David McCollough III describes how the American Exchange Project builds connections between rural, urban, and suburban students
Foreign exchange programs have been used since after World War II as a peacekeeping tool. I go to college lecture halls and I speak now and I say, who's been to a different country? Pretty much every hand goes up. That was not the case before World War A fraction of the people would have would have done that. Three quarters of white Americans don't have a friend who's not white.
David McCullough III:40% of Americans have never met a farmer. Two thirds never met a native American. Only 20% know someone who's trans. We are suffering from all the sorts of ignorances about the other. If we don't take the time to help our young people get to know each other, they are ill suited to have the kinds of conversations and make the sorts of decisions as citizens that they'll need to make as adults.
David McCullough III:That's David McCullough, cofounder and CEO of the American Exchange Project. The American Exchange Project, also known as AEP, sends high school seniors on a free weeklong trip to different parts of the country to engage with people and experiences that are different from their own. The concept builds on effective peacekeeping tools like international pen pals and study abroad programs developed after World War two. But this time, the study abroad program, as David notes, is needed within our own country. David worries that kids today don't have the opportunity to exercise those innate psychological muscles that help form connections with people who are different from them and who might disagree with them on some things.
David McCullough III:David joined me for a conversation about AEP, how it came about and where he hopes to take it, and the need to step out of one's comfort zone and see life through the lens of another community and perspective.
David McCullough III:This is Ellen Wolcher from the University of Minnesota Extension. This is the Side by Side podcast.
David McCullough III:Can you tell our listeners about the American Exchange Project?
David McCullough III:Sure. So, basically, the American Exchange Project is a foreign exchange program, but rather than going to different country, you go abroad to a different state and different hometown from the one that you're growing up in. So we send kids in the summer after they graduate high school on a free week long trip to an American town that is politically, socioeconomically, and culturally very different from their own home town. Think Dodge City, Kansas to San Francisco, San Francisco to Muskogee, Oklahoma, Muskogee, Oklahoma to Tampa, Florida. And the whole idea is to introduce young people to other versions of our country, other ways of life within our country from their own, on the belief that the relationships they're gonna form naturally will be valuable to their lives in many ways and will be valuable to our civic society and our civil society as a whole.
David McCullough III:What does a week look like for students when they're in this place that's so different from what they're used to?
David McCullough III:It's a lot of fun, and it's a lot of activities that are designed to help young people walk in the shoes of folks who are very, very different from them. So we operate by hiring a high school teacher in each of our partner towns who becomes the leader of the exchange. We call them our school's exchange managers, and they really have final cut and the authorship over the weeks exchange, but we train them throughout the year on how to facilitate conversations on really difficult topics. We train them on games and activities they can play that will help people who maybe have a reason to not get along, to to get along and to get to know one another. And then we divide the week's activities into four broad categories, cultural immersion, whatever that might mean to the individual who hears it.
David McCullough III:Community events and activities, we've discovered in running AEP that pretty much every town in America has a rattlesnake roundup or a chili cook off or a farmer's market or a state fair, you name it. And they're terrific and worth attending. The best way to immerse yourself in the community is to go and see the best of that town, see that idea or event or program that brings everybody out. So we we get our kids there, we often try to have them volunteer at it or have them attend. Then we do what we call professional development, which is really a way of saying they have meals with interesting adults in the community, ranges from mayors to front office folks to sports teams, really whatever the kids are interested in.
David McCullough III:And then one of our days of the exchange is dedicated to service, volunteering, especially on a particularly difficult local issue. So the exchange managers can do really whatever they want so long as they feel that what they're planning fits into those one of those broad ideas. It's a lot of camping, it's a lot of hiking, it's a lot of riding horses, seeing the tops of skyscrapers, and the red carpet glistening versions of the communities they go to, and then also the hole in the wall authentic realities of what it means to grow up there.
David McCullough III:How do you select who goes where, they fill out a surge do kids fill out a survey? What does this look like?
David McCullough III:So the reality is that our communities today have, our country is so diverse, and our communities have become so politically, culturally, and socioeconomically, and often racialethnically homogeneous, that there are any number of places, it's not hard, I should to find a place that's really different in this country from the one that you're growing up in. We place students based on a kind of algorithm that loosely aligns political, socioeconomic, cultural, demographic, and urbanruralsuburban factors into a student's placement. We also, in our registration process, track what the young people are interested in. Little personality tests like, would you rather go swimming in a lake or hike a mountain? Would you rather tour a museum or work with your hands for a day?
