The Transformative Power of Mentorship | Jon Peede

On this episode of Anchored, Jeremy is joined by Jon Peede, president of Ashland University. They discuss his over a decade’s worth of work in the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities and his experience learning from differing viewpoints as a conservative working in the arts. They discuss the possibility of a modern renaissance in art and how educational institutions can aid in that flourishing. They also dive into how Ashland’s accent on the individual makes it a unique, classical educational experience. 

Transcript

Jeremy Tate (00:00.178)
of Petey. Folks, welcome back to the Anchor Podcast. We have an exciting guest with us today, the 31st President of Ashland University, President John Petey, formerly the Chairman for the National Endowment for the Humanities. President Petey, thanks so much for being with us today.

Jon Peede (00:20.075)
it's absolutely my pleasure. Thank you for having me on.

Jeremy Tate (00:24.012)
So we often, especially when we're speaking with a university president, we love to kick off the podcast sometimes just hearing a little bit about your road to this position. Did you see yourself as a young boy, as a future academic? What was schooling like for you growing up?

Jon Peede (00:41.422)
Absolutely. I always loved learning. I never thought I'd be a university president. I thought I'd be a doctor. I thought I'd be a surgeon. And one thing I would say to your listeners, and I particularly think of also the students that are taking classical learning classes, is I may be a good example. Because the liberal arts, the broadness of it, worked in my career, but I think it only worked in hindsight, right?

Sometimes parents say, what does this all add up to? Well, in my case, it added up to a broadly minded career. So I love books and reading. I grew up in a town that was three or 4,000 people in Mississippi, outside the Capitol. My father was a surgeon and one of the few doctors in town. And he was a first generation college educated. And he went to Vanderbilt. He was a steel mill worker son, Catholic.

The Catholic nuns at John Carroll High School in Birmingham made him into the man he became in many ways. It didn't necessarily happen in the household. My mother, first generation, college educated, she went to Emory. So they both really went to these competitive schools. And I'm sure in some ways it was a struggle. They were both Southerners. They both passed. And so I grew up in that environment.

I worked at a hospital as an intern, as an orderly in high school. I went to Vanderbilt myself. I was pre-medical studies. I worked in the nephrology lab. Here's the thing. I was not very good at the sciences. I wanted to do what I had done since a boyhood, which was devour books, Steinbeck and whatever. I felt that I paid.

Vanderbilt for the privilege of having four years with two million books in a library. And my junior year of college, I switched from chemistry to English. And that broad mindedness never ended for me. I went back to Mississippi. There was a program at the University of Mississippi called Southern Studies, a master's program. It seems peculiar as a southerner. Yeah.

Jeremy Tate (03:04.149)
I saw that reading your bio. didn't know that was a Southern studies. Tell me about that.

Jon Peede (03:09.326)
Well, first thing is you can imagine I've now spent 30 years of my career trying to explain that and most recently to the search committee at Ashland University. is, if you hear it this way, think of it as an American Studies program or American CIB Masters like they have at Yale or Texas or Brown University. So the idea is if you took American Studies, so

Jeremy Tate (03:15.134)
Ha ha.

Jon Peede (03:39.074)
but only had it the master's level. We took art history classes at the graduate level, history classes with the history PhDs, English classes with the English PhDs, but we were studying Faulkner versus say Hemingway. So you had to, as part of that program, study in, I believe, at least three different fields. And that meant that afterwards you would go and get your doctorate.

Or you'd become a museum curator or you'd make documentary films. It wasn't as an MA, so it's not seen as a terminal degree. And that's what I would expect to do, but I'm talking to you not yet as Dr. Petey. Why is that? Well, my thesis director, the head of that program, Bill Ferris, recommended me to become a book editor at Mercer University Press.

where if you want to become a book editor, that broad education is of great value. And I might stop there. So by 23, I finished my master's, 24, I'm a book editor, 25, 26, I am married to my colleague who had been a chaplain at Harvard. And in the midst of this, I meet the visiting writer by the name of Dana Joya, and he changes the next 30 years of my life.

