Where dreams come from is a podcast featuring successful people from around the world who have pursued their dreams to arrive at the station in life. I'm your host, Sanjeev Chatterjee. I'm a professor of cinema and journalism. And in my creative life, I make documentary films. I started this podcast to explore what it takes for people to follow their dreams, even while being true to who they are, at least, who they believe there. Today, my guest is Steven Levy, who spent 29 years of his working life as the president of California Institute of the Arts, more popularly known as Cal Arts. Having grown up in a small Wisconsin town, Steven could not wait to go out into the world. As he puts it. In Woking, his distant cousin Bob Dylan, he wanted to explore where the wind was blowing. After attending Ivy League institutions and becoming a professor for a while, he landed a job at the Rockefeller Foundation and discover the possibility that elite institutions could be instrumental in bringing about social change. His next job as the president of Cal Arts afforded him the dream of trying this idea out for himself. Steven Devine, welcome to where dreams come from. I'm delighted to be here. Thank you. Why don't you tell us a little bit about the circumstances of your childhood where you grew up, and what you remember most,

I grew up in a small town in the Midwest. First, the town of Porter 97 people. And then we moved to the big city 23,000 people, superior Wisconsin. Actually, what I remember best is my mother at the piano. She wanted, in the worst way to be a concert pianist. She had the talent she won competitions, but but didn't have the financial backing or the confidence to have the career she wanted. And I saw the unhappiness of not being able to fulfill the life you wanted. And I guess the other thing I remember best is my dad. He was an old fashioned country doctor who used to go out on snow shoes to the farmers. Farmers when they were snowed in. He carried that same attitude toward the town we eventually moved to where if a patient couldn't afford to pay, he didn't ask them to pay. And the other thing I remember is knowing that when I went to college I was going to get out of these small towns.

As an aspiring storyteller. I always think of very good stories very often are about the universe in a grain of sand. Absolutely. You seem to have inhabited such a grain of sand in a small town. in the Midwest, Why leave I suppose

it was my mother's combining our with a kind of aspiration to urbanity. Remember, there were two prints just inside our entrance to our house, one of Central Park and one of a cafe in Paris. And that that really stood for my my mother's dreams and inherited her her dreams. I thought Stanford was in San Francisco. I remember breaking down in tears when I realized it was in a suburb, not in the city. But I thought I was going to join hippy dome and we were going to be searching for the meaning of life together. I was I wasn't interested in the center drug aspect of picky dumb if you'd be dumb, I was interested in the the Allen ginsburg spiritual aspirations.

In the late 20th and 21st century, the hippie movement seems to have a reputation of being something off kilter,

there were two companion hippie movements. What one was really dropping out, just giving up on on society altogether, seeking relief and drugs and not a very healthy thing in the end. The other was a kind of sense that that middle class culture was stifling. There was a kind of far reaching conservatism that assumed that women should be housewives that seemed a whole lot of things that that shut a lot of doors. The other part of the hippie movement was about opening those doors. You know, one of the other people from our area was my distant cousin, Bob Dylan. And when I first heard his album, The blowing in the wind, it was you didn't think that Wind was probably blowing and hitting Minnesota where he was from, or in superior, Wisconsin where I was from. You want it to go where that wind was blowing.

Once you left town, after school, I believe and you went to Stanford, was that a kind of a cultural shock?

Well, that the shot was that it wasn't nearly as intellectual as I thought it was going to be. I had wonderful teachers, and I learned how to read how to really read, I'd read all my life, but but the idea of interpreting a book was something that no one had ever exposed me to. And that was quite thrilling. The sense that I was learning how to think. But we weren't really being encouraged to think about the meaning of life. We were We were encouraged to think about what how do you interpret this? Or how do you? How do you? How do you do that? How do you do your, your organic chemistry experiment? By and large, it was a disappointment.

Was this because of what we think of now as the disadvantage of the the ivory tower?

I think so. I think so that the quantification of what your academic contribution is, is is really a destructive thing. It emphasizes like our whole society does a kind of general productivity over the quality of what you actually produce the not entirely, I think, to be fair, but it but it puts an emphasis on a specific narrow area of achievement. We need universities to open up more to the to the world to address the world problems, although there's a lot of disincentive because as soon as you take any stand on anything, you immediately are attacked by the other half of the political spectrum. It's a challenge how the university is going to play this larger role.

