Building an Informed Democracy: Education, Public Policy, and Information Literacy

PODCAST Season 5 EPISODE 3 

Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto

School Chair, Tom and Marie Patton Chair, Professor Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy Georgia Institute of Technology

Quote of the Podcast: 

Nelson Mandela: “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”

Introduction of Guest BIO – 

Dr. Cassidy R. Sugimoto holds multiple roles at Georgia Tech. She is School Chair, the Tom and Marie Patton Chair, and Professor of the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy. Her research explores how knowledge is created, shared, and supported—with a strong focus on equity, diversity, and inclusion in science and academia. She holds three degrees from UNC Chapel Hill, including a Ph.D. in Information and Library Science. A recognized leader in her field, Dr. Sugimoto has earned multiple teaching, leadership, and service awards and is known for her thought leadership at the intersection of policy, research, and inclusion.

Interview

Agents of Change: Leaders/Innovators. 

• 30,000 Ft. View – Why so we, as a society invest in education?
• What drew you to education?
• What do you love about what you do?
• Information dissemination
• Importance of Higher Education
• What are the biggest challenges to you?
• What would you like decision makers to know?”

Transcript

Liza Holland [00:00:02]:
Welcome to Education Perspectives. I am your host, Liza Holland. This is a podcast that explores the role of education in our society from a variety of lenses. Education needs to evolve, to meet the needs of today and the future. Solving such huge issues requires understanding. Join me as we begin to explore the many perspectives of education. Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto holds multiple roles at Georgia Tech.

Liza Holland [00:00:32]:
She is School Chair, the Tom and Marie Patton Chair, and Professor of the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy. Her research explores how knowledge is created, shared, and supported, with a strong focus on equity, diversity, and inclusion in science and academia. She holds three degrees from UNC Chapel Hill, including a PhD in Information and Library Science. A recognized leader in her field, Dr. Tsujimoto has earned multiple teaching, leadership and service awards and is known for her thought leadership at the intersection of policy, research, and inclusion. So, Dr. Tsujimoto, thank you so much for coming aboard on Education Perspectives.

Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto [00:01:21]:
Thanks for having me.

Liza Holland [00:01:22]:
Would love to kick you off with the 30,000 foot question. Why do you think that we as a society invest in education?

Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto [00:01:31]:
That's a great question. And I. I truly believe that education is essential for an informed democracy. I believe that education is how we learn to live in the world responsibly, how we learn to create new innovations that improve the human condition and how we come to understand ourselves and others. I think it's a way of living, a way of being, and I think when we are more educated at all levels, I think it leads to a better society.

Liza Holland [00:01:59]:
Absolutely. So what drew you to education as a vocation?

Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto [00:02:04]:
Both of my parents are educators, and I grew up surrounded by books and a keen sense that education was the mechanism by which I could improve my own life and the lives of others. And I think it's really something that has been pervasive across generations. My grandmother wasn't an educator, but she had 15 children. And I think that that is a form of education every day, making sure that you are raising those children. And she did in a way that I've really taken to heart, that she brought books into the household. They were not wealthy by any means. They were farmers. They were working very hard to keep the farm alive in a time when a lot of big farms were coming in and taking over.

Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto [00:02:46]:
And they had this family farm. And so she took two by fours and cinder blocks and created bookshelves. And so she just surrounded her children with books that she believed that anything was possible for them. And she instilled this love of learning in all of her children. So I think that's something that has really come down through the generations. That education doesn't necessarily have to be formal, but it is a way of living your life of constantly learning, of constantly improving yourself. And not just for you, but for all of the lives that you touch. And so I think that's part of what I bring to my own work as an educator.

Liza Holland [00:03:23]:
Oh, that is such a great story. And I think that that's so incredibly true. And really what we need to be getting more towards in our entire education system is not just a short term opportunity to learn, but how to inspire being lifelong learners. Especially with the pace of change today. I mean, everything could be obsolete tomorrow.

Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto [00:03:45]:
Exactly.

Liza Holland [00:03:46]:
Be doing that sort of thing. So you're now at Georgia Tech and you have many hats there. What do you love about what you're doing?

Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto [00:03:55]:
Oh, how much time do we have? I feel so blessed. I feel so lucky. I think as a child, I imagined all of these different careers and different aspects of those careers. I wanted to be a teacher and a performer and a scientist and a traveler and a writer. Right. You imagine all of these futures for yourself. And now I found a career where I can do all of those things. I get to mentor students, I get to conduct research.

Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto [00:04:20]:
I get to travel the world and talk with people all over the globe about their educational systems. I get to write and publish books. So it's all of those things packaged into this one really fabulous career. So it's something where every day is different, every day is challenging, every day I learn something. I think it's really, you know, it's a blessing to be able to do this.

Liza Holland [00:04:41]:
Oh, that's marvelous. I'll tell you what, as a lifelong curiosity addict, I was fascinated by the, you know, kind of your focus on information dissemination. Can you tell me a little bit about your research there and what you're digging into?

Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto [00:04:57]:
Absolutely. So maybe I'll back up and sort of tell a little bit about my story. I started out as a music performance major. So in undergraduate, I was studying the flute and I wanted to be in an opera orchestra. And so it's been a really big shift to go from that into public policy. But what happened is I was working in the music library. I was on the work study program. I didn't have a lot of money as a student, and so I needed a job.

Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto [00:05:23]:
And I was working in the library every day. And I became just fascinated with library science and went to pursue that in graduate school. And when I got into the classroom the first semester, I was confronted with these questions that still sort of drive me, it was, who gets to make information? Who gets access to that information? How do we know what's true and what's false? How do we shift through all of these conflicting pieces of information to understand how we should live in the world? And that really drove me to think about that. How do scientists communicate their information? Who gets to even be a scientist? What kinds of questions can they ask? And how is that constrained by the government, by institutions, by our own life trajectories? And so that's something that's driven me along the way and thinking about that. So one of those things is scholarly communication and thinking about how we disseminate both to other scientists across national borders and to the public. And so that's been a lifelong interest of mine.

Liza Holland [00:06:28]:
Boy, that is fascinating. And I imagine that with all of the crazy disinformation and AI and everything that's going on right now, I mean, obviously it's probably a more protected world in academia because guardrails are still there. But that's one of the things that I think is really important for students. One of the things I was proudest of during my very involved parent phase was we had a school who was thinking about just no longer having a librarian, and they were going to put it into extra resources for students who were struggling. And I was like, you know, this is something that everybody needs, is that idea of how do you value information? How do you sift through what is real and what's not? How do you make good decisions and judgments? And that's exactly what our librarians do for us.

Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto [00:07:28]:
Exactly. Information literacy is more important now. Oh, absolutely. I will always say librarians are one of the most important jobs and needs to be protected along with educators. That is how we learn to exist in this world, to understand how we should live, what information that we should consume or not. I think the hard thing from scientists is two sides of that issue. One of my favorite piece of advice that I ever heard from Rush Holt, a former elected official for the US and also someone who led one of the biggest associations for science, he said that when your kids come home from school, you shouldn't ask them what they learned, but you should ask them what questions they asked. Right.

Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto [00:08:14]:
And it's pushing this idea that science isn't static. It's not this monolithic thing that just moves over time, but it changes. It's dynamic, it's uncertain. Right. And they can also be scientists. They can both contribute to certainty by constructing new knowledge, but. But contribute to uncertainty by questioning that which we know right now, but I think science is in a really hard position because at one time we want to promote that, you know, there are uncertainties, things are changing, we discover new ways of knowing. We discover new things all the time.

Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto [00:08:46]:
But at the same time, that uncertainty doesn't devalue or illegitimatize science, which right now, I think when people see that uncertainty, because they are confronted all the time with misinformation, with all of this, it makes them trust science less. And so we're in this really difficult space of trying to demonstrate to the public the uncertainties of science because it is. And it's, you know, it has these moments that we are discussing and we're moving through and it's dynamic and it's ever changing while at the same time letting people know that these are the mechanisms to distinguish between, you know, facts and non facts. And that's a difficult space right now. And you're absolutely right. With the rise of AI, it becomes even more difficult. If you search in Google and you have your AI search turned on, you get things that look very much like facts. Here's what we know.

Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto [00:09:38]:
Here are bullet points. And it's very easy to take them on face value and say those look right and draw them. But we know that the AI is hallucinating, that it's giving us references that don't even exist, that it is trying to replace information with omitted information in ways that are really, really harmful with pretty dire consequences, particularly in some fields like medicine and other spaces. So it's, I think it's a really tricky spot right now. We've never been confronted with this much information that's been generated at such a large scale so quickly that needs to be combated constantly.

