Transcript of interview with Chris Peck, leader of the Unofficial Transparency Band

Mary: All right, there we go.

Chris: I teach classes where we use Audacity, so…the pause button is one of the most frustrating parts of the interviews.

Mary: Yeah…I’m still kind of learning, but I’ve done a couple practice interviews with my classmates, so I more or less know how to use it.

Chris: It looks like it’s working fine.

Mary: Yeah. But every so often I might take a glance over there to make sure it’s still working.

Chris: Yeah.

Mary: All right, well I’ve got some questions here. They might be used to structure the interview, but if it goes off in another direction that’s totally okay. More or less what’s going to happen is you and I are going to have a conversation in which we talk about what happened this past summer.

Chris: Yep.

Mary: All right, but, before we get started, for the record, could you please state your name, and spell it for me?

Chris: Okay. Chris Peck, C-H-R-I-S P-E-C-K.

Mary: Excellent. And could you describe your place at UVA?

Chris: So I’m a, just starting my third year in the program in composition and ocmputer technology in the music department. It’s a phd program. And as I said I’m also a fellow in the Praxis program in the Scholars Lab. What else? I think those are my official things right now. I’m a music PHD student.

Mary: Ok, cool. All right, well, let’s just get right into this. Could you tell me about when you first heard that President Sullivan had resigned?

Chris: Um. Boy, that’s a good question. I think like everybody else I got that email on the Sunday. And I did a bit of a double take. We get a lot of emails like that, and I’ll admit that I do not read every single one. I certainly don’t read every single one in its entirety. But, that one struck me as strange. I don’t know that I paid a lot of attention to President Sullivan prior to that moment, but she did speak a few years ago when I was…we started here at the same time. She was the new president, and she spoke to us at the sort of teaching workshop. I was very impressed with her. She struck me as very well spoken, and I felt like she made me feel good about being at UVA, for sure I was excited about UVA having a woman president for the first time. I also did my undergrad at Michigan, so…someone coming from Michigan, I felt good about that. I at that moment especially reflected a lot on…I had done my master’s degree at Dartmouth, and I was happy to be coming back to a public institution. I think that fits in with…I feel like I have a certain set of values about what it means to be at a public university, and what that means in terms of responsibilities to sort of the bigger community and providing not just pure research or doing things that just stay within the university but also being involved in providing access to education. And in my particular case, access to the arts. So, yeah, when I first learned about her leaving it seemed weird that it was happening in the summer, and it was happening on a Sunday like that, and from there it was just talking to friends and starting to see people posting on Facebook about it, and then gradually I think when it really started to seem serious was when I saw the faculty response so then going to that first open meeting of the faculty senate, and then seeing the number of people that came out for that meeting at Darden, and getting a sense of how worried some of the faculty were, so having some conversations with faculty who are close with, enough that I could have a casual conversation about something like that. And that open faculty senate meeting just seemed crazy. It’s just really unusual that you would see like I know how hard it sometimes seems as a grad student to get faculty in my department to talk to each other, and to see faculty across the university all coming together and displaying something like solidarity in the face of something that seemed really threatening and potentially grave…uh, it was a little bit confusing and scary.

Mary: Yeah.

Chris: So, yeah, that’s the moment when I guess I had this sense that it was important enough that I felt like I needed to show up to that meeting, but then especially being in that meeting, that’s when it seemed like, well, something’s going to happen. And from that point I think myslelf and other grad students I was talking to at the time, we were trying to figure out what, if anything, we could or should do.

Mary: All right. Well, I kind of have to ask, what did you do?

