How to Create Positive Change in Our Communities Through Negotiation With Dr. James L. Moore III

Hello, my friends, and welcome to another exciting episode of Negotiate Anything. This show is produced by the American Negotiation Institute and with over 5 million downloads and listeners in over 180 countries, listeners just like you have made this the number one negotiation podcast in the world.

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James, thanks for joining us today.

Oh, I'm delighted to be here. Very proud of you. Very proud. So thank you for inviting me to be a guest.

Thank you. I appreciate it. Yes, this is great. So how would you get us started? By telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do.

Well, again, I'm James Moore, and I am the Vice Provost and Chief Diversity Officer at the Ohio State University. But I have many other hats that I wear. I'm also the inaugural Executive Director for the Todd Anthony Bell National Resource center on the African American Male. And I'm a Distinguished professor of Urban Education in the College of Education.

This is great. Yes. And recently, hey, let's give a shout out to the Bell Resource Center. They won a distinguished Aw. Tell the listeners about that, too.

Yes, well, as you know, many African American males around the country are not functioning optimal in the educational spaces. And our center was founded to ensure that our young black males are successful at the institution and beyond. We recently received a highly coveted diversity award at the university for our work. We're very proud that last year we passed the threshold. Over 50% of our African American males had a cumulative GPA of 3.0 or higher. And that's out of about 1400, a little over 1400 African American males. Some people might say, well, it should be better, but usually those individuals are not aware of the state of affairs for black males across the United States. And so our young men are so impressive. They're certainly pioneering excellence without excuses in ways that other institutions marvel at. Some of the things that we've been able to achieve. Over the years, we probably had over 40 to 50 universities that have contacted us looking for the magic bullet to ensure that their young black males on their campus and beyond are performing at optimal levels. And so we wouldn't achieve these kinds of successes if it weren't for great alumni like yourself, as well as those who come behind you. As you know, at the Ohio State University, we don't pay back, we pay it forward. And so the young men who come behind you, came behind you, they stand on your shoulders. And so we keep passing the baton. And so we embrace the ethos of excellence. And not only that, we make excellence a priority in the Bell National Resource center on the African American male.

Yeah, and you produce excellence with consistency, too. And I think that's what's so impressive. I know I owe a lot of my success to the work that you and the rest of the team did. Made my journey through OSU a lot easier. Set me up for success. And I always come back and try to give back, and a lot of people do, which is great to see again, which is a testament to the program. Again, just to highlight how unique the program is. And don't worry, listeners, we'll get to the helpful tools as well. But I want to give you an opportunity to see some of the great work that James is doing here. When you compare the outcomes of African American males at the Ohio State University to other institutions, what is it that makes us stand out, statistically speaking?

Well, I think first and foremost, I mean, you know, there's a desire to help individuals reach optimal success. And what we've tried to do is build an apparatus of success. Not only that, to build an apparatus success, you got to understand what are the common pitfalls that contribute to the demise, the academic demise of young people, broadly speaking, and more specifically as it relates to African American males. And so we built an apparatus of support and engagement. And whatever our young people want to do in life or aspire to do, whatever their dreams and aspirations are, we've tried to build an apparatus in which they can achieve those dreams and aspirations. And so our young men go on to do great things, extraordinary things. And they come from various zip codes, some first gen, low income, and some come from very affluent communities. And so we focus on scholastic achievement. That's one thing. We want our students to do exceptionally well because they matriculated at this university for specific reasons. So we want them to be able to achieve those dreams and aspirations by doing really well. The second thing we focus on is ethics. We want Our young men to be ethical human beings. And we want that to be infectious. The third thing is we focus on leadership. We don't want our young men to be in the back. We want them to be in the front. We believe that it's their destiny to be frontline leaders. Particularly when you think about the state of affairs for black men in this country, we all. We embrace what it means to be a role model.

At least that's what we.