Liza Holland [00:10:13]:
Well, and you know, compounding that to me is the place that you would normally turn to for the most credible information and whatnot. Your, your institutions of higher learning are also being attacked and quote, you know, I guess I don't even want it to repeat it. But at any rate, it's. They're questioning the validity and the value of higher education. And some of these poor colleges are really, are really in very, very difficult types of situations and circumstances, especially with the amount of money that is involved as far as research is concerned. I'd love for us to take even a step back and talk about, since you are at an institution of higher learning, what about this importance of higher education? Is that still relevant? Are we, you know, do you think that that's changing or how can we get back to that foundational Certainty of depending upon our institutions.

Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto [00:11:18]:
It's a great question. And I think right now it is so imperative for us to demonstrate our value to the public and for them to realize that that value extends to all sectors and all parts of it. Whether we're looking at our economic well being, our national security, our health and wellness. All of those are impacted dramatically by what happens in higher ed. And you spoke to some of these funding cuts earlier. And I think it is very easy for the public to think of higher ed as a luxury good and one that can be cut in favor of other services without realizing how dependent those services are upon higher education, upon innovations that come out of it, upon the strength of our scientific workforce. I think AI, which we talked about earlier, is a really interesting example. Right.

Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto [00:12:07]:
Right now we're putting $500 billion into AI, but all targeted towards industry. And the idea is that industry can accelerate innovation. They can run faster, they can run better. They're going to accelerate advances in AI. And that's not false. Industry does have the capacity to do that. At the same time, all of those industries are dependent upon a scientific workforce that went through higher ed. They're dependent upon technological advancements that happened in higher ed.

Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto [00:12:38]:
Over the last 30 years. We've been developing the techniques that they can now use to put into commercialization to build new technologies that improve human well being. We hope if we don't fund higher education. And right now, the proposed budgetary cuts of more than 50% across both the National Institutes of Health and also the National Science foundation mean that right now industry can run, but it's going to hit a cliff. And that cliff is when we haven't generated any new innovations that then can be taken in, that we haven't created a scientific workforce that can continue to propel those innovations over time. And so we have these moments where that are very shortsighted, where we say, let's stop funding higher ed. Let's turn our funding to other sectors of the economy without realizing their dependency. And so I think it's incumbent upon higher ed.

Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto [00:13:30]:
I think we don't do a great job of letting people know how what we're doing here translates to these benefits for the public. I think we need to do a better job of doing that. But I am concerned about the urgency of that messaging that right now we, we're making decisions that are going to be manifest in three and five years and in 10 years in really dramatic ways for the US population.

Liza Holland [00:13:54]:
You know, it's. To me, I, I look at industry at least in the US it's very focused on the short term. You know, it's not playing the long game. And the long game is really where higher ed has been, been the anchor. Because it's not always about the profit motive, right? It's about making society better, making a discipline better, making whatever. And you lose a lot. I can definitely see a cliff like that. That's.

Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto [00:14:25]:
And I will be the first to say that industry should be profit oriented and industry should be short term. That's what that sector does and it does it really, really well. And to your point, education does the long term well and it does public benefit really well. And the government also should have as its primary motive public benefit and public welfare. Therefore, the government should be funding higher ed with that long term that leads to this profit generation. Right? It's an ecosystem. And that ecosystem needs to be healthy. It needs industry to do well.

Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto [00:14:56]:
It needs the government to also be subsidizing. It needs higher ed to be innovating and creating and generating a workforce. Like each sector has to work in tandem. When one sector forgets its place, we become really off balanced and it leads to those kinds of disparities in the long run. So if we start saying, let's not invest in research and higher ed, let's put it all in industry, then we become off, right? We lose what our value proposition is. Industry is good at one thing, it should keep doing that. Higher ed also needs to keep doing it for industry to be successful.

Liza Holland [00:15:30]:
Absolutely. So with all of your background on information dissemination, how do we think, how do you think we ought to get that message out?

Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto [00:15:39]:
Well, I think podcasts like this are a great way to do it. And I'm not just saying that to be sycophantic. I mean, I think we need to find out how people, and this has always been the case, find out how people are consuming their information and meet them where they are. And I think higher ed, I'll be the first to say, has not been great at that. We're very good at communicating our information to other scientists. We're very good at that. We're not as good at breaking it down and translating that science for the public and particularly translating the impact and the benefit. I think that we could do a much better job of that.

Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto [00:16:12]:
So we're so excited about our results and our findings. We're like, oh, I found this. But we're not good at saying, I found this and this is what it means for society, right? And really taking it to that next step. So I think Institutes of higher education need to invest more in that communication piece and think about the multiple stakeholders from the public, officials, elected officials, appointed officials, civil servants, as well as the general public, and making sure that we're translating our work in a way that's accessible.

Liza Holland [00:16:42]:
I think that's great. And it. It. I definitely see that pattern. My. My husband's a DVM PhD, and so I went through the whole, you know, academia portion with him, and that's exactly what he spends a lot of his time doing, is doing that translating. And I think that marketing piece of what's in it for me needs to be part of the message to general public, et cetera. Yeah.

Liza Holland [00:17:06]:
So obviously facing a lot of challenges. What about you and the Department of Public Policy there? What do you think? What are the biggest challenges that you are facing at this point?

Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto [00:17:16]:
I'll say maybe start at the public policy and then go to the bigger one. I think as a school of public policy, too often the public conflates policy with politics. And I think that that's a challenge for us, is that they assume that in studying public policy and creating future students and practitioners in public policy, that we are ideologically skewed in one direction or the other, that we're teaching people how to be politicians. And I think that there's a lot of skepticism and concern about politics right now in the United States, and it's very divisive kind of chasm. And so I think I spend a lot of time trying to demonstrate that that's not what we're doing. We're thinking about policies, and policies affect everyone's lives. Right. If you drive on a road, you are subject to policies in the transportation area.

Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto [00:18:08]:
If your children go to a public school, those are policies that elect that. If your kids go to a charter school, there are policies that allow those things. If you engage in the health care system at all, those are governed by policies at as well. And I think we saw that in Covid. People became a lot more aware of how policies affect their lives and how they live in the world and experience the world. But policies, when policies are working well, you don't notice them. And that's sometimes really problematic, is that we take for granted the way in which we exist in the world. I think people who travel more have seen what it looks like to be in a dysfunctional system around public policy.

Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto [00:18:48]:
We have so much that we can be grateful for in the United States, and a lot of that are due to policies. And so I think that's part of my challenge Right now, particularly as people are really upset about the political system, to let them know that public policy exists, whether it's Democrat or Republican. Right. We still need good policy and good policy making and evidence based policies in order to really leverage all of the advantages that the US system gives its citizens.

Liza Holland [00:19:18]:
Isn't that the truth? So if a student is interested in going into public policy, what does that look like for, you know, beyond higher education? What can you do with your degree in public policy?

Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto [00:19:34]:
So our students have a variety of careers, and that's one thing I love about the program at Georgia Tech, because we combine the technological with the policy. So students come in and many of them go on to law school and they become JDs and they bring sort of that regulatory and policy framework with them to their legal careers, often in science and technology related areas. So in intellectual property or artificial intelligence. So thinking about how we regulate or not, emerging technologies becomes a part of what they do. We have students who go into consulting companies or students who go and become lobbyists. We have students who go and work for the federal government, state government, local governments, and really provide, I think, the mechanisms for making our cities, our state and our nation run.

Liza Holland [00:20:20]:
That's so cool. My nephew actually is a graduate of public policy from University of Kentucky and he's now working for the governor's office in budget management. So.

Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto [00:20:30]:
Excellent.

Liza Holland [00:20:31]:
Yeah, yeah. He's having a great time, which is really. But good to have that young voice and perspective in these halls. So I guess I would like to take one last dive into your information dissemination perspective and maybe it could blend in with this decision makers question. But I'm working with the League of Women Voters and we're trying very hard to be able to talk about how to get your good civic information and whatnot. Could you talk a little bit more about in this day and age, how in the world you decide whether a resource is indeed credible?

Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto [00:21:19]:
Yeah. So when I have a few things I would love to say relevant to the question in the League of Women Voters and the importance of organizations like that, but let me go directly to the question. I think we all need to come with some skepticism to everything that we see. So when you read it, the first thing is to question, right? Is this credible? Is this coming from a source that I know that is certified? Right. Do I understand this source and the authenticity of that source? Does this resonate with other sources? Can I find other sources that also confirm this? Right. Not just taking a single source as an answer, but doing a little bit of research to understand does this resonate with other things, or does this an outlier? Does this look wrong compared to other information that I've seen before? Having trusted assessors and other tools to evaluate, asking other people you trust, Right. Does this look like it? Particular mentors in other ways? You talked about librarians earlier. Those are great sources to say, hey, I found this.

Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto [00:22:18]:
Does this seem right? Right. They have expertise in evaluating the credibility of sources. So I think that there's a lot of tools, and every librarian's website will have a thing on information literacy. How do I evaluate that this source is accurate? People need to arm themselves with those tools. And I think sometimes we think, oh, I'm smart enough. Right. I can look at it. But we're getting really sophisticated misinformation now.

Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto [00:22:40]:
Everyone needs to be much more armed, much more skeptical about the kinds of information that we're receiving, and we need to do a little bit more sleuthing on our own. I will say, though, I want to go back to your comment about the League of Women Voters. The other thing that we look at is so much about who gets to produce that information and who is disseminating information. And I think a lot of times we get into our filter bubbles, and so we pull into this space and we have data that's been curated for particular profiles, and it reinforces what you're looking for. So the other thing I would say is to make sure that you're moving outside of those spaces, that you're getting different forums, different perspectives of information, and not just getting all of your information from a single source. Because I think that that's also what leads us to fall into the traps of dis and misinformation.

Liza Holland [00:23:32]:
I'm so glad I asked the question. That was a good. That was. So at this point, I'd like to ask the question about what would you like decision makers to know? And you can define who the decision makers are that you are speaking to. It could be, you know, the general public. It could be folks in government making decisions. You choose. But what would you like to say to decision makers out there?

Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto [00:23:56]:
Well, first I'd like to say that we're all decision makers. And I think that's really important. One of my most transformative experiences as an educator has actually been in the construction of the GTDC program. It was a program that sent and continues to send Georgia Tech students to D.C. for a semester where they work as an intern, they take two classes, they all live together in our nation's capital. And the first semester that I went was this beautiful moment, I met with all of our female students and female alumni from our program, and they are all working in these incredible careers in public service. And they talked about what they had done in their careers. And I was so impressed with our alumni.

Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto [00:24:40]:
But then we went around and we talked with other, each. Each of these students who were doing internships, right? Not full time jobs, not even fellowships, internships for undergraduates. And they were doing impressive, important work. They were actually helping to write legislation that was going through to write policy memos and briefs. They were working on some really important things. One of the alums said, how many of you ever thought you would live and work in D.C. and not a hand went up. And they said, how many of you think that you could do a tour of duty in D.C.

Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto [00:25:12]:
and all of these hands went up. All of these students who never thought they would leave the state of Georgia now saw that they could make a difference, that their voice mattered, that they could do something there. And I see that in the same way in the governor's office for our Georgia Legislative Internship program of students coming in and saying, wow, my voice matters, right? I can bring evidence to the conversation. I can change the conversation in ways that can change, change the lives of hundreds, thousands, millions of Americans when I am bringing this perspective in. So I think one thing is to say everyone should feel empowered in their own right. We all are representatives, all of our representatives are looking to us to tell them what we need and what we want. The more informed we are on issues, the more engaged we are in dialogue is what makes our democracy great, right? So everyone should realize that they have the power to bring evidence to the conversation and bring their voice to the conversation. I think that's, that's essential.

Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto [00:26:09]:
I think that they need to make sure that they're doing their research right, and we've talked a lot about that is understanding the situations and being able to bring that evidence base to it. For those who are in positions of power, I think it's important for them to realize that higher education is pervasive and that it improves the well being of our society, that we have to continue to fund it, to support it. We have to provide access for all students to be able to come through and to education, to realize that they too can be scholars and scientists. I think we all have to do more of that to realize, to fully realize that promise of American higher education, that everyone has access to it and everyone can go through it in formal and informal ways. And then to go back to our first conversation, to encourage everyone to be curious, to be lifelong learners, to continue to engage in this dialogue, because I think that that makes sense, makes us all better.

Liza Holland [00:27:01]:
Oh, fabulous answer. Fabulous answer.

Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto [00:27:05]:
Thank you, Liza.

Liza Holland [00:27:07]:
Thank you so very, very much for taking time out of, out of your day to share these thoughts with us, because I think that they're really important and incredibly timely. So thanks so much for being a guest.

Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto [00:27:19]:
Well, thanks for all that you do. I think that this is, this is important, and it's part of, part of the puzzle of addressing some of these issues. So thank you.

Liza Holland [00:27:28]:
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Education Perspectives. Feel free to share your thoughts on our Facebook page. Let us know which education perspectives you would like to hear or share. Please subscribe and share with your friends.