Jeremy Tate (05:07.276)
Okay, okay. Now, real quick, your childhood, mean, you're in a home with books, I'm imagining. Both of your parents, you know, very accomplished. Was your love for learning, was it fostered just by the environment of being around books? Was it fostered in school? Was it some intentionality on the part of your parents? Where did it come from?

Jon Peede (05:30.84)
Great question. Because we know when I was at later, when I'll get to my career, when I was at the National Endowment for the Arts, our reading at risk survey talked about the importance of books in your household is more important for your later success of leaving life, but certainly your academic progress than the demographics of income, race, anything else, the presence of books.

Jeremy Tate (05:56.652)
Hmm.

Jon Peede (06:00.166)
at least or more books. We certainly had that. But, and this is important, because my parents were both first-generational and didn't necessarily have a bookish upbringing themselves, what did we have? We had the Encyclopedia Britannicus, the Gold Leaf 1969 deluxe set, and we would watch NFL football games with our dad, and at halftime he would say, go get the letter S or the letter P.

Jeremy Tate (06:16.605)
huh. Yeah.

Jeremy Tate (06:22.294)
Totally.

Jon Peede (06:30.03)
And do you, what do you know about this? If you don't know, flip to it and learn about it. That's where I first found out the Maupoli, the Hot Gates. And so it was, it was the public library. Certainly I remember, you know, I kept a book list. I would read, I think I read 15 or 16 Steinbecks, you know, the big hungry novels, but also the red pony. And, and so it, it was.

My parents did the right thing. They weren't going to know the great literary works themselves. And they weren't necessarily going to know the historians at the moment. But there was trust in the producers of the encyclopedias. And by the way, a society issue, why? Because there is a belief that the creators of that were in no way trying to create an agenda. They were trying to impart knowledge.

Jeremy Tate (07:27.036)
Mm-hmm. Okay. Okay. This sounds kind of Elon Musk. I read his biography recently and he would also just read through the Encyclopedia Britannica. I've never imagined doing that and never have done that, but that's a fascinating chapter from your own child.

Jon Peede (07:32.204)
Okay

Jon Peede (07:45.07)
I loved it. was my parents would joke that so they had four sons in five years and they would joke that I, none of us acted out as it, you we were, you know, affirming football, playing, sports orientated, you know, I think good young men. But when I did get in trouble, my mom said the problem was when she sent me to the room, I just sat there and read. So it was hard to punish me for misbehavior.

Jeremy Tate (08:12.564)
Hmm. That's what you wanted to be doing anyway. When do you recall first getting a sense, you know, that as you think about your academic journey and reflect on it, you started to get a sense that something real had been lost in terms of, your love for the humanities or for this tradition. Was there a time you began to reflect on kind of the trajectory of American education?

Jon Peede (08:16.546)
Exactly.

Jeremy Tate (08:41.471)
and see maybe that things went wrong at some point.

Jon Peede (08:45.918)
I that happens for me around the year 2003. so in narrating my biography, I've told you I go to grad school, I get this book editing job, I meet my wife, I'm a university press book editor for Southern History, Literature, Photography, Civil Rights. She gets called to a church as a minister. I resign, I follow her.

I go back to my native Mississippi, which she was called, and I worked for about six years at Millsets College. Small liberal arts college, wonderful tradition. I thought I could have spent my whole career there. The pay wasn't great. The sense of camaraderie was incredible. And President Bush, George W. Bush…

Jeremy Tate (09:22.528)
Mm-hmm.

Jon Peede (09:41.1)
brings Dana Joya on as the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Joya and I have been corresponding for six years and he says, well, you moved to Washington and you had to have a title that the White House had already approved. So they said, would you be my speechwriter to the chairman of the NEA?

Jeremy Tate (09:46.133)
Mm-hmm.

Jon Peede (10:03.97)
Well, you know how great Dana Joya is at giving a speech. So I'd be in the back of the room. People say, what do you do for a living? I say, I'm the speechwriter. You know, as if I had created this. A year later, the White House changed it to my title to counselor to the chairman. So I'm with Joya. We bring on Mark Ballerline as director of research. He's on leave from Emory University. know. Yes, he's on your board, I know. And we talk about the gap.

