Interview with Professor Andrew Nathan

Takayasu: Today is September 1st, 2021. This is Sach Takayasu of Columbia University Oral History and Master of Arts program, I'm honored to interview Professor Andrew J. Nathan today for the oral history project of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. Professor Nathan, do I have your consent to record your interview today?

 

Nathan: Yes, you do, Sach.

 

Takayasu: Thank you. Could you please say your full name with a spelling?

 

Nathan: It's Andrew, James, Nathan A-N-D-R-E-W, J-A-M-E-S, N-A-T-H-A-N.

 

Takayasu: Thank you. Today's interview is being conducted not in person, but remotely using Zoom. I'm calling in from Normal, Illinois. Professor Nathan, could you please tell us where you are?

 

Nathan: I'm in Upper Montclair, New Jersey, where I live.

 

Takayasu: Great. Thank you. So, Professor Andrew J. Nathan is Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. He studies the politics and foreign policy of China, political participation and political culture in Asia and the international human rights regime. Professor Nathans books include Chinese Democracy, The Tiananmen Papers, China's Search for Security, Will China Democratize?, and China’s Influence and the Center-Periphery Tug of War in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Indo-Pacific.

He has served at Columbia as director of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and as chair of the Political Science Department. He is chair of the Morningside Institutional Review Board (the IRB). And off campus, he's a member of the board of Human Rights in China and a former board member of the National Endowment for Democracy and of the Freedom House. He is the regular Asia and Pacific book reviewer for Foreign Affairs.

Thank you, Professor Nathan, for joining us today. Could you please tell us about becoming the director of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute? How did that happen?

 

Nathan: So this is a long time ago. But as I remember it, well, one thing I know is that the position of director rotates among members of the Institute faculty. And I think Gerry [Gerald L.] Curtis, if I remember correctly, had been the director for a long time. He was sort of indispensable in that capacity. Very good director. But he finally wanted to stop doing it. And so we had consultations, you know, everybody spoke to everybody. I don't remember who was in charge of these consultations and it ended up with me. Somebody came to me and said, The faculty would like you to serve as director. That's how I remember. 

 

Takayasu: Thank you for that.

So in the last annual report of Dr. Curtis, which was 1990–1991 academic year, he introduces you in his letter saying, Professor Nathan will be succeeding me. And there's a wonderful picture of you, the incoming director, standing next to a long-term, long-time director, Dr. James [W.] Morley, and also Professor Curtis. And it made me wonder was there, this kind of special kinship or support, maybe informal support amongst the alumni club of the directors, to support the incoming director? How does that work, the whole informal mentoring or support structure?

 

Nathan: I have to tell a story, if I may, about Jim Morley. Until US-China relations were diplomatically normalized in 1979, it was very unusual for American scholars to visit China. But the Institute had a connection with a guy named Jack Chun. I won't go into all the details of this story. And Jack Chun arranged for something called the New York State Educators Study Tour of China in 1973. This is before the time that you're speaking about, and I think Jim was the director at that time and I was just a young guy at Columbia. I started in '71, so in '73 I had been at Columbia for a short time. Jim and I went on this guided tour of China and while we were there, I got into some trouble.

Because I was a young guy, I took some photographs that the guides, tour guides, didn't want taken and they came to our group and said one of you has taken photographs that you shouldn't take. This story was very complicated. But the long and short of it is that alone among the 12 or 14 members of this delegation, Jim stood up for me in that group. Jim was a highly ethical guy, very moral guy. I think his parents had been clergy, actually pastors. His father had been a pastor. So, Jim, to me at that time, even in the time you're asking about 1991 or whatever year it was, was somebody I looked up to. He was an authoritative figure. He had also been chairperson of the Political Science Department as well as the next director of the Institute. A bit scary to me because I was so young.

But yes, to come to your question, the Institute itself has always, was then and has always been a collegial environment of mutual support. Very little of the academic factionalism that one sort of hears about or what you see on this Netflix show that's airing now called The Chair with Sandra Oh [actress] back biting, all that kind of thing. Very little of that. None of it. So, yes, I, as director, felt very much supported by the previous directors, Jim and Gerry and other members of the faculty,  some of whom would later become directors of the Institute.

 

Takayasu: That's wonderful. Could you perhaps share with us a story of a particular incident where you really felt supported?