Chris: Um, well, I reactivated my twitter account. That’s one thing that happened. I think I was just trying to follow the news and just understand what happened. I think anyone who was around at that time can relate to that, like, it semed like everyone in the town or everyone in the university was just dropped what they were doing research-wise. I mean, I certainly had other work that I was doing, but we were especially first we were like, “Is the university still going to be here in the fall?” It wasn’t quite that bad, but any sort of insecurity we were feeling or especially as graduate students, we feel like we’re in some ways in a very difficult vulnerable position and as grad students in the humanities especially it seems like we have to justify our existence, and it can be kind of difficult, especially if we have to justify our business according to some sort of profit model, business concerns and things like that. So, we were just trying to figure out what was going on, so it was just about being glued to the news, about being on Facebook and trying to see what the latest article was that was coming out, trying to keep up with all the different editorials and news stories, and that just over the next few days after that just sort of mushroomed and then it really started to seem like a big deal when it was getting national press attention. And people were looking to this as a kind of showdown about the future of public education, so reading these articles in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, various newspapers, also sometimes just being on Twitter can just sort of find out what was happening sort of moment to moment, at these times when there was a meeting and it seemed like something was going to happen. And then there was a lot of “it seems like something’s going to happen,” and then nothing happened, or something happened but nobody knows what it means, and there was a lot of drama. And then of course when there was a time to go and be on the lawn, going and doing that, and then also, and then one thing that happened was that as musicians we started to think about what role music could play, for sure, although that didn’t come until later. I think the thing that really spurred us to action in terms of thinking about music was, we were looking at Facebook and somebody posted something about trying to do a sort of Flashmob with junk percussion at one of the rallies, and a couple of us were like, okay, that can’t happen. We can do better, but what can we do? And it’s a problem with the musical life at the University is very focused around these big ensembles that are run by the music department in these various units. The music department, like…the marching band is part of the music department but also an athletic thing, and it seems autonomous. Then you have these big groups like the University Singers, but of course professors can’t, nor would they want to really try to bring a university ensemble to something like that, to something that’s political. Furthermore, a lot of the people in the marching band, you know, the marching band owns their instruments. So they also, we got word that people in the marching band weren’t going to be able to use their instruments at the rally. We started looking into the history of the UVA pep band, which is very interesting and I don’t know a lot of the history but there is a certain history on their webpage that we can read. I guess the short version of that story is that there used to be a student-organized pep band that would play at athletic events and then there was a movement at some point toward more organized, big marching band kind of thing like we have now. And there was a lot of tension over that transition, and the pep band was sort of phased out/pushed out and now it seems like no longer really exists. So we just have the university organized marching band. There isn’t really this pep band because the pep band was an effect, it seems like, banned from playing at events. I guess they…somebody didn’t like it. So there wasn’t really an appropriate student group to play at something like this. So I think we realized that we were going to have to organize it. So I just started emailing everybody that I could think of, and we set up a Facebook group, and through Facebook also we got in touch with the people who were organizing the big rally that happened. And then we had to figure out sort of what kind of band it would be, and what we would play, and how. So there was a lot of discussion about repertoire, what songs to play, also what sorts of instruments, so I felt very strongly that it shouldn’t be, I shouldn’t say very strongly…I felt like it should be acoustic, that we shouldn’t try to get electricity out on the lawn and deal with anything that needed amplification. That comes from, there are a couple of reasons for that. One of them is just practical, that if you’re using electricity then people can cut off the power. Logistically, getting power out to the lawn is also just difficult. But also it seems like there’s something that’s maybe a bit more democratic about just sticking with acoustic instruments. Having a big PA system or something, or even something like an amplifier is a way for one person to control a lot of acoustic power, and therefore a lot of power in terms of being able to get sound out to the people, and that of course is very valuable when you’re making a political speech, but in terms of music it seemed more appropriate to try to get a lot of people playing acoustic instruments as opposed to just having one person with a microphone. So we sort of said, ok, guitars are fine but it has to be acoustic guitars. We’ll want to be singing, but we’ll want to do the kind of singing people can participate in rather than something people will listen to. And we just started trying to get together as many people that we knew that could play some kind of instrument, and trying to get a variety of instruments that cover sort of different frequency ranges or different roles in an ensemble. So we were really trying to get anybody who plays a low brass instrument and we ended up not being able to get anybody. But that’s another story, that has to do like I said with the marching band instruments and just how everyone is gone for the summer, which I guess is probably the whole reason that they made this move in the summer to begin with, to do it a time when people were unable to respond. And now we had to figure out what to play, what sort of music to play, if we look on the Facebook page for the UVA Unofficial Transparency Band, you’ll see all this discussion about appropriate, which got at times pretty heated, so there were a number of different suggestions, so a lot of the community of music graduate students, we have a particular obscure interest in a lot of music and politics, so there were suggestions made like our friend Wendy, who has a sort of Asian surf-rock band immediately suggested something that their band plays, they play a lot of political songs that are like political rock music from Southeast Asia. So that was one of the first suggestions, and it was kind of like…well, no one’s going to know that. Right? Like, really really cool suggestion. I think it was a sincere suggestion, but it was also like, she’s in California and I don’t think she understands that we don’t have a band, let alone a band where everyone could read music. We’re dealing with pretty severe limitations. There were also a lot of suggestions that were maybe more facetious from the world of experimental music, like transparency was one of the big buzzwords, so thinking about how it relates to Steve (?) and the ideas about music as a gradual process and stuff like that. But, you know, or also ideas about playing drone music that would sort of irritate people, so trying to sort of smoke out the Board of Visitors by playing like super drone music like that. So there were a bunch of ways that music related to politics, and I think all of these things were thrown in. one of the more serious suggestions, I mean there were a number of people who had been involved in radical politics since the 60s, and they saw a rally and were like, “Well, you have to play We Shall Not Be Moved, etc.” and that was a more serious discussion that had to happen, because I think a lot of us felt that weven though we were getting wrapped up in the energy of it, we were also very clear that this was…even if it’s a national showdown about the future of public higher ed, it’s not as dire as the struggle for basic civil rights or something like that. So we really didn’t want to do anything that had even the smell of trying to draw parallels between reinstating Sullivan and Civil Rights Movement or any of these sort of classic protest songs that have been used in that way. So we want to stay away from that kind of thing. But that was a pretty serious discussion we had to have with people and I think there are people who are still haven’t forgiven us entirely for that. So we started…I brought you a copy of the songbook, I’ve got two of them.