Promote within our enterprise. And, you know, the last thing is we want our young men to be engaged community service, to be engaged in the community, to create a disruptive transformation in the community as well as the larger society and say, hey, we're here, and we're here to contribute. And we're not asking for handouts. We're just asking for an opportunity. And when I young men get that opportunity, I can tell you it's going to be more and more. And that's something we take great deal of pride in. We founded in 2004. There's no center like ours around the country. Not only there's a tremendous emphasis on the programmatic aspect, but not only that we're trying to impact the quality of life for black men at various levels of education. And so with that being said, is that we do a lot of research, but not only research, we provide technical assistance to a variety of institutions in our society to help them do a better job ensuring that black males are successful and or reaching their full potential.

This is great. Yeah. And again, the work that you're doing, it's borne out by the statistics. It's an exceptionally successful program. And now you said something really interesting. You said that there is no other program like this in the country. And so for me, as a negotiator, especially when we're talking about how we can use the skills of negotiation and conflict resolution to create positive change in our communities and our organizations. The question I come up with is when we think about 2003, when this program didn't exist, and then 2004, I want to explore some of those difficult conversations that led to the creation of this institution. And then as we've grown in competency and capability and in resources as well, how did we negotiate for more resources so we could do our job better? So let's talk about before the center existed. So what got us to the point of existence?

Well, as Fannie Lou Hamer once said, I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired. What people don't know. Prior to 1987, the Ohio State University was an open admissions institution, and we were one of the few open admissions, big ten schools in the country. And so it was your birthright, if you obtain a high school diploma from the state of Ohio, that you can come to the Ohio State University. And certainly we didn't have the robust models that we have today around admissions. And it used to be functioning, and this might be an over exaggeration, but it was functioning like an institution. We took first come, first serve, and.

Retention and graduation rates for all students.

Were not something that we would celebrate, but the most vulnerable students, it was even worse. And so in 2000, there was a movement across the country to begin to think about men's studies, begin to talk about the state of affairs around different racial groups within the male population. And so the university recognized that when you disaggregated the data, the group that was always trailing and had been trailing for a very long time, regardless when you control for income, urbanicity and other factors, black males were always trailing their counterparts. And so the university.

Who I like.

To reference, Dr. Max Stewart, has been the founder, he was the vice provost and chief diversity officer at the time, as well as other thought leaders across campus, said we can and we will have greater impact in the lives of black males. And I was just a junior professor at that time, and I was part of the research team and we studied these issues. And what came out of the report was, is that the university needed a one stop shop and we needed someone to devote time, talent, treasure and touch specifically for black males on this campus. And so unlike other places around the country, they come looking for the, I guess the magic wand. We really studied this issue and I think that created the groundswell. And so I was hired as the inaugural director, even though we had gotten it off the ground. But I was the first director and then later executive director. The vice provost at the time says, we want you to have greater impact not only in the lives of black males on this campus, but black males across the United States. And so I like to say that Dr. Stewart, he certainly must have had more expectations than I probably had of myself at that time, is that he wanted me to help make the center national, but he gave me a local budget. I had a local budget, but I had a national mission. But I think it worked out well. And then we're still, still going places that we've never been before. But I like to say we stole everything from Morehouse College. And I jokingly like to tell my colleagues at Morehouse, now Morehouse call us to help them. So, yeah, yeah. And so, you know, Ohio State is one of the great intellectual installations in the world. And for me, I'm very humbled to do this work because I would do this work virtually for free. And I always jokingly say, if you ask my wife, she probably think I'd do it for free and to do the work that, you know, that it needs to be done. And I've done consulting and work with a lot of different entities around the country, and we see the same patterns that we saw many years ago. But I can tell you, people say nothing and do nothing to kind of improve the quality of life for black males across the country. And so I give Ohio State major kudos for making this kind of investment. And I think it is aligned with our land grant mission to edify society and make it better.