 

Nathan: OK. So while I was director, Jim Morley and another guy who was there named Bob [Robert M.H.] Immerman, who ran our Professional Fellows program. He was a former Ford Foundation officer working on Asia. They knew that I was interested in human rights and they decided that we could raise project money for the Institute by having a project on human rights in Asia. And so we had a series of conversations and wrote a draft proposal and so forth and sent it into the Japanese-funded foundation called the—what is it called?— The Center for Global Partnership I think? CGP, and so that was a very collaborative project. As it so happened, we didn't end up with that grant. Somebody else, another organization, got the grant. But, as a younger faculty, I mean, even though I was director, I was still younger than these other folks. And I felt that they were trying to draw on my strengths and work with me.

Another thing about support that I could mention is that at that time, with the Institute, as you know, is funded partly with an old, very old Ford Foundation endowment, partly with money that came from what was then called the School of International Affairs. We did not yet have the Weatherhead Endowment. So most of the soft money in the Institute came from Japan and had been raised by Gerry. But Gerry distributed that money among the several what we called research committees, the Japan Research Committee, the China Research Committee. And I think at that time we had a Korea, already had a Korea research committee. Gerry made sure that the funding in the Institute was spread around among all the groups of faculty. So that when I was director, we didn't have and I don't think we ever before or since— not only when I was director, but all through my 50 years of time in the Institute—we haven't had struggles among the different research communities within the Institute about "my money is not enough and your money is too much." We haven't had those kind of struggles. And I attribute that, I think, to Gerry's statesmanship at the time when Japan money was the main money that we had.

 

Takayasu: It sounds like that's a very rare type of spirit. Is that the case?

 

Nathan: I think that is the case. I've also been fortunate to find a similar level of collegiality in the political science department and another unit that I've become associated with more recently, the Institute for the Study of Human Rights. So, I don't have direct personal experience [laughs] of these types of unhappy factional struggles in academia. But certainly, everything you read in fiction and movies and the Chronicle of Higher Education and so forth suggests that that kind of bad atmosphere is pretty widespread. But I haven't had to suffer from it.

 

Takayasu: When we previously met, you had mentioned the healthiness of institutions. And I think it comes from your background as a former director of the Weatherhead, as well as the head of the political science department and the human rights area. And so could you tell us a little bit more about it? Because that's a very unique perspective in terms of what is a healthy institution.

 

Nathan: I know. It's a sort of a puzzle. I have my own theories and my own experience. When I came to Columbia in 1971, the university had just been through a very hard time. The students, what to call it, demonstrations or uprising on the campus that happened in 1968. I was not here then and the university was very badly funded. The alumni fundraising operation was bad. The campus was kind of run down. The buildings were kind of run down. And New York City was not in a good place. In 1971 the air was polluted. The Central Park, Riverside Park were in bad shape. The crime rates were relatively scary. My wife at that time got mugged. One of my favorite colleagues, also a friend of mine, got mugged in the very early '70s. You know, things were not very good. But, my experience, and maybe it's [laughs] partly my own, I don't think that every Columbia faculty member would necessarily be as optimistic or sunny in their account as I am. So, I might be bringing some characterological trait to the table, as well as the sort of my good luck in academia, getting tenure here without problem, being treated well by the university.

 

I might have a bias, but I also think it's true that Columbia has been a healthy institution in my time here, because since the beginning period when I first came, when things were kind of rocky, it has raised itself up and the city has raised itself up. So the city has improved. The crime rates, the atmosphere, it's become a very desirable place to be. And the university has raised its academic standing, whether you measure that by the ranking of, for example, the poli-sci [political science] department, which was when I first arrived, ranked—and there are different rankings—but ranked number thirty something among American political science departments. Now generally considered to be in the top five poli-sci departments, and some rankings rank it as number one. And I think the core of it is that faculty governance, which is not perfect by any means, and many faculty members will complain that they're not sufficiently involved. But, respect for the faculty, the academic enterprise is uppermost and that has allowed true academic freedom.

 

And another factor that I think might be there is the New York City environment. If you're the main institution in a college town, you may think of yourself as very important. But if you're in New York City, there's a certain modesty that goes with that, which I think is beneficial too [laughs]. Academics can easily think they're such a big shot. And I think we are in the middle of important media, lawyers, businesses, politics, think tanks and so forth in New York City. So, we're one of the players, but we're not the biggest or, you know—.  So that that gives us a perspective. And I think being in the city also prevents the kind of small-town atmosphere [of] everybody is in everybody's business, because some of us are living on Morningside Heights. I'm living in New Jersey. Some people live in Greenwich Village. Some people live in Connecticut. So the atmosphere on campus, I think, is professional and it isn't excessively personal. So those are some of my theories about it. And I feel as I get older, that institutions are inherently fragile and that what we have now was not always there and it may not always be there. So, I feel that I was lucky to be at Columbia during a period of time when at least for my experience, it was a healthy institution.