When did it really occur to you at what stage that this bridge between an intellectual life, which is elite, and becoming a problem solver, which is much more I think grassroots that this bridge bridge is first of all desirable? And second, of all, that it can

indeed be built? There was a book published recently about me called Steven deal divine failure is what it's all about. Which traces the answer to your question away, and I didn't find it when I was in graduate school at Harvard, I didn't find it when I was a professor at the University of Michigan, I did find it when I went to work at the Rockefeller Foundation, and I was surrounded by, by brilliant people on the staff who were at a hunger to address world poverty, hunger dude, to to use their knowledge to make the world better. Remember that the head of our Health Sciences Division, used to carry this little packet of salts in his pocket. And, and he take it out at every opportunity to tell people you know, if you can get people to boil water, and put this salt in it, we could save something like a million children each year in in Africa, we were near the beginnings of African American Studies, where you met all sorts of people where this knowledge was finally about the liberation of people still, women's studies, medical ethics, all things that fed right back into how we, we live our lives. And it was thrilling to be in the presence of that

when he went to the Rockefeller Foundation, it became really a problem solving kind of a profession, is that kind of accurate to say,

you know, in a way, the chance to be at the Rockefeller Foundation was quite an elite thing. But this was a lead opportunity being turned to social good. And I guess what, in some ways what we're we're hungry for is to the extent that there isn't a lead that understand that just as an opportunity to to make a difference to make things better than otherwise you're just wasting the the the opportunity that you have you buy a bigger yachts. I mean, it's just crazy.

At what point in your own life did you kind of arrive at some kind of a dream or a goal or a vision for who or what you really want it to be?

It really didn't fully take form until I became president of California Institute of the Arts. I carried forward my father's desire to relieve suffering and my mother's artistic aspirations and, and frustration I saw at the Rockefeller Foundation how unequal opportunity was in the world, that just being talented didn't open the doors for anybody. Everybody needed help propping the doors open. And suddenly as as president of Cal Arts, I was in a position to do something to prop the doors open. And I think that they're the pieces that that for me kind of came due as being able to act. So when I got to Cal Arts, the when we were deeply in deficit, which I inherited, the first thing we did was start a youth program for kids in poor neighborhoods of Los Angeles, it was just obvious to me that if people were going to value our institution, we had to show that we cared about the fate of the world. And it turned out to be true.

This was a neat tease, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah,

there were already important things going on. There have been all along, although with very insufficient attention paid to them. That the trouble with, again, with elite things is they have a lot of advertising money. And they take up a lot of space in people's imaginations. And it's it's very easy not to be exposed to what's actually out there. When we started those youth programs at Cal Arts. Part of it was I wanted our students to be exposed to the facts of life, the social facts of life, but also to be in the presence of the inspiring leaders of these neighborhood cultural centers, who against all odds were delivering for their neighbors. And to have that help form their sense of life. I remember once went to something in East Los Angeles, and they were so surprised that I was said I was going to come to them, as opposed to expecting them to come to me. Well, to me, that was just basic politeness, I was asking them to consider collaborating with us. I was doing the asking, so I should go there. But they were used to people from prominent institutions, just always assuming you come to us because we're more important in your own

career, as the President of Cal Arts has the meaning of education changed, it's changed in my lifetime and terrible ways.

College, when I was a student was still fundamentally about self realization, about discovering who you were, and what you wanted to be. But it was not seen as frontline job training. If you found yourself, you would then find what you wanted to do in life, as money started to push to the top, as poverty increased, as the middle class declined the pressure on people to turn their investment and college into immediate Work Opportunity is totally understandable. And in some ways, people have no choice. It's, but it is a huge loss. A striking example was that people who were close to their ambitions, whether or not they're making much money, were actually happy. And they were part of communities and they were they were living, they were worried. I mean, the money is money, you need to pay for things. And then we discovered this alumnus who was a very successful writer for men's magazines, and he was dying on the vine, because he was using his talents, in a way abusing his talents, turning it just to the making of money, rather than the creation that he had become an artist to be able to act on. And again, it kept circling back for me in a way to my mother's experience that you've got to find a way to connect with, with your dreams of accomplishing something positive

at this stage in your life. Do you have you thought in any kind of structured way about what should be the elements of a fulfilled life?

My father used to say there really only three or four things that make up a life. He said, if you're lucky, you have a family. Maybe you have one or two friends in the world. Maybe you have a hobby that gives you satisfaction. And ideally, you have a job that both supports you and, and and gives you some kind of satisfaction. In a way the challenge is how you divide up your sense of purpose within that. I've been very lucky because being able to do this job at Cal Arts, my job and my life and my into my hobby. Have my wife as an artist. It's all one simple package. Most people are not that lucky to have the parts come together so, so beautifully.

What I hear you saying is that happiness is more than Your income. And a significant part of that is purpose,

volunteering and contributing something is for most people an extraordinary experience, a lot of kids have sort of pretended, in order to have the resumes that get them into good colleges. But to genuinely do it, and to feel you're helping is such a great feeling that in a way, if you can expose people to it, at some level, it can be like a drug. We're so driven by sort of neoliberal economics and the economy is you just, that's gonna solve everything, and you just have to find your place in the economy, people can forget what really will make them happy. I don't know happiness is not even a big category. For me. satisfaction is a big category, being able to go to bed feeling like I did something today,

when did you begin to notice that mental health becoming a real issue and perhaps even a barrier towards reaching some purpose in life,

I have to confess my first decade at Keller, it's even my second decade, our attitude was toughing it out that the world was was rough. And you just had to swallow it and go on to maybe it's a failure in my in my leadership there, that they've added lots of mental health services that they're doing much more than we did in our time. And I think part of it is this ever growing pressure, and at both ends pressure to succeed at all costs. If you are privileged, still the pressure to succeed at all costs. At the other end, there's a pressure to survive at all costs, that has to take whatever your normal mental state is, and exacerbated the living with anxiety as a steady state. And in a way, that's what our economy has done.