David McCullough III:And that gauges something so that we can determine where the kids might wanna go, what they're interested in doing, and it also allows us to see a place that's really, really different from them. You can also learn a lot or assume a lot about a young person purely by the zip code in which they're growing up. So knowing where these kids are from gives us a pretty high understanding of what they believe in, where they're headed, and where they've likely never been before.
David McCullough III:We are so divided. Right? We tend to live around people who think like us politically. Right?
David McCullough III:It's a comfortable, natural way to live, but it presents, I think, really challenging problems toward the democratic project of finding common ground with people who are different from you, which in a country as large and diverse as ours is something we need to do every day to create progress on our nation's most contentious issues and also to move forward. I think kids today are growing up in communities that are not exercising enough those innate psychological muscles that help us form connections with people who are different from us and feel comfortable around people who might disagree with us on some things.
David McCullough III:And not just kids, maybe adults as well. I'm just curious about this. You mentioned that the high schools have a manager of those projects. So within towns, are there, you know, three or four students at a time from a different location in that communities? So there's kind of a cohort of kids?
David McCullough III:Yeah. So the kids travel in cohorts, usually ranging from about five to as many as 20 students from across the country. The number varies usually based on the size of the town that they're going to. And the key is that the students in the cohort are not from that student's town, so you would not travel from Minneapolis with 15 other kids from your high school. You'd travel with kids from Seattle and San Francisco and Austin, Texas.
David McCullough III:Texas. And the idea is that it, one, helps students meet people from all over the country as well as people in the community that they're going to. And it also means that for you in your hometown, you're the one person going to Muskogee, Oklahoma or Dodge City, Kansas, let's say that year. And so the trips for the kids are very individualized, and it makes it more of a coming of age experience for them, the hero's journey and individual adventure. We've also seen that the bonding, the social bonding that happens when they travel very, very quickly because you immediately latch onto the people you've never met before, but are kind of in the same spot as you all of a sudden.
David McCullough III:We surveyed our kids, and we found that most felt they'd made a real friendship within twelve to twenty four hours of arriving.
David McCullough III:I wish they had had this program when I was a kid. You know, because I grew up in Montana and North Dakota. And so for me, it was going out east or going to a big city. And vice versa, you know, a lot of my friends from New York City that I met in college, I wish they had had the experience to go where I grew up because I think that they would have really benefited from that too.
David McCullough III:And did they ever eventually, in being friends with you, did
David McCullough III:they ever get out of your way? Yeah. Well, one of my good friends from New York City, he did eventually visit Montana. And I think it really you know, he didn't drive till he was 20. And I I think it was a good experience, but I it was a little scary for him being out in the mountains, and it it there's so few people.
David McCullough III:But, yes, I think it was good for him.
David McCullough III:It's not really valuable if it doesn't make you a little bit nervous, if it's not a little bit scary. The requirement of being courageous, I think, is a very good one. And too often you see young people today, I think, holding when faced with adversity or moving away from something that might spark their nerves. You know, the enemy of the AEP trip we found is actually not the passionate, argumentative liberal or conservative or the caustic kid or the narrow minded kid. It's the cell phone.
David McCullough III:Because a lot of things at ADP and and what we're doing and in civic projects generally require you to put yourself out there and to put yourself in situations that might make you a little nervous or uncomfortable. And too many kids, I think, have the habit of when faced with that go right back to the phone, which is this comfortable kind of umbilical cord back into a cozy environment that you can control that not only, you know, shows what you ask it to show you, it reads you. And so it anticipates what you want and surrounds you in a world of your own taste, your own ideas.
David McCullough III:This program's all over The United States. Are there any locations where you wish you had a site?
David McCullough III:Yeah. There are 33,000 high schools in America. We're in 65. So there are then 32,035 high schools that I wish we had a site right now. I wish we were everywhere.
David McCullough III:I think this program should be in every town. I think a week in a different town should be our nation's civic rite of passage as common to the high school experience as the prom. There is no perfect place for this, truly. It can be anywhere. Every town is interesting.
David McCullough III:Every person growing up in America today is shaped by the place that they're up and then the people who call that place home, and therefore the act of going away and coming back will be valuable to their development. We're running 65 exchanges this summer, and they start on Wednesday or two days from now. We'll have over 500 students in the program, which means we'll put about 1,000 kids through the program by the end of the summer. We are in 36 states. In terms of the types of high schools or the regions of the country that are everywhere.
David McCullough III:We have no gaps on the map, the geographic map, or the demographic map of the country. We're really pulling kids from everywhere, and we've seen extraordinary buy in from all walks of life in America. We've really had no trouble tapping any network. And there are precedents that exist. The Erasmus program in Europe, for example, in thirty years, 10,000,000 Europeans have had funded exchanges to other universities through the Erasmus program.