 

Takayasu: Thank you for that. I think this is the first time I've ever heard the word New York City and modesty together in the same sentence [laughter]. That's really quite unique. But I would actually like to ask you, when you were a director of the Institute, how did you leverage this uniqueness of New York City that you just mentioned, where there are all these players in politics and arts and everything?

 

Nathan: Well, I'm not sure I can limit my answer to just the period when I was director, but I think—.

 

Takayasu: Perhaps the Weatherhead itself.

 

Nathan: The Weatherhead itself. So I think well, let me start with just a personal experience. You may know that in 2001, I published a book called The Tiananmen Papers that was a very controversial book. The story of this book was that a Chinese person came to me and said that he had secret papers from inside the Chinese government that revealed the whole process of what went on during the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations, hunger strike and crackdown. And he wanted to get these things published outside of China as part of a process to put pressure on the Chinese government to rectify the historical crime that the government had committed. This was a very huge project. It was many, many, many documents, and in order to get it published, I had to first authenticate it to my own satisfaction and then find a Chinese publisher for the Chinese edition. And the strategy was to publish an English translation before the Chinese edition so that the Chinese government would sort of be caught blindsided and wouldn't know what to say about it. And it would also bring international publicity. So that required a team of translators. Myself and Perry Link edited the translations, but we needed people to do the first drafts of the translation. That meant money. We needed a lawyer. We needed a publisher who was willing to take this risk. We needed a publicity plan and so forth.

And I was able to put all those things together by reaching out to a few people in New York City. I didn't have to fly in from San Francisco to New York. We found a top, top, top lawyer who advised us pro bono. We found a wealthy person who loaned us money against the ultimate royalties, a publisher and so forth and so on. An agent, all in New York.

 

The other thing from a more generic Institute point of view, I would say, is that sooner or later, everybody comes to New York. The Institute speakers series is kind of a combination of academic speakers, policy world speakers, because a good part of our Institute's student population is SIPA students from the Policy School, School of International and Public Affairs [SIPA]. And, sort of interesting people, especially from my point of view, Chinese dissidents whom I have frequently brought in. And often, they will speak in Chinese and sometimes I'll interpret for them. And sometimes we will just announce, This is a Chinese-only talk, depending on partly how much the person has to say. Because if you have interpretation, it cuts down to half, the amount of time, partly sort of the degree of specialization of their topic. And so for the Institute to field a fascinating range of speakers, we don't have to work too hard to do that [laughs]. We just have to sort of know who's coming to town and find a place on our schedule to accommodate those persons.

 

Also, you mentioned in the intro that I have been on or am on some human rights boards and that I'm the regular book reviewer, Asia-Pacific book reviewer for Foreign Affairs. Well, the board that I'm on, Human Rights in China, that's located in New York. The National Endowment for Democracy and Freedom House, located in Washington—the board meetings. Freedom House has an office in New York. Foreign Affairs is in New York. And many media are in New York, The New York Times and so forth. So, for example, when a New York Times correspondent is going to be sent to China—now, I don't think they have to send anymore there because China is not giving them visas. But, [The] New York Times correspondents who were given an assignment to China would often call me up because it's convenient and say “I'm going to China and I'd like to talk about it.” And I would  meet with them. So I would consider myself a pure academic. A lot of my work is very, very academic. But it was so easy for me to be drawn into a sort of side gig as a policy guy, public intellectual type of thing, because of, I think being in New York. Other people in other locations can do this, but it isn't as easy and doesn't sort of unfold so naturally. So, I would say that's part of the advantage of the location.

 

Takayasu: Fascinating. Thank you for that. You mentioned how the location may provide certain advantages in inviting scholars and presenters, students too, including dissidents. What role has the staff played in enabling these people's involvement with the Weatherhead?