Jeremy Tate (10:26.442)
Love Mark, yep.

Jon Peede (10:33.644)
between the educations we had, the joy I had at Harvard and Stanford, but what he had growing up as a lower middle class Sicilian Mexican household. He had me as a doctor's kid in Mississippi. And there was something that was available to both of us. He had an income issue. I had a rural America issue. And we were both getting this great education that we could.

learn about the dissent within our government, from our citizens, the suffrage movement, the abolitionist movement. We could learn about our country and when our country was in our best selves, but we could be educated in a classroom in a way that was not ideological. And by the time I got to the National Endowment for the Arts in 2003,

I was seeing so many campuses and so many grants and the activism was too often being put in front of the art. Not everywhere and not always, but that was my awakening that we had somehow lost a sense of unity and common purpose.

Jeremy Tate (11:53.344)
And then tell us about your time as chairman for the National Endowment for the Humanities. What was the day to day like? What was your work focused on?

Jon Peede (12:03.214)
Sure. So I led the National Endowment for the Humanities from 2017 into January of 2021. It was an incredible job, incredible colleagues. I had had the advantage of having eight years at the National Endowment for the Arts, so I understood how the government process works. And the great part of it was

My background as a book editor and my master's studying in multiple disciplines really helped when I became head of the NEH. So you have peer review panels, you have a wonderful staff, you have a national board of advisors, but at the end of the day, only one person in the whole agency can give the grant. And that's the chair. And so as chairman,

It helped that I was broadly educated, and you might look at 9 a.m. on a proposal recommended for oral history for seagrass basket weavers in the Sea Islands of Carolinas. Then at noon, you're trying to decide if you're going to give $400,000 to Stanford for the Martin Luther King papers. And then at 2, there's a Ken Burns…

proposal for a new film and you know and at four o'clock you're going to go talk on Capitol Hill to a group and at five o'clock you're going to meet and this actually happened where you're going to meet with the FBI arts crimes team because they want to build a group of art advisors to help them understand if they're stolen works coming through customs.

Jeremy Tate (13:59.468)
Hmm.

Jon Peede (13:59.7)
So it was a remarkable job, and I can say this, that I worked almost 12 years, almost 13 at the NEA and the NEH. And I was generally in a political party that wanted to eliminate it or once reported to White House it did.

And I was always where Reagan was, which is I believe the agencies had value as catalytic federal investments in culture. But ultimately, the citizens in the private sector had to sustain the nonprofit arts.

Jeremy Tate (14:42.922)
Okay. Now, from what you've seen there, from what you've seen in your time in between and now at Ashland, are you optimistic? Are we in the beginning of a Renaissance in terms of study in the humanities, revival of the classical tradition? In a hundred years, will historians look back to this time as the beginning of something grand? What are your thoughts?

Jon Peede (15:05.068)
I believe they will, 100 years from now, the historians will look back on this moment as one of two things. Either the time that the restoration began or the time that the collapse was arrested for a generation, for a moment, whatever it may be, before the collapse continued. And if there is a restoration of the humanities, and I believe that there are elements of that already, and I believe it's fully possible.

We have to do, those of us who make our living in the humanities, that love the humanities, we have to make a better case for the humanities, and broadly, the universities have to make sure that we haven't put our own personal ideologies in front of the educational missions of our institutions. I personally love

having a range of friends who agree with me on things and disagree with me on things. I think that's healthy. think I said at my inauguration speech to the faculty and the students and the public that I have no interest in a monoculture at my university or in my life. I said that my best ideas are those that have been challenged, rigorously challenged by others of different point of views.