David McCullough III:It's been an extraordinary investment on the part of the EU in creating a more cohesive European identity. And I think given how fractured our society and culture is today and how America's only gonna become increasingly diverse, we need to think about our own iterations of that.
David McCullough III:David, what are some of the changes in perspectives that you've heard from students who've participated in this experience or experiences that they've shared with you in which really a light bulb has got on and said, hey. Gosh. I didn't realize this, or this changed my assumption of that.
David McCullough III:It's everything. It's enormous. It's like we've expanded the horizon that they're looking at for their lives. It's not just, you know, oh gosh, Republicans are people too, you know, man, our rural people are not as mean as I thought. That, frankly, is the extraordinarily low hanging fruit.
David McCullough III:Best experience of my life, foundational experience of my childhood is what we hear the most often from our kids when they come back from this experience. There is something that is so deeply coming of age about the act of going away from your hometown and embedding yourself with people who are different that allows young people to grow up. When a young person sees what it's like to grow up in a different place, they themselves grow up there. That, I think, is the higher accomplishment. One of the biggest things kids say is that is the realization that one's beliefs and attitudes to the world, not just political, but in really all manners, are the byproduct of our lived experiences and that those experiences really are the byproduct of the circumstances in which we live.
David McCullough III:And for young people, that's the circumstances in which they've grown up, which they don't get to choose. And so the people who go through our program on the whole, I think come away with two very quiet but powerful reorientations to their way they look at the world. The is that all people are individuals. We're the composites of these complicated factors of who we are, who we were raised by, where we've come from, and the things that we've done. And so before we judge a person, we should get to know them a little bit.
David McCullough III:We should ask questions about them. And young people see that when they go to rural Texas or Downtown Boston, that it's not that folks are different from me, that they're just living very different lives in a very different place, faced with a very different set of realities for my own. And who am I to make judgments about that because I don't live here every day, and so I ought to embed myself and learn more about it. That's item one. Item two is that by having fun and positive experiences and connecting with people and seeing the humanity of people who you previously thought were scary, a little bit of what's scary about this experience is that kids think, based on the prevailing stereotypes and prejudices that are so prevalent in our country today, that when they go to a lot of places, they're gonna get rejected, they're gonna be treated meanly, they're gonna be pushed away.
David McCullough III:But when the thing that happens is a family, mom and a dad and little kids with a poster at the airport saying, Ellen, welcome to Montana, we're so glad to have you here. And they bring you home, and there's dinner at the dinner table, and there's a room that with clean folded sheets at the edge of the bed for you and a shower towel, and it's you've had a long day and you get some rest tonight. That is a deeply powerful experience that affirms the universal humanity of all people, and I think cuts right through a lot of what's behind so many of the tribalizing or through the issues of tribalism in our society today, which are prejudice and ignorance. We've seen with a lot of our kids when asked, you know, what did you think about Vermont before you came here? The answer always isn't, oh, I thought it was horrible and full of mean people.
David McCullough III:It was, I didn't think about it at all. And I think that gets close to where a lot of us are at today, which is that we don't really truly think deeply about all of these places and people and viewpoints that are so different from us. We just have these quick gut reactions. And if we let young people and if we let excuse me. If we let Vermont for young people be defined by something they see on a abrasive media environment or in a polarizing social media post or from that wacky uncle at Thanksgiving that, you know, goes off on who knows what, then they're gonna have a state defined for them inappropriately and not defined by the people who actually live there and the place itself.
David McCullough III:And so positive name association and a more nuanced and frankly complex and accurate understanding of what makes people who they are is ultimately what I think all young people come away from this experience with because it's so inherent in the experience itself. Apart from that too, young people get something for them that I think really shapes their lives. And so like any adventure, like any place that you go to, I think young people hook onto opportunities that present themselves through the connections they make in those places that can end up shaping major parts of their own lives. So socializing across lines of diversity, I think, is only gonna become more important as we move forward in the future, not just right now with the with the present issues that have to do with polarization.
David McCullough III:David, what was the impetus of this work that you do? Where did this start? What was the light bulb that went off for you?
David McCullough III:A lot of it began unintentionally with a road trip I took in college. When I was a junior in college, I was an American Studies major. Very important to me were the way the American dream can connect our society and promises of equality and equal opportunity embedded within our constitution, I believe, and within our way of life. And so I wanted to look at the grand strategy of how we educate our nation's poorest children. And when I started reading into the issue, I realized a few people were going out into the the, quote unquote, field, let's say, and talking to teachers and kids and parents and folks in the middle of it.