 

Nathan: So the staff situation has really improved tremendously. When I started at Columbia in 1971, we had an, I forget the title, I think the title was then assistant director, was a person named Debbie Bell. And she was wonderful and had everything under control. The operation was significantly smaller then. One thing I do remember from that period of time that's strange in retrospect, was that if a person had a research account—and I don't remember what research account I had [laughs], but I had some kind of a research account—I was not allowed by Debbie to see the numbers. I could ask her, Do I have money left [laughs]? Or stuff like that, and she would tell me her answer. But it was considered somehow confidential. Why? I don't know why. I don't know if there was a university rule to that effect. That wasn't smart. Debbie decided to leave and go to another job, I think, uptown at the medical center.  So that someplace along the way Gerry hired a person as assistant director or associate director who was not so good [laughs]. And I don't want to get into names and details about this, but I inherited that individual and I had quite a bit of trouble getting a straight answer out of her about a lot of different things.

The University—I mentioned earlier that I thought that over the course of my 50 years at Columbia, the institution got better and better. But there are also some negative trends, not entirely the fault of the university, partly the fault of increasing regulation of universities by the federal government and so on and so forth. But the University has more and more and more and more rules, you know, paperwork. If you want to get reimbursed, you have to—. Of course, you always had to submit some paperwork, but now it's more and more complicated. You mentioned that I'm the chair of one of Columbia's Institutional Review Boards. Those Institutional Review Boards are a relatively new thing, I'd say maybe 20 years old, that exists to implement federal regulations for the protection of human subjects of research. So, there's lots of bureaucracy. More and more bureaucracy.

And when I was director, we felt that this increase of bureaucracy was making it harder to do things that we used to do relatively straightforwardly, financial things in particular. And the assistant director that worked with me at that time was one who thought, “I'll do this the easy way. I'll do a run around. You know, I'm not going to go through all this paperwork. I have a way to defeat the paperwork.” And that just caused us problems because it turned out you couldn't defeat the paperwork and things would get worse instead of better. So that was an unhappy—. And I actually got to the place where I wanted to fire this individual, but she was protected by the procedures and so forth in the human resources bureaucracy at the university. To fire a person, you had to give that person a very long, detailed and precise letter of what she had done wrong, the date, the time, the thing that she did. And then you had to give her, I think it was six months during which to correct those things. Then you could send another letter [laughs]. So, this could go on forever and ever and ever. And I did not—maybe I wasn't tough enough for one thing—but I did not succeed in getting rid of her. And my successor, Matti Zelin, did succeed in replacing her with somebody else who was terrific. And that individual went on to another job.

And after that, we've had very, very good— the title has changed now and I forget exactly what it is—executive directors or something like that, Waichi Ho and now Nicole Vartanian and we've increased the size of the staff. So now this is finally coming down to answering your question. But we now have staff who—we have great people—a great person who runs student affairs, which is more and more complicated because with more money, we have more fellowships and more programs that students can apply for. And all those dossiers have to be collected and sorted and eligibility and so forth and so on before the faculty have a meeting to allocate money.

We have a great program officer, so we run so much programming. And this is another thing that's become kind of bureaucratized, because when I was director, somebody would say, I want to invite someone, so to speak, and I would say, Fine, invite them. But now, because we have a larger faculty as well as a larger staff, we have a program committee that has to make a determination of, Do we want to prioritize this speaker or that speaker? Although I have to say that in case the program committee says, “We can't do this. We don't have enough staff, time or money or room on the schedule to do it.” I can still do it. I can invite the person. I just have to do the publicity and reserve a room and stuff like that by myself or with my assistant. It's not a kind of censorship, but what it is, is just too much activity we have.

So without going through the whole list, we have larger staff than ever before with a high level of excellence, as far as I can tell. I don't supervise the staff. So I am not too sure, but my impression is that the staff morale, esprit is also very good. And they believe in the mission, whether that's student service, whether it's programming, whether it's helping the faculty with some of their chores.

The job, what we used to call secretary [laughs], which has become somehow politically incorrect, is now called an administrative assistant. And that job has changed a lot. So when I started out at the Institute, we didn't have computers [laughs]. I was going to say they didn't exist. I don't know if that's true, but we certainly didn't have them. We had typewriters. And so when I needed to write a letter, a series of letters of recommendation and fill out forms—a kid was applying to whatever program, someplace or a PhD graduate was applying for jobs—you would write your letter of recommendation on a typewriter. You would make corrections in pencil and edits in pencil. You would hand that and the forms to your secretary, she or he, because there were some male secretaries. One of my former secretaries, I just had an email from him two days ago in which he said he got tenure. He got a PhD. He went from the Institute to a graduate program in geography and just got tenure as a professor. Another one of my male secretaries—these two guys were great guys—is in Japan teaching English. So these administrative assistants that we've had are people who have an interest in Asia. Anyway, at that time with the process of having to do everything on a typewriter, it was overwhelming. And I think pretty boring, maybe for the staff. But now,  everything's on computer and secretarial work by administrative assistants is much diminished, at least in my case. And the work is, I hope, more interesting and diverse.