Does your company invest in professional development training? If you believe that your team would benefit from a negotiation workshop, all you need to do is go to our website, fill out the workshop request form, and then we'll set up a time to chat. These workshops are completely customizable, and we've done them all around the country. Negotiation and conflict resolution skills are beneficial across all professions, but they're especially useful in procurement, purchasing, sales, sourcing, and contract management. Our calendar is filling up quickly, and we even have some workshops scheduled for next year if you think you might want one. I'd suggest reaching out soon so you don't miss out. Check out the link in the description to learn more. And now back to the show. Yeah. Oh, this is great. This is great. And really what I'm hearing at the beginning is in order to get this process started, you had to come up with essentially incontrovertible data to demonstrate that there was a problem. You took the time, you did the research, you found the information so you could identify what the problem was with precision. So that was step one. And then you use that data to be the launching point to get focused resources and budget so you could actually do the work that needed to be done. Now, James, let me push you here because I know that sounds like a great story and it is a great story, but I understand that whenever you're trying to create change like this, and especially when you're trying to get money for that change, there's going to be some resistance. And now I'm not asking you to name names. I'm asking you to talk about what that resistance look like and how you were able to push through it.

Well, the resistance is widespread and it's not you saw it across the enterprise.

As well as outside.

Even though most people know about this problem, but they didn't necessarily. You get questions. Why are we focusing specifically on this group? Why are we singling out this group? Is because when you look at the national data and since we've been collecting data on college matriculation, when you compare all the other demographic groups, black males are the only demographic group that never passed their black female counterparts for almost.

A century, we've never passed our black.

Female counterparts for matriculation in higher education.

And when you look at white males.

And I use that because oftentimes we in social and behavioral science research, we like to have a comparison group and white males are oftentimes the comparison group. But that's a whole nother story. I won't spend a lot of time talking about that.

White women pass white men for the.

First time in matriculation in higher education in the 80s. And white women are progressing so much that they're leaving white males. So when you compare all the demographic groups and look within, women are more likely to matriculate in higher education than any than males. In fact, when you look at the data after Covid, over 800,000 men and that's aggregate did not re enroll in institutions in higher learning.

I have said numerous times in my.

Talks is that I predict in the next 15 to 20 years the new affirmative action will be men. If you examine data at large at large institutions of higher learning, particularly our major public universities, there's an imbalance in the number of women compared to men. And most people are not paying close attention to this.

In 2004, US News Week.

Had on the front page the new male crisis. The image on that popular magazine was white males. And I've heard other scholars begin to note that. And some people have went to great lengths to connect what happened January 6th to some of this crisis. And I haven't went that far, but.

I would imagine because that's not specifically my research, but certainly I'm keenly aware. And you look at China, if you.

Do a Google and talk about the Chinese lad or the young Chinese boy in China, they have grave concerns about the underachievement and low achievement of Chinese boys and men right now.

So you see this, it's a pattern.

It'S a global pattern. And bringing it back home related to black men. You can go to Canada, you can see the same thing. You can go to the Caribbean, you see the same thing. You can go into Europe, you see the same thing. These are patterns that we have noticed and as a result, the center, through the center, as well as a.

The.

Wisconsin Educational Laboratory, a dear colleague there and I created and founded a colloquium called the International Colloquium on black Males in Education because we thought it was very important to galvanize and bring high impact practitioners, scholars and researchers around the world together to begin to focus on this and hopefully be able to put forth a set of recommendations to address these many challenges that we see in education, in health and other sectors of our society for black men and boys.

This is really interesting because essentially it started with being able to answer the expected resistance, the questions, because they were saying, why focus on this group? We have so many other options, we have so many other places that we can spend our money. Why focus on this group? And one of the things I've realized a lot of times in general, but especially in conversations about sensitive topics like race, gender, those type of things, people go in to these difficult conversations and they believe so strongly in what it is that they're saying that they don't even take the time to consider what the resistance might be. As a result, when they meet that resistance, they don't know what to say other than the same thing, but louder. That's not very persuasive. The beauty of the fact that you took the time to do this research is that you were able to not only identify the problem, but also ask that subsequent question of why should we focus on this particular problem over others and allocate funds to that. I think that's really, really, really insightful.

Well, I would say that.