Your book is about failure, and the necessity of failure. But you talk a little bit about in my own youth,

my mother's sense that she was she was a failure, which which she was not responsible for her failure, her parents stripped her of a sense of self competence. And she grew up without money. That's not her failure. But she didn't achieve what she wanted. And so she felt like a failure. I felt like a failure because I thought my job as a young person was to cheer her up. And you could never sufficiently cheer her up, and then going off into the world. Even with all my opportunities, there was always a sort of fear that you wouldn't get it right. And in fact, at one stage of my career, I didn't get it. Right. I studied to be a scholar of 18th century English literature, when in fact, what I was interested in was the 20th century and I and social action, not scholarship, I sort of had no one myself well enough. I had a sense of failure that this thing I devoted myself to for so many years, when I got to Cal Arts, I didn't know how to be a college president. I was aware of winging it every day, and failing a lot of the time, in a way that it was a wonderful opportunity to put failure in perspective, because you would you would try one thing, and it wouldn't work. And you just have to say, okay, that didn't work. I failed at that. I got to try. I got to try another way. Because once you were president, you were kind of sort of stuck. You didn't get to just sort of say, well, this, we didn't solve this problem. You had to find a way to keep going. It was your responsibility to lead the institution back towards solving whatever the problem was, in a way that one of the big turning point for me, was it in 1994. having gotten Keller its initial bad finances straightened out. We got hit by the Northridge earthquake and lost the use of our entire campus. And suddenly they they're you were you were responsible for finding out was this college going to survive with no money and no campus and you couldn't walk away from it, you just had to find what to do. And when you looked at the overall picture, when you discovered that, with almost no endowment, you had a $40 million rebuilding project, it looked like the end of the world. But in a way that job didn't let you see it as the end of the world, you have to just do it. So many things in life are about putting one one foot in front of the next. You know, we realized we're gonna have to work with FEMA. I didn't know anything about working with the federal government. So you call up someone on the phone who has done it. And in my experience, people are very generous. In terms of offer you console, I think people like it because it makes them superior people and lets them feel the virtue of doing some good. Most things aren't rocket science. They're just problems to be solved.

What is your advice to a young person who's a freshman who walks into your office?

Two kinds of advice. One is if you already know what you want to do, then start doing it. Don't wait. Don't wait till you graduate and you have credentials to do it. If what you want to do is be a singer. Well join a chorus off campus as well as have your activity on campus and just start doing it. The end that gets the companion advices. If you're not sure what you want to do, go volunteer a lot of places, look at people look like they do know what they're doing, and learn from being exposed to them, see if that's really what you want to be doing. And one of the nice things about being in the arts with talented kids is you can do it right now. I mean, the jazz players are all out gigging while they're still students, the actors are doing summer repertory are, in fact, part of what we had to do is sometimes the faculty didn't like how much time the students were spending film students who were actually working on a professional production on the side. And the faculty would say, well, you're not you're not here making your work with us. And you'd have to say, Well, this is also important what they're doing, it's going to end. So try to find the balance between those two things, taking advantage of everything your college offers, but also not letting it consume you. That's, that's my core advice. And don't be intimidated. That's my other big advice. I spent so much of my youth thinking, maybe this is my small town background, that there were people who knew exactly what to do. And that I was just that I was not from a fancy background that I didn't know what to do. I did have this my father saying that anyone who could fix a car can be a doctor that helped to have in the background, that sort of sense that doesn't take all that much. I'll tell you a wonderful companion story, which goes to that point, friend was one who was a Russian emigrate in France, was copying a painting in the loo. And an old man was behind him and was said to his wife in Russian. He's really pretty talented. And my friend turned around and said, You're Marc Chagall. And it was Marc Chagall. And as he walked away, heard Mark Shergill say to his wife, imagine that if he knows who I am. That's, that's the world. Imagine that he knows who I am, even though you're a great painter, Steven Devine.

Thank you very much for taking this hour. It's been a pleasure talking with you. Thank you very much. For me, this conversation with Steven Levine highlights multiple aspects of living a dream. The vine acknowledges that he is part of a continuum in carrying forward dreams that were inspired by what he observed at home in his bed. Breaking Away from a small town life was to both carry forward the values learn by observing his doctor father, while at the same time addressing his mother's unfulfilled dreams to be a recognized artist. However, it took time and perhaps a good deal of serendipity, to land a dream job that combined both aspects of his aspiration, but in a form that he could not imagine in advance. He discovered it why living life for media for change? I'm Sanjeev Chatterjee