But anyway, the quality of the staff has risen. The number and quality have increased over the years that I've been here. And I would say in the recent two executive directors, Waichi and Nicole, the quality of staff has been very impressive.

 

[INTERRUPTION]

 

Takayasu: So during your directorship, it was a very interesting period when a lot of things in East Asia were changing and also you had a new president in the United States with the Clinton administration. And you're leading this organization that focuses on East Asia policy. So could you tell us some stories about what it must have been like to be a director in that particular time in history?

 

Nathan: Well, first of all, I wouldn't say that the Institute focuses on policy. It's not a policy think tank. And I think it's true to say that all of the faculty members of the Institute hold appointments in academic departments or schools. One of the schools is the School of International and Public Affairs, which is a policy school, but the arts and sciences departments predominate, right? So, poli[tical] sci[ence], history, East Asian languages and cultures, anthro[pology], econ[omics], sociology. So, I think the faculty think of their predominant role as academic with different levels of purity. Some faculty members really think that academics inherently ought to have nothing to do with politics. And then for myself, being in the political science department and as I said before, taking advantage of the New York location to have some connection to human rights and policy and so forth, I'm a little more connected to policy, but I've never been in the government. Some of our people have been in and out of the government.

The Weatherhead faculty comes from different departments and schools. I don't think we have any faculty member appointed directly in the Institute that I can think of. And I would say that some of the faculty come from professional schools, the law school, the School of International and Public Affairs, business school, school of Social Work, not when I was director, but currently. And are in some of those cases, probably especially the School of International and Public Affairs, the faculty, it's a policy school, so the faculty are pretty engaged in policy and many people come out of the policy world or have served in it, such as among our current faculty, Tom [Thomas J.] Christensen, who used to be in the State Department for a period of time, Merit [E.] Janow, who served in the office of the US Trade Representative and so forth. So there's some policy orientation, but most of the faculty think of their work as really scholarly, academic work.

And each faculty person has his or her own view about the extent to which academic work has anything at all to do with politics or policy. So I'm in the political science department. So to some extent it's normal for some people in the discipline of political science to take an interest in policy. And I have done so especially through the human rights lens and how that affects US-China relations. So I’ve done some of that. But I've never served in government, for example. But I think the predominant view of Institute members is that academic work has nothing to do with politics and policy. We've never really discussed this, but my impression would be that some of them even feel that if it has anything to do with politics, it diminishes its academic value. That's not my view, but perhaps some people in some disciplines may have that point of view. But we each tolerate the range of opinion among ourselves.

So it means that each faculty person in the Institute is an individual academic entrepreneur deciding on his or her own intellectual priorities and getting his or her own project funding.  And agreeing to collaborate with others, then reaching out on his or her own back to find collaborators either within Columbia or outside or internationally and bringing in speakers that they think their own students and so forth would like to speak to. So, at the director level, there isn't really much power or influence that the director has. The spirit of academic freedom is that the director is kind of a servant of the collective trying to sort of keep things running so that everybody can do their own thing.

 

Certainly,  one of the environments that we faced when I was director was that American relations with China were changing. So in the ‘70s, after Mao Zedong passed away in the late ‘70s, and then in the 1980s, China was a friend of the United States. Everybody was very optimistic about it. People were worried about Japanese influence. And then, 1989 Tiananmen pro-democracy demonstrations and the crackdown kind of shifted the American view of China, that China was a dictatorship. It was violating human rights. It was something of a, not an enemy, the way that it is today, but something of a threat or a disappointment. And in the meantime, Japan was in a period of stagnation, so called, "stagflation." And so the Japan threat kind of receded and the China threat was beginning to emerge.