Mary: Thank you, oh this is excellent.

Chris: So this is actually what we played from. I have some transposed parts for different instruments, but this is mostly what we played from. So we decided that we would play the UVA songs, so the Good Old Song and Virginia Hail All Hail, so that was one place that we started, and I had a conversation with Winston in the music library about potential sorts of repertoire and where to get the UVA songs. So it turns out that if you’re trying to get together, so we knew that this was going to be a kind of pickup band, it was going to be whoever could show up, people if they could read music at a very basic level, guitar players can probably read chords, and we wanted to do familiar melodies that people if they heard them they could just sing along. So we were trying to think about the way the lowest common denominator of what are songs that people are likely to know in this, people who are showing up at the rally. Just to get people doing something that is musical and positive and have a sort of minimum amount of conversation. So on a practical level that means needing parts that are really easy to read. So there isn’t, you can’t just walk into the music library and get something that looks like this, so this involved me going to a book from 1905, or something like that, and finding…and I don’t know the Good Old Song, it’s like Grad Students don’t know the Good Old Song.

Mary: Ok, that’s fair.

Chris: So I had to copy it out of a book and hope that it’s right. You might notice, if you know the Good Old Song from being, you know, in this community, there are probably going to be parts of the melody that are slightly different, because these songs change over time. And I didn’t have time to consult with anybody, it all had to happen in 48 hours or something like that.

Mary: That’s impressive.

Chris: So I had to find that and then recopy it in notation software. This is where my skill as a composer comes in handy. I’ve been joking but it’s also somewhat serious, I feel that this was a moment where I felt like “This is the most useful thing I’ve ever done with my knowledge of music notation.” This is not just about realizing my idea or something, this is the community needs this booklet of music, and I know how to use notation software well enough that I could do this and have it printed in time for the rally. So I felt good about my education in that one. And then Virginia All Hail is the second one. The 10,000 Voices. So just thinking about super simple songs, I was thinking about folk songs and stuff. And also thinking a little bit about the tradition of taking old melodies and writing new topical political texts to them, so this is one of those. We have “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean,” but then at the end we go: [SINGS] “Bring back, bring back, oh bring back transparency-y-y, Bring back, Bring back, oh bring back our president please!” So this is what we’re trying to do, keeping it light and actually to the point of being irreverent about what’s going on, trying to bring a positive atmosphere to that, when it seemed like a lot of people were getting way too dark and serious about it, just trying to sort of inject a little bit of light into the thing.

Mary: Do you think it helped with the atmosphere there?

