't just come from the oppressed within the United States, this process of reflection also has to take place in the people who really control the strings, right? In whatever sector we could describe in the United States, of people, of wealth, some of whom are great moral people, of course, but corporate power, and political power that does not see or seem to understand the concept of oppression as it has played out in 250 years of slavery, 100 years of Jim Crow laws, right, institutional racism, which we still see in many parts of our society. This reflection needs to take place very, very, very deeply. Perhaps I'll just leave it at that statement in terms of that in terms of that.
Laurence Simon:
I do think liberation theology of the other part of the question, Raj, is very important to us. As you know, because you've been writing on this very productively and very importantly, I myself have been invited over the past few years to talk with the Catholic Bishops Association of India. I've met with priests and sisters in southern India and as well as in Delhi and north, who are looking very deeply, want to learn the experience of Latin American theology of liberation, the experience of the grassroots, the Comunidades de Base, and try to interpret that within their faith tradition, whether it's Roman Catholicism, like a great friend, Ambrose Pinto, who just passed away a few years ago now, who was a Jesuit in Bangalore. But in other traditions, in the Buddhist community, I think India is the is the most thoroughly reflective of what we would call, they may not call it that, but of Theologies Liberation Movement.
Rajesh Sampath:
Totally agree, Larry. So as we transition, we're going to give Larry just two to three more minutes to the summation of this really remarkable career that's far from over, by the way. I mean, we've talked about things that are on the horizon. But we have a great point from Rhonda Newhouse, who I wanted. Maybe it's a good way to sum up, everything you've discussed. Then as we look forward, can you speak to the issue of ethics, action and responsibility for the future of your work, this work, personal development in general, the advancement of human rights, social equity, justice, inclusion, peace, and pluralism, and the healing component?
Rajesh Sampath:
In a way, it kind of brings us back full circle to your familial roots. For the folks in the audience, what I want to convey, at least in terms of my concluding impression, and then my part will end here, is you all know as alumni that Brandeis has this extraordinary history of incredible faculty and some of the most amazing human beings in general, Herbert Marcuse comes to mind, that fled Nazi Germany and was so instrumental in forming the intellectual foundations of Brandeis, and then subsequently, so many other great faculty members that maybe you took courses with and worked with.
Rajesh Sampath:
My assessment of Professor Lawrence Simon is someone who's interwoven his existence in life in such a profound way with these extraordinary human beings that he's met in the 20th century and beyond, and the people he continues to work with today, like Dr. Thorat, our colleague in India.
Rajesh Sampath:
It takes a gift to have this ability to intertwine an academic life and career which is extraordinary by any measure, because of just what you created, to the point where a dissertation by a doctoral student at NYU who just graduates can be booked next year, and Larry, his team can maybe give you more information. It's on the founding of AJWS and Larry's role with it. There's a whole chapter on the website.
Rajesh Sampath:
For someone to be written about, currently we would say a living legend, but really a Brandeis faculty member who's being written about, for me, is a testament not only to his impact, but the kind of human being Larry Simon is. So if you want to round us out, Larry. Be mindful, we want to close, I was told around 1:15, we'll have closing remarks from Nicole and then we'll end. So ethics, action, responsibility, the future of your work, and in light of this theme, healing the world.
Laurence Simon:
Right, thank you so much, Raj. Rhonda, I miss you. She's one our great students of all time and has gone on to do absolutely extraordinary work. We need to be back in touch soon. I'm going to try, Rhonda and Raj, to respond to some of the dimensions of what you asked very, very briefly, of course.
Laurence Simon:
When Raj and I met, and I got to take a second to mention that because we didn't even talk about Google. We won't spend much time on that. But I first met Raj because I was asked by Larry Brilliant, who was one of the great public health heroes, one of the leaders of the Smallpox Eradication Campaign in South Asia. Larry had called me and asked when he was appointed the first director of the Google Foundation, what's called Google.org. He asked me whether I can come out to help him develop some of the early programs and so on. I did. Within the first few days, Raj comes into my office, introduces himself. I think, Raj, you're working on the Inc. side, the corporate side. While you were also teaching at Santa Cruz. What I found in Raj was the most extraordinary person that I have actually learned from all these years.
Laurence Simon:
Now, honestly, Raj. I knew this when I first met you, because within the first 10 minutes, we transitioned from talking about recruitment strategies for senior staff at the Google.org to Heidegger. I figured, okay, I don't know if Raj is typical of Google, but this is going to be an interesting time. Okay. The reason I mentioned this, Raj, is not just to balance things here because you are one of the gems of the Brandeis University, honestly. But because Raj has brought to us, intentionally because we were hiring for somebody in philosophy, in ethics, who could work with us on teaching and exploring the problems of poverty and exploitation, and even climate change that are at essence, ethical questions, in my opinion.
Laurence Simon:
So that being said, Rhonda, the short answer, I think to this, to your really important question is what I call the three E's. It's not easy, but the three E's. First, empathy. I know every person on this call today is motivated because you're part of this Brandeis community, motivated by a deep sense of empathy, not pity. Pity might make us write a check for $10 or $10,000 even, if we can afford it. Then feel like, "Okay, I've helped these poor people."
Laurence Simon:
Empathy is to say, "Okay, I will support organizations. But I need to also go further and try to understand why these problems persist. It's not enough to say, "There but for the grace of God go I." That's important too. But to use that to say, "We need to structure more learning opportunities, more reflection to go beyond this." So empathy should lead us to ethics, and that's why I've mentioned this about Raj. Empathy should lead us to try to think about and build a system of ethics to help solve the problems at the most fundamental level, which is the problem of ethical dissonance.
Laurence Simon:
The third the E is emancipation. So what I call the kind of development that I tried to instill in the SID program is really an emancipatory development. It's not just the technical fix, although technique is important. It's not just one policy or another policy. There has to be a mindset and a culture that says that poverty, hunger, exploitation are not natural to the world, they are manmade, and that we need to direct our efforts, our thinking, even our PhD studies, toward emancipation of people who are caught in preventable suffering because of the social structures that we live in. So empathy, ethics, emancipation. Rhonda, I think you have been leading your life very, very much on these three E's, as I know. Thank you, Raj.
Rajesh Sampath:
Thank you, Larry. I think that's just a beautiful way to sum up an incredible ... It was brief, but incredible one hour with Professor Lauren Simon, reflecting on his life. Of course, thank you, Larry, and thank you to the audience for your wonderful questions. So I will now transition to Nicole who will bring our session to a close. We hope that there's a way if Larry and I can connect with you in the future, if you want to continue these discussions. So thank you for being here.
Laurence Simon:
Absolutely.
Nicole Rodriguez:
I hope you all can please join me in thanking Larry Simon and Raj Sampath today. What a wonderful discussion and such an impressive career. Thank you so much for sharing your experiences and teaching us also very much. Also a special thanks for all of you for joining us today. We are delighted to see so many of our Brandeis community members here. We hope that we continue coming together, especially during these troubled times and continue lifelong learning. We look forward for you all to join us for any and all upcoming virtual programs. Thank you so much. I hope you have a great day.