And so, you know, American academia is pretty much—I think especially my discipline of political science—its attention span keeps shifting around according to contemporary issues. So, China becomes quite important [laughs] and Japan becomes less important. In fact, one of the things that I worry about as a book reviewer for Foreign Affairs where I cover Asia and Pacific is that in each issue of Foreign Affairs, I am allowed to review seven books in my column. It's called Capsule Reviews. I get a big stack of books, sometimes two boxes of books, and I go through these books and sort them out. And the tallest pile of books is China books. Some of them saying the same thing over and over and over and over again about the China threat,  Is this the China threat? Is that the China threat? Now I'm not talking about when I was director, but more currently, the Belt and Road Initiative is this, Xi Jinping is this, and so forth. Big stack of China books, and then a somewhat smaller book of a stack of Southeast Asia books, and then a stack of South Asia, India, Pakistan books, and then the smallest stack, sometimes zero, are Japan books. And that's because of this sort of feature of American academia to sort of go with the flow and not study the thing that's threatening everybody at the time [laughs].

 

And this bothers me a lot because though I'm predominantly a China specialist, I did study Japan. I studied the Japanese language at one point. I've studied in Japan, language study in Japan.  And I sincerely believe that Japan continues to be extremely important, both from a real-world angle and maybe even, you know, double from a humanities and social science angle. It's so interesting, so important. And I really worry about the lack of people publishing important books, publishing anything on Japan.

So, anyway, you referred to the political environment of the time when I was director. And I think part of that environment was the rise of China as a—not so much the economic and military rise of China came a bit later than that—but the rise of China as a concern for the university and the decline of Japan as a concern for the university.

 

Which reminds me that around that time as well, a bunch of us in the Institute were really trying to get Southeast Asian studies off the ground in the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. So originally, the Weatherhead East Asia—what was then was not called Weatherhead—but the East Asian Institute had been set up in nineteen forty-whatever it was, nine, I think, with a Ford Foundation grant and perhaps a Rockefeller grant. You would remember better than I do because you've been doing this oral history with the purpose of studying what was called East Asia, that means China, Japan and Korea. But there was no place in the university that was studying Southeast Asia in a significant way. There was a guy in the history department and somebody in anthro[pology]. But the South Asian Institute, which studies India and the Indian subcontinent, was not doing South East Asia, so nobody was really doing it. And so some of us thought, and that would include Jim Morley, Bob Immerman, Gerry Curtis, and Hugh Patrick. They were the main ones who thought we need to pick up Southeast Asia because it's incredibly important for all kinds of reasons that I would love to elaborate, but I don't think we want to take all the time to go into it. But suffice it to say, it was, and it is extraordinarily important geopolitically, economically, culturally, in terms of the humanities, in terms of all of the disciplines that we studied. But there was no money for it. And as director, when I came in as director, then I needed to facilitate the work of that group.

 

Nathan: Anyway, the role of director, I think, is to facilitate and be a partner to the initiatives that come up from the different members of the faculty. And that was great for me, as a learning experience and a chance to be close to, in these projects, with all of these great colleagues.

 

Takayasu: That's fascinating and maybe, time permitting, we could revisit this whole perspective on support for Southeast Asian studies, because I think it's a fascinating area. What you mention about people, that academia is focusing on, you know, the—

 

Nathan: The threat?

 

Takayasu: What is deemed to be a threat, yes, versus not. And it's a very stark example. So perhaps now's a good time, because I understand that Weatherhead East Asian Institute, one of its core DNA, is the regional studies. It really does look beyond just one country, but the entire swath, including the borders, countries and stuff. So, would you like to elaborate on the importance? Because I think it's a great opportunity to hear from you about the importance of Southeast Asia.

 

Nathan: Oh, I see. Well, there are two angles to the idea of regional studies. One is simply our master's degree that we give, which I don't think we were doing when I was director of—I can't quite remember. But, we have a regional studies East Asia master's degree, which does require students to specialize in some country or region, but to also know something about something else. And some of them want to go on for PhDs, but many of them do actually want to go into the world of policy.

 

In fact, if I can open the aperture a little bit, I think one of the advantages of teaching at Columbia is to be simultaneously exposed to students who are very pure in a particular academic discipline, in my case, political science. And they might be using advanced quantitative techniques to study some sort of scientific proposition in political science, some hypothesis about political behavior. And then at the same time to have students in SIPA and in the MARSEA program who may have come from the US military and have served in Asia or came from the Singapore Foreign Ministry, and to be able to be drawn by student need, to be as alert as one can be to both of these aspects. The mix of students, including the mix of undergrads who are very, very elite, but young, very young with grad students, some of whom are in SIPA, for example, in their late 20s and early 30s, routinely. It's a great mix of students.