Chris: I think so. I got comments from people that it did, but that’s something you’d have to talk to other people about, if they even noticed. But I think so, yeah. It felt really good to do, for sure, yeah, I mean it’s hard to say. I think we did manage to avoid it going into a 60s protest music kind of place, and we did get a wide variety of people participating. So we had everybody from John Dearth, sort of a local jazz trumpet celebrity, to a couple of drum set players, a guy playing an African drum, one guy did show up who I didn’t know with an acoustic guitar, people brought their kids who played instruments, so we had like a tiny flute player and a tiny violinist, which was adorable. I don’t know if you’ve seen any of the photos, but there are photos floating around and you get a sense of…and there are some videos of us playing too, which I can point you to those later. So it felt like yeah, and music faculty as well as undergrads and grads, it was mostly grad students because most undergrads leave in the summer, so. So in terms of that feeling of it being participatory and welcoming and engaging and sort of a broad cross-section of people, and it was definitely a group of people who would never play together before, it was very unusual that we just get together with musicology faculty and play in a band like that, so it was pretty cool. And it was also really valuable that somebody like John Dearth there, because he also got people improvising on songs a little bit, and started trading chords and things like that, so yeah, that was probably the…we got a lot of flack for “She’ll be coming round the mountain” being totally unrelated. I see it as totally related, like a metaphor of waiting for somebody that’s…this is again, this is somewhat facetiously appropriate for these moments where we’re waiting for somebody to come out of the room. And the symbolism of the mountain in like Jeffersonian architecture and Monticello and stuff like that. This is what I was thinking about even though it wasn’t obvious. Shenandoah, even though I don’t think this song actually has anything to do with this region, it’s a song a lot of people associated with this…

Mary: I’ve heard it many times.

Chris: And it’s a beautiful song, and it’s, you know, also something with a different tempo. Whe just wanted to have a variety of things.

Mary: We had a running joke in my high school choir that there was not a year that could go by without us singing Shenandoah.

Chris: You’re from the area?

Mary: I’m from Northern VA.

Chris: Yeah, it’s funny. But I don’t think it has anything to do with our Shenandoah, but it is a beautiful song. As long as we don’t think too hard of what it’s about, it’s a good song. “Stop in the Name of Love,” we were also just trying to think about things that had riffs that we could repeat for a long time, and just sort of play with, so I was definitely thinking about these as sort of like basis for a spontaneous arrangement that we could put together with the band, with just having some people doing a group and we could play a melody on top and we could sort of repeat it with different combinations. So this one is just like, Stop, stop doing whatever is happening. Just stop. “A Hard Day’s Night,” getting at the sort of like general frustration that this was dragging on and distracting us from our work. I think “We’re not gonna take it” was the big hit, that was, that seemed right on in terms of the tone we were going for, and that’s the one that a lot of people sort of commented on, that was a really good arrangement. And we never got to “The Final Countdown,” which I think is unfortunate.

Mary: That is unfortunate, that song just makes things more epic.

Chris: It is more epic, the idea of poking fun at sort of this political struggle that actually when it comes down to it is like, you know, we’re all okay. It’s as important as this was, there was a point of contention for a while for people who were involved in the living wage campaign. People who were politically involved, which is not myself so much, but I sympathize with this point of view for sure, that people were going like, “Hey, wait a second, Sullivan wasn’t some kind of perfect angel, it isn’t like all of our problems are going to be solved when Sullivan comes back; there’s still going to be the living wage problems, there’s still going to be problems, all sorts of problems.” So I think one of…when the whole thing was mysteriously over and we…there was a feeling of what just happened, how was it possible that with no explanation she can be reinstated and everyone’s pretending to be friends? I think a lot of us were just cautiously hopeful, maybe, that Sullivan having some sort of mandate to push her agenda through was going to be a positive thing, although some of these things like research center management, that’s not necessarily going to be good for the arts and humanities. We just have to wait and see, and I was really looking to the faculty to see how they were reacting, and they were saying things like, well, this new sort of sense of faculty engagement’s like governance is a good thing, but we still haven’t gotten a cost of living increase in years, so how long is this engagement really going to last? What people actually want to do is get jobs at other universities. So I guess reflecting on this I feel good about this as a community music thing, and I feel good about some of the decisions that we were able to make in terms of having appropriate music happen at this event, but I also kind of feel like nothing was actually accomplished other than maybe increased awareness of what’s going on with these kinds of politics. And for the music grad students, one thing that came out of it was that I think we were more, we were better prepared, we started paying attention to things like the fact that we live in a Right to Work State, and therefore we can’t unionize. I don’t know what we can do about that. I still don’t know what to do about that, but we’ve started a grad student association in the music department to try and fix some of our internal problems, and I feel like maybe more of us were energized to think about self-governance in the limited way that we can as grad students. So that might’ve been a positive thing that came out of it, but…I actually think that would’ve happened anyway. Yeah, so I guess my feeling about it is really one of overwhelming ambivalence.

Mary: Okay. Well, one of my later questions was going to be “Do you think the whole thing is over,” in terms…so, you covered a lot of ground there, is there anything else you want to add…further lasting effects happening, or, do you think there’s still going to be struggle between the Board of Visitors and the community, or?