That comes from the humanities, right? And so I think we need to get back to that idea of intellectual engagement. And if you're gonna do that, then you have to be able to make a judgment to say those literary and cultural texts that have survived thousands of years, there is something in them that are so vital.

that they can help shape you ethically. They can help develop your critical reasoning skills. I was – at one point in my career, last three years, I taught at Historically Black College as I was a consultant after I left the NEH. And when I teach James Baldwin, you will find classical allusions on notes of a native son. Frederick Douglass, you will find that.

Jeremy Tate (17:21.025)
Hmm.

Jon Peede (17:25.772)
this echo as well. So sometimes those of us that love the classical text and love that humanities tradition, that Western tradition, we need to do a better job of talking about how broadly inclusive that tradition is.

Jeremy Tate (17:43.572)
That's fantastic. And let's talk about Ashland University. now was this, is this a, was this a known quantity for you, your whole life, your whole experience in academia? Did you have a perception of it 20 years ago? How did it first come on the radar?

Jon Peede (18:01.772)
You know, it wasn't a relationship I had 20 years ago, but about seven years ago, I was asked to be a visiting faculty member for their MFA in creative writing program. So I got to see the campus and I put it in the back of my mind of saying, this is an interesting piece. People, you know, this campus feels welcoming. And I went on with my job. was already at the National Endowment for the Humanities. was

winding down my last activity before really being active at the Humanities Endowment. Did I ever think I would be on campus again? Not necessarily. And then they wanted a president, and by the way, not just for the university, but for the seminary as well. And while I'm not trained as a theologian, I'm not a minister, again, my wife's an ordained minister, not me. There is a...

a deep difference in her knowledge of mine. But here's what I would say. For 30 years, I have been blessed with jobs that had meaning, but never had I ever been called before. And Ashland University was the first calling of my career, my life. And it is certainly my wish that it'll be my last one as well.

Jeremy Tate (19:24.47)
President Peat, we have thousands of parents, students listening here. I'm sure a chunk maybe haven't heard much of anything maybe.

If you were to make a case for why it should be on their list of schools to visit as they do their college exploratory process, how would you make that case?

Jon Peede (19:48.782)
What I would say is, Ashland University offers an elite education without being elitist. That's so important, without being elitist. It began by the brethren church, which is very small Protestant denomination. Though I noticed for the students that said they're religious, 12 % said they're Catholic. So it is a place where we really

have Christian values, but you can be other religions or you could have no religion. You're equally welcome. I'd say to everybody, I go to work down Samaritan Avenue. Everybody is my brother and my sister, right? What we do incredibly well, it seems to me, is bringing students and honestly quite often from our area of Ohio, about 50 miles below Cleveland, and we give them

an incredibly personal experience. Now I know every campus says that. We have something we call accent on the individual. We've been using that concept for decades and it is an intensively personal experience where your faculty mentorships really are transformative. We are also, because we are probably at the Division II level,

the most known in the nation for the number of athletes that have been in the Olympics. I was just with Katie Moon, the gold medalist and one of our graduates. And she talked about her coaches helping her emotionally and mentally, not so much athletically, but who they were in her life as human beings. And so this idea of we've won national championships in sports and

Jeremy Tate (21:18.102)
Yeah.

Jon Peede (21:41.014)
yet we have what I think is one of the most notable conservative group. I won't call it a think tank exactly, but the Ashbrook Center. Ronald Reagan did the opening remarks for it. Margaret Thatcher and others were here later. So if you come to Ashland University, you could be part of the honors program, but you can also be an Ashbrook scholar.

and the amount of national leaders that are coming to our campus in Ohio to talk to our Ashbrook scholars. It's a level of access that you simply can't get at a large state school or an Ivy League school, frankly. And so this level of personal mentorship by teachers that are faculty are, I would say if I had to prioritize it,

teachers first and scholars and researchers second, but they're not mutually exclusive. I say to our classical education students and the parents, one of the points you're going to have to talk about eventually is if your career is going to be in field, in STEM fields, you need a university that is distinguished in that area too, and we're a national leader.

Jeremy Tate (22:39.616)
Mm-hmm.

Jon Peede (23:04.062)
and a number of international STEM projects.

Jeremy Tate (23:08.352)
Fantastic. And recently launched as well a unique center for classical education and homeschooling. Is that right?