A lot of people know me for this work, and it is certainly a labor of love, and I plan to do this until I'm no longer breathing. But nevertheless, the work that we have done specifically focus on black males, serves as a test bed for other things that we have done throughout the office of Diversity Inclusion. And so our office is just turned 52 today. Our office was founded May 25, 1970. Our office is one of the oldest, largest and most comprehensive of its kind the United States. And so I like to say that there are a range of programs, initiatives and activities that is coordinated out of our office. And so, you know, we're in the big ten and been in a big ten schools, particularly a mammoth of an institution like the Ohio State University.

Everything is big.

And so we have one of the oldest, largest and most comprehensive diversity scholarship programs in the country, where we have nearly 1500 students that we fund.

And it's important for me to underscore.

To our listeners is that this scholarship has nothing to do with your race, your gender. First and foremost, it focuses on academic excellence. And the second criteria is diversity leadership. Humanitarian work as well as social justice work are major elements because we changed it. We changed it when I was a.

Social provost because, Kwame, to quite be quite frankly with you, how we try.

To address diversity, equity, inclusion in our.

Society, we try to right the wrong.

By giving groups advantages that did not always have advantages.

And so what we're seeing right now.

Is people are saying reverse discrimination. Right.

And so something ain't whole about that. Right. That you know is not going to be sustainable over time. Particularly when you have an office that says diversity and inclusion. It didn't say African American and then say Latinx.

It didn't say LGBTQ plus.

It says diversity and inclusion.

Right.

Just.

The denotation of those words and.

As well as what we extrapolate from those words. And so what we tried to do is think about a path forward based.

On the state of affairs.

And at that time, you're talking about nervousness. See, some people of color thought it was their birthright that they could get this scholarship. And some people who were not people.

Of color said, well, they can't get it because they're not a person of color. Right.

So I challenge and try to convince.

My supervisor at that time for us to think about something differently.

And what I mean by that, what is the public asking the question, starting.

With the question, what is the role of higher education in advancing our democracy? What is the role of higher education in advancing inclusion? Right.

What is the public good of higher education? Right. And there are certain things in higher.

Education, particularly at a land grant university, I won't spend a lot of time talking about that.

And so what we decided to do, because we want to create a transformation on this campus, and regardless of what.

Zip code, what your background is, we.

Want to reward those students who work.

Really hard academically and who were successful.

But also trying to make the world better. Right. Those students, you don't have to convince, they it's a part of their ethos. And part of. When you heard me talk about building apparatus, I was able to, in my leadership role, to build a bigger apparatus. And so let me tell you a little bit about the Morrill Scholarship program that was founded 40 years ago this year we're celebrating 40 years and we graduated almost 10,000 students in 40 years. Unprecedented, right?

Unprecedented.

And to give you a sense of.

It.

The university has only had nine Rhodes scholars in his History. It's a highly covered fellowship that Cecil Rhodes from South Africa created that you.

Can study at Oxford University in the uk.

Some are earlier scholars were white and male because in his original trust women and persons of color could not receive a Rhodes Scholarship. They changed his trust.

Right.

So to make a long story short, we've only had nine. Two of the last four came out.

Of my office and they were the first persons of color and they were Morrill scholars.

The second thing, last year we had.

A Truman Scholar that came out of office.

The four year, the five year, the.

Six year graduation rate higher than the university average. 80% are in honors and scholars, over 50% make the dean's list annually.

They go to the top graduate and professional schools. They're a leader. You know we had the first black.

Woman to become the SGA president and.

The vice president that was latched the year before.

Was a moral scholar. This past year the vice president was a moral scholar.

They can almost win any competition. And they are the heart and soul of the university. And any given day it feels like I'm hanging out in the halls of the United Nations. My students are black, they're white, they're Latinx, they're multiracial, they're lgbtq, they're atheists, they're Christian, they're Republican, they're independent, they're all but what they share. It's not the zip code, not the phenotype always is that this unbridled belief in diversity, equity, inclusion and academic excellence. So in this I am more hopeful in the world. So for example, if you're a white student who's a moral scholar.

And I.