Chris: Yeah…well, there has been continued strife going into the fall. I haven’t been following all of it as closely, but I mean, these anti-semetic comments that were made to Jim Cohn, and this meeting last month…um…for instance, I don’t, I don’t know.

Mary: All right.

Chris: Yeah, it seems like it’s not over. It seems like it’s really not over, but I don’t know what…there still is this feeling of like, what to do about it. And I think it’s probably what to do about it is probably not about rallies. As a musician I’m really invested in live performance and things that happen with people actually in actual as opposed to virtual space together, but then I guess I wonder what purpose rallies serve, like, when it comes to actually having or effecting some kind of political change. And this question of real space versus virtual space is something that I mean a lot of the debates were around on like education, stuff like that, so I think I’ve certainly been thinking about that aspect. And that’s something that keeps coming up, people are talking about more, and not just because of this summer but I think maybe a little bit more because of this summer. But I’ve been to a couple of talks recently by faculty both from UVA and from other places where the subject of online education comes up, and everyone’s trying to figure out what to do about it, and as a grad student I am also teaching classes, and thinking about what it means to be in a room full of people and things about how to organize a class, how to use technology appropriately, it seems funny that I’m teaching a class right now where by design the class has a no-laptop rule.

Mary: Which class is this?

Chris: Music 1510, a basic music theory class. It’s about reading and writing music, it’s about very old traditional sort of western music skills. And stuff that you really need to learn with a pencil and paper, and the expectation is that for me as a teacher I’ll be doing a lot of lecturing at the chalkboard. It’s sort of a…fundamental to what the class is, I’ve tried to resist it and push it in different ways, but it’s funny that I’m teaching this class that is really the opposite direction of what people are talking about as like the new model of higher ed, or trying to imagine what those new models might be like. So I’m definitely thinking about this stuff in terms of teaching and in terms of my future as a teacher, and my future having a career in higher ed, like is the university still going to exist? Will the tenure track still exist? I think about it in terms of these things in my work. In terms of activism at this place, I feel more ambivalent or I guess I’m just not sure exactly what I could do about it. And I feel like if I’m going to engage in activist stuff, it’s going to be more about things that I think are more important, like about how the university relates to the larger community of Charlottesville, trying to think about access to education and for people who are not coming to UVA, who are not involved in our community. That seems like a more important place to put energy. The BOV, etc, it’s hard to know what to do about that.

Mary: Fair enough. Just for the fun of it, you mentioned you don’t know whether the university will still exist in the same way it does or tenure track or anything like that, do you have any predictions, like if it would change, what would it change to?

Chris: Well, it will surely change. I mean that…we know that it always changes, right?

Mary: This is just out of curiosity, I mean…

Chris: Well, the way that it seems to be changing for people who are getting jobs right now, this has been happening for a while, is that yeah, people seem to be getting a lot like, people with PHDs are getting these jobs that often have ridiculous workloads and no job security. They’re temporary or adjunct kind of jobs, or they’re yeah, temporary one or two year jobs and you’re expected to teach so much that you can’t really be doing any additional research. And I think that seems like less and less of a good deal, and my own thinking is that I would still love to have a teaching job of the kind that my mentors have had. And I would like to be ready for that job if it materializes, but I also am not working towards that as if it’s my only goal, and I think there’s more recognition that there are a lot of things that you can do with a PhD, but it’s not just about the straight and narrow path to like tenure track and security and all of that. So my prediction is that it’s going to be shrinking and that the tenure system will no longer exist in the way that it currently does, and I also don’t see that as entirely negative.

Mary: Okay.

Chris: Although, you know, I’m concerned about it.

Mary: That’s completely understandable. All right, well, you mentioned you spent time at Dartmouth. Do you think anything like this would’ve happened there? Do you want to compare the future of public education to the future of higher education itself, or do you have anything you want to say about that?

Chris: I think UVA in a lot of ways is a lot like a private institution, so I think that the distinctions are…you’re sort of splitting hairs, probably, and I’m just not educated enough about how the finances work and stuff. I know that the professors at Dartmouth get paid a lot better…yeah.

Mary: Okay, I mean it was just something that…

Chris: Does that make them more engaged? Or something? I don’t…I actually, I don’t really know.