David McCullough III:Everyone was quoting metadata and big think pieces. So I took that idea. I was an American studies major, you know, Alexis de Tocqueville, Dorothea Lange, James Evans, John Stein. There's this big tradition of taking your big American question and hitting the road with the fun of a road trip. And so I borrowed my mom's car in the morning after my 20 birthday, left my little leafy suburb of Boston called Sudbury, Massachusetts and drove 7,000 miles across the country and spent two months living in Catulla, Texas, way down rural South Texas, Pine Ridge, South Dakota, and in some of the more blighted neighborhoods of Cleveland.
David McCullough III:And it was without a doubt the most profound educational experience I had in my entire life. And I'd been to some amazing schools and universities and graduate schools, but nothing compared to hitting the road for two months and talking to people. I also made great friends and came back not only with a deep understanding of the issue I was looking at, but a narrative about America that was more nuanced and complex than what we were hearing that year in 2016 on the eve of the Clinton Trump election. And after Donald Trump won the election and everyone in my world of Yale and Boston was wondering how could that be, I was the kid at dinner tables and in lecture halls with my hand raised saying, you know, hop in my mom's car and I'll go show you. So fast forward two years, in the fall of twenty eighteen, I was fresh out of graduate school.
David McCullough III:And so I had lunch with a professor from that program, Paul Salmon, who's the economics correspondent for the PBS NewsHour and was, as he says, moonlighting as a Yale professor in the grand strategy program. And we shared our interest in why America was so divided, and we defined that both as politically polarized but also economically unequal, is another kind of growing apart in our society. And we also thought it interesting that no one really knew what to do about it. And so that fall, we got in touch with a lot of the top professors we knew who were also concerned about the problem. Akhil Amar, the constitutional law professor at Yale, Robert Putnam, the sociologist at Harvard, Arlie Hochschild, sociologist at Berkeley.
David McCullough III:So they came together as this sort of board of big brains, and I was a kid conducting a research project on what can we do to bring Americans from different regions and backgrounds together so that they maybe even can become friends with each other. And we learned a few very interesting lessons during our six months of research. We learned that for people who are at odds with each other in conflict, in order to get through their prejudices, they need to connect in person, and it helps to do a thing. Acts of service, we often think, are great ways for this and they are. The kicker though is that that thing can't market itself on a hey you people who don't get along with each other, let's get along and do this thing together.
David McCullough III:It's gotta be something else, which means that it's gotta be a product or an idea or an experience that is of equal interest to both divided groups. And that's where it gets very, very challenging. In addition, we also saw that most people who were polarized against other folks and other groups in our country were not talking about the issues they cared so much about with what we might call logic or careful research. They were talking from personal places. I care so much about gay rights because my brother or sister is gay, and I love them to death, and I want them to be happy.
David McCullough III:And so we realized that if you're gonna work on finding common ground on issues and finding common ground between groups that are conflicting groups, you need to work with people's hearts as much as you do with their heads. And we saw with this a great opportunity to work with young people, teenagers, which was perfect because at the time, starting a nonprofit is not the most lucrative decision one can make in one's life. I was working as a substitute teacher and a baseball coach at the local high school in the town. And so I decided to ask kids from Sudbury, Massachusetts, this liberal, mostly affluent town in the suburbs of Boston, one of the same questions I asked to kids out on the road back in the February, which is what's the least favorite what's your least favorite thing about where you're growing up? Trying to get out, what's an issue that bothers you every day?
David McCullough III:And the kids in that room ironically said the exact same thing as kids who come from demographically polar opposite sides of America. They said we feel like we're growing up in a bubble, but we've never seen life outside the bubble. And that's when the light bulb. On the hook of an adventure, which every teenager seems to wanna have, and on the hook of just meeting different people, which every kid wants to do because you're so sick of your hometown by the time you're 18 and just getting out and seeing a little. Let's start an exchange program but right here in America.
David McCullough III:And when we went and researched where foreign exchange programs come from, they are actually been used since after World War II as a peacekeeping tool, much the way we would want to use that today between the groups in our own society that are in conflict with each other. So in 1946, the American Field Service, which had been an ambulance corps for foreign nationals who wanted to volunteer in the war effort but couldn't fight in World War one and then again in World War two, would go in and serve as ambulance drivers and medics. They noticed that people between different nations were becoming friends, and weren't those friendships indicative of the kind of world order we would wanna have after these two major conflicts? And so in 1946, the American field service sent 40 Americans to high school in Germany and 40 Germans to high school in America. Within years, the State Department was funding these sorts of experiences, and you had the International Cultural Youth Exchange pop up, the Fulbright program, which was enormous.