Jon Peede (23:15.576)
That's right. And what I love about our approach is – take the homeschooling approach, for example. We're offering free seminars, free meetings, free educational resources to middle and high school homeschool parents. So if they never come to our school – in fact, I can be candid with you. I think we've almost gone too far. I said, well, wait a second. Where's the advertisement for the university on this? I said…

It's great to tell them, but then eventually all these parents can say, well, now that's finished, where do I go next? And I want to make sure Ashland University is that, where do you go next? So I commend my staff that they've been so focused on it that they wanted them to know this isn't merely transactional, right? We want these students to be successful, these middle school and high school students, regardless of where they go. And then on

The classical education side, it's just hard to overstate the quality of our faculty that teach the Ashbrook scholars.

Jeremy Tate (24:22.208)
Fantastic. President Peaty, we always ask the guests on the Anchor podcast, the book that has been most formative. Maybe it's a book that you have taught or maybe just one that you reread every year or two on your own. What would that be for you?

Jon Peede (24:36.812)
Well, for me, it's Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men.

Jeremy Tate (24:41.076)
Okay, tell us about why is that?

Jon Peede (24:44.78)
Well, I grew up in a very politically active Southern household. I was around my state's long-term US Senator. Both my brother and I have had White House appointments. So politics was, we always grew up around that. Robert Penn Warren's book looked at our neighboring state of Louisiana modeled in many ways on elements of Huey Long's life. What I thought

It is a tragedy, the book. It's about ambition and hubris. It's about how sometimes people begin public office for the right reasons and then get overtaken by their ego. I think that's, I've seen presences work that way too. It's important to keep humble the more authority you have. And I try to remember that. I don't read it as a cautionary tale, but I do read it as the idea that

those virtues we have in life, those good elements within us, we must cling to them. And it's a really well-written, powerful book of how we sometimes give up the best versions of ourselves and the consequences of such.

Jeremy Tate (26:09.456)
I've heard good things, haven't read it. I am an LSU graduate though. And when I went to LSU, you had to take a class on Louisiana politics. It was required back then. I graduated in 2004. And Huey Long was just so fascinating to learn about. That's a great recommendation. Next steps for parents, students listening, if they want to get to know a little bit more about the Ashbrook Center or Ashland University, what is a good next step?

Jon Peede (26:36.238)
Sure. We are happy. Two Saturdays ago, we had a wonderful home football game. had, we're undefeated in our conference, say. We had 122 families on our campus. So first thing is come, you can bring your siblings, parents, everybody we welcome visits. Also, increasingly, we welcome just schools to come and mass. Some schools bring 80 people.

They can reach out to us. I travel extensively to meet with our supporters and donors. If somebody said, you going to be in Baton Rouge to pick up things so I can go to Baton Rouge and get you a copy of that book and get it to your house. So reach out to the admissions office.

Jeremy Tate (27:24.204)
you

Jon Peede (27:30.134)
What I've loved is some people are coming to our university because they reached out to an individual professor and said, I saw your lecture on YouTube or what have you. That's our culture, I think, is that we're all pulling in the same direction. We have a lot of different opinions, but what unites us is we all love Ashland. And so I'm not offering you anything special that others aren't. I'm saying reach out.

or respond to one of the information outreach. And as to that, I think you well know that if somebody believes the classical learning test is the best test of their knowledge, we have long been an adopter of that. So I think that's an important marker about what our value system is too.

Jeremy Tate (28:28.662)
Well, President Petey, we thank you for that. I need to get on campus and visit myself. I've heard great things now for more and more people, especially for when I think about our typical CLT students. I just get so excited about the work you're doing, the Ashbrook Center. So this has been great. Congratulations to you. I know it'll be a year in March, I believe, as the 33rd president again, 31st at Ashland University. Again, we're here with President John Parrish Petey.

President of Ashland University, President Peaty, thanks so much for being with us today.

Jon Peede (29:02.124)
thank you. Thank you, Jeremy, for having me on.