Told the company this one time and said yeah, they want to recruit my diverse student. I said, but don't want you to recruit my white students and my other students as well because you ain't got to preach to them the importance of diversity, equity, inclusion. They got a highly coveted scholarship in kwame. I get 4,000 to 7,000 applications for 350 to 450 slots. These young people get accepted in the top universities in the United States. And some of them, I am blown away, they opt out of the Ivy's and Duke and Vanderbilt and places like that, Stanford, because they said this is the only place, one of the few places where they have a critical mass of all walks of life where there's a shared values for diversity, equity, inclusion. And not only that, there's a built in apparatus for them to reach their dreams and aspirations. I'm proud of that. But that started with the work.

That.

We did at the Bell National Resource Center.

Actually, it starts with the work when I was a teacher and a counselor and a district level administrator.

It's thinking about how do we right.

Some of the wrongs and how do.

We do it in a way that.

It doesn't create tension.

And how do.

We create a disruptive transformation in the realities of everyone?

So we buy a lot of swag for our students because everybody used to think our students look just like me and you. I don't think it's a problem for them to look like me and you, but some people do think it's a.

Problem for them to look like me and you.

But our students look like everybody. But what they share. Don't think because they may not look like you that they don't possess the.

Similar values that diversity, equity, inclusion.

So I'll close on this. JPMorgan Chase gave us the largest corporate.

Gift in the history of our office.

They gave us $2.5 million because I met with the C suite and they decided that they wanted to make a.

Big investment because they wanted to do something different.

And I got to meet with the C suite and I said, if you want talent and diversity, you have to do something different than what you've always done before, because what you do is.

What other banks do, what other companies do.

You got to do something different. And then I told them, because most people, if they want diversity, they go to universities where they think diversity is. But if you just look at my African American population, we're bigger than most HBCUs in the United States. But most people don't think about that when they think about Ohio State. And so then when I talk about our quality metrics, then you say Ohio State is a place, not that, where I get talent, broadly, I get talent and diversity. And so that's what we're very excited about. And I jokingly tell a lot of places, you can critique us as much as you want, but show me one entity that has had that kind of success overnight, and your beloved automata that you probably didn't know has that kind of success. Long before diversity was popular, when you look back in the annals, the Ohio State has always been one of the leaders. We're imperfect as an institution, and I will state that. But it's not many places that I would say that is comparable to us in our rich legacy around diversity, equity and inclusion.

Oh, I think that is a good place to land, James. And you know, it makes me proud to be a Buckeye. I'm Always proud to be a graduate of the Ohio State University and a product of the Bell National Resource Center. I tell you, the work that you have done and the team has done is so encouraging, so inspiring, and I think this is a great opportunity to share that with everybody. Before you go, can you let the listeners know how they can learn more about some of the work that you're doing?

Sure. I encourage them to go to the website ODI for Office of Diversity Inclusion O osu. Edu for Ohio State University. Edu so odi. Osu.

Edu and you can find a lot of information about what we do.

And you may have.

A child, mentee or a neighbor that you might be.

Thinking about that Ohio State might be.

A designation for them to consider.

Or you may be someone who has infinite amount of resources that you want.

To make an investment for us to take things to the next level. We welcome any kind of conversation with any of your listeners.

Perfect. Really appreciate it. James, thanks so much for joining us.

Well, thank you.

And again, we're very proud of you. In the Office of Diversity Inclusion, in particular, the Todd Anthony Bell National Resource center on the African American Male. Words cannot express that enough. And your listeners, if they certainly take.

The time to listen to your podcast and know that you're fabulous, I want.

People to know the people who follow him because he's an inspiration to all.

Of us and there are many more.

Like him who coming behind him.

Oh, that is a good way to end. I appreciate that. Congratulations. You've just joined an elite club by listening to a full episode. You're now officially on the Negotiate Anything team. So welcome aboard. What most team members do is they subscribe to the podcast because that allows them to to automatically get the latest episodes of the show. The best things in life lie on the other side of difficult conversations. Keep learning, keep practicing, and keep getting better. Your relationships will improve, your career will soar, and you'll have the confidence you need to get the most out of these crucial conversations. Again, thank you for joining the team. We're excited to have you and I will see you in the next episode. I'll catch you later.