David McCullough III:AFS blew up. And then by 1960, you're launching the Peace Corps to use this same notion of travel and exchange, young people going away and serving or getting to know different people as a tool to help countries that might fall into communism move in a direction toward democracy. So we used it on a foreign stage before. Why not adopt that same program right here in The US when we're going through many of the same issues that our society was going through back in the middle part of the century? Today, hundreds of thousands of kids a year travel abroad.
David McCullough III:I go to college lecture halls and I speak now, and I say, show of hands who's done a study abroad program. Generally, quarter to a of the hands in the room. Then I say, who's been to a different country? Pretty much every hand goes up. That had not been the case or that was not the case before World War two.
David McCullough III:A fraction of the people would have would have done that. And we have, I would say, the whole, there's still a lot of conflict between the nations that had been at war in the nineteen tens and twenties and thirties and forties, much more peaceful relations now and much more charitable relations and better understandings on the part of young people. Today, three quarters of white Americans don't have a friend who's not white. 40% of Americans have never met a farmer. Two thirds never met a native American.
David McCullough III:Only 20% know someone who's trans. I mean, are suffering from all the sorts of ignorances about the other that I think folks would have been suffering from about foreign nationals in the middle part of the So the idea is why not scale this up right here?
David McCullough III:My son is heading to college in four years, and one of the things colleges say to you is, hey, there's this study abroad program in Spain or Africa. And you're right. You don't hear about studying abroad within the United States and how how valuable that would be.
David McCullough III:And yet we have many languages spoken across our country. Many of our states are bigger than most countries. We have an enormously diverse population that hails from cultures and societies across the world. If we don't take the time to help our young people get to know each other, they are ill suited to have the kinds of conversations and make the sorts of decisions as citizens that they'll need to make as adults.
David McCullough III:Of the things that struck me as you mentioned your road trip, my family and I are planning a trip to New Orleans. And the question was, should we fly or should we drive? There's just so much of the United States my kids haven't seen. And we miss so much when we're just flying from one destination to another. And like you said, miss that nuance of what's really happening on the ground.
David McCullough III:You know, you and your car and the interstate highway system, interstate highway system, I mean, it's too bad. The notion of the American journey and travel and hitting the road, I mean, I think that is a core concept in our nation's culture and in our understanding of the culture. Embedded within that idea is a love of adventure, a trusting of the places that you're going to, and the ability to welcome the stranger. This notion of flyover states and the things we zoom by every day, I think, ignores a core human quality, which is curiosity. Curiosity encouraged to venture down the open road, I think has always been part of what's connected us as society.
David McCullough III:And if you look at the story, the narrative of the journey from the Tocqueville through Huck Finn, through Steinbeck or Thea Lange, James A. G. Walker Evans, names I said earlier in the podcast, it's a core feature of our nation's culture and our nation's identity, the trip.
David McCullough III:I just have two last questions. What do you think people get wrong about rural America? And what do you think they get wrong about urban America?
David McCullough III:I think people think about both, that they are more scary, dangerous, and narrow minded than they really are. I think people get wrong about rural America, that it is a depraved and not very diverse place full of simple folk. And I also think, frankly, that people don't think about rural America if they don't live there very much at all. And I think people get wrong about urban America that it is holier than now, the world that counts versus the world that doesn't count, and also, you know, dangerous cesspools of urban decay with kids walking up and down the streets smoking marijuana. I think on the aggregate though, I think people generally about urban and rural America and all people think that life there is much more black and white than it really is.
David McCullough III:And I think people are not appreciating the complexity of all things and all peoples and all places. Any environment is more nuanced than we can ever imagine, and we should be treating them with curiosity and not judgment. There are so many things we share. The all the whole of our organization is based on the belief that most Americans are good people who, under the right circumstances, will get along with each other and share valuable ideas and connections with each other.
David McCullough III:Thanks, David. This has flown by. It's just been such a pleasure to talk with you.
David McCullough III:Thank you, Ellen. Been a joy.
David McCullough III:Thank you for listening to Side by Side. We welcome your emails at sidebyside@umn.edu. Side by Side is a production of the University of Minnesota Extension and is written and hosted by me, Ellen Wolter. Special thanks to Jan Jekula, who designed our wonderful logo, and Jim Griswold, who sings and plays guitar in our opening and closing credits. You can find episodes of side by side wherever you get your podcasts.
David McCullough III:I'm Ellen Wolter, and this is side by side.