Mary: Okay. Well, something that I kind of wanted to bring up is something that we talk about a lot in the class that I’m taking in which I will be submitting this interview, is we focus a lot on some of the bigger issues facing UVA that kind of relate to why the summer’s events happened at all, and the class seems to have kind of two ideas. One is that the major issue was honor in that it was just a dishonorable thing to do this summer, and the other one is governance, which is, why does the BOV have this power? So, do you have any commentary? Do you think it was more one or the other, or is there a completely other option as to why you think all of this happened, and what the effects will be? Sorry if that got a little convoluted…

Chris: Yeah, I think for me the issue was more governance and transparency. That was more the aspect that I identified with. It’s interesting how honor has come into this, but you know, as a grad student I feel like I have…I find honor confusing. It’s this word that gets tossed around a lot, and I think I didn’t have a sense of what it actually means to undergraduates at UVa, and what it means to the community. It seems like it gets tossed around the way that Jefferson quotes get tossed around, to sort of justify anything that we could potentially want to do. And as an instructor, as a TA and as a graduate student instructor, the honor system is really problematic.

Mary: How so?

Chris: Well, most of the situations that you end up with with students are in grey areas that don’t seem severe enough that the single sanction could ever apply. And yet the honor code sort of ties your hands sometimes about how you can respond. Without getting into specific examples or things like that…I also don’t actually feel like undergraduates don’t cheat. So then…and this is my own experience and also tons of anecdotal evidnce from other grad students, like, you do actually have to watch people on tests to make sure they’re not looking at their neighbor’s papers. So what good is the honor system really doing? I don’t feel like it’s really, you know, there’s so much pressure, different kinds, on undergraduates, and it’s a lot to ask of the community for that to be self-enforced, peer-enforced. And it seems that some kind of system that leaves some room for ambiguity and…not ambiguity, but more gradations of sanctions or…yeah, I don’t know. I guess I like the idea of it, but I find it very hard in practice. Like, I would love to be able to just give a test to students or just give take-home tests and mostly I just trust students and ignore things that look like cheating, and also try to teach a class in such a way that it isn’t just about grades for people, but students are really motivated by grades, in general, except for the very best, the top 2% or something that are the ones who I feel like I’m really connecting with, the ones I feel like I’m really teaching to. A lot of times they’re really just there for the grade, and that’s all they care aobut. And that leads to situations where, if people are going to try to cut corners, and people who cut corners in all sorts of ways, they’re not…they’re where they have plausible deniability about it being something that’s like lying, cheating, or stealing. But it might be…they might be doing something that I would consider to be dishonorable. Or not having the highest standards of academic integrity or something like that. So when people were tossing around honor this summer it seemed kind of empty to me.

Mary: All right, in that case I would say you’re on the governance side? Governance and transparency? Do you have any ways you think you would improve it, or…?

Chris: Hmm.

Mary: Or just, sort of…specific things that you noticed this summer while that was going on, or any…?

Chris: Less public relations and more communication.

Mary: Makes sense.

Chris: Maybe, that was one of the suspicious things, and the stuff that’s come out since then about the ways that the board were using public relations tactics to try to control perceptions of things rather than trying to actually communicate effectively with the community. I mean, that just seems so gross.

Mary: Good word for it. All right, well, let’s see. You’ve already covered your continued involvement, any good or funny stories from working with the band that you’d like to share?

Chris: No, I don’t think so. The best part was having the kids there, and that was, I already covered that.

Mary: I mean, I’ve got to say, I’m probably the only person who has not only singing but the words “tiny violin player” on my interview, so…all right, well that pretty much covers my questions. I think you covered a lot of ground.

Chris: Well, I hope this is helpful. What are you going to do with this interview now?

Mary: I’m going to transcribe it, submit it to the class, we’re thinking of having some sort of a big presentation or press conference either at the end of this semester or the beginning of the next in which we present our findings and say, “These are now available in the public record.”

Chris: I submitted this (indicates music book) to the library.

Mary: Yeah.

…

Chris: And let me know about that event, because I’ll totally be there if I can. I’m interested in the other sorts of narratives.

Mary: Yeah, we’ve got some pretty good people. Several professors, several people who are involved, I think a donor actually, we’re interviewing.

…

Chris: Well, this is a good thing too, an answer to what can be done about the transparency question. Figuring out how to tell the story in such a way that this stuff won’t be forgotten, so that the next time this happens, because it will happen again, something like this will happen again, that people can refer back and say, “Oh, right, didn’t this happen before? How did that work out?” And then hopefully that’ll be helpful. Hopefully it doesn’t happen again in exactly the same way soon. I hope we aren’t in the same place next summer.

Mary: Yeah, no, I share that feeling there. All right, well, if there is anything else you want to say for the record?

Chris: That’s good, thank you. That was fun.