 

The other concept of area––of regional studies––is really this old idea of area studies that was the product of post-World War II. The United States at the end of World War II finds itself kind of against its own will being involved in all of these, well, fighting communism really in all of these different regions of the world in the early Cold War. And so the foundations that created these area study centers at Columbia, Harvard, Michigan, Berkeley, Stanford, of which we are one. We're driven by this concept of area studies, which is a concept that says that in order to build a knowledge foundation for good American policy and all around the world, one needs to know the language, the culture, the history, to a multidisciplinary knowledge of a certain region of the world.
 

Which has gone not entirely out of fashion, but has become significantly less important in the social sciences in particular, where there's this what I think is a vain attempt to create a sort of economistic model of human behavior that would be universal and would be free of any interference by culture [laughs]. So area studies has become less important.

But some of the regional institutes at Columbia are much weaker than Weatherhead. I think we are one of the two that are very strong and this has a lot to do with money, simply. So the fact Matti and Carol were able to raise this Weatherhead endowment has given us the strength to have programs, have excellent faculty and stuff like that, while some of the other institutes at Columbia haven't had that good fortune, so they're not able to do as much. So at Columbia, and I think it's partly the money and partly the history and partly the location and the sort of institutional momentum that comes from recruiting a certain student body and having a strong language department in the East Asian languages and cultures department, library and all that. The institutional momentum that keeps us in the game. East Asian area studies remains strong at Columbia. And the idea that in the Institute, we have all of these different disciplines and we have this master's program where people are supposed to sample from a bunch of disciplines and have a level of language remains strong.

To me, the intellectual logic of area studies—which I was trained in, of course, so I'm biased— remains very valid. I mean, if you're studying something like China [laughs], not to just mention all of Asia or Southeast Asia, but if you're studying China, there is no end to it. If you're studying the Chinese language, there is no such thing as mastery of the Chinese language or the Japanese language. These languages are very deep. They go on forever. You're always learning.

This brings to mind a memory glancingly relevant, but I told you before that when I invite Chinese dissidents to the campus, I will sometimes interpret for them, serve as an interpreter, live, not a consecutive interpreter. They'll talk, then I'll interpret them, because the skill of simultaneous interpretation is beyond me. But the first time that I did this [laughs] was with a woman named Lin Xiling. I'm sorry that I can't remember when she visited the campus. But Lin Xiling was a Chinese woman who had become a major target of something called the Anti-Rightist Campaign in China, which took place in 1957 when the government encouraged people to speak up and then cracked down, and then labeled a number of people as “Rightists” and punished them.

And so many, many years later, maybe when I was director, this person who had been a target and had been imprisoned and had been persecuted and had a horrible life—but was very smart, that's why she had been targeted—landed up in New York. I don't remember why. And somebody told me she's in New York. And I said, Let's hear her experiences. And she came to campus and she didn't speak any English. And I said, I'll interpret. Well, Lin Xiling was a dramatic, fiery, melodramatic individual who came in to give this speech and started shouting and yelling and [makes sound], and I found myself interpreting in the same way, sort of infused with her energy and her passion. I was translating into English with the same exaggerated—. And I enjoyed it so much because usually I'm kind of mellow [laughs]. It gave me a chance to play a role without any preparation or any intentionality, but I was just drawn along by her energy and shouting and screaming and translating. And so that was my first time. And I enjoyed it so much that that's why I continued to play this role of interpreter from time to time for my Chinese guests.  

Which is connected to the question of area studies in a way, because there are 1.4 billion Chinese and each one of them is unique if you have a chance to get to know them. There's so much to know about any one person's life and personality. So, I do believe in area studies, and I think it's great that Weatherhead and some other similar institutes at Columbia and other universities are still very vibrant.

 

Takayasu: That's great. Thank you.
 

[Laughter]

Nathan: I know, that was fun.

 

Takayasu: It's just contagious energy? Was that the reason why you—?

 

Nathan: I think so. Yeah. In this particular case, it was her passion, her anger, her emphatic quality of denouncing the Chinese regime and explaining the painful experiences that she had had and so forth. And I just found myself swept up in it.

 

Takayasu: Wow. How do those kind of events get received by students? Did you get any feedback from them?

 

Nathan: Well, we normally have a very robust turnout for most of our events. But I think now that you mention it, in that particular event, the whole audience was swept up with the energy of it and including my performance [laughs]. Because you could sort of imagine if you're an audience member and you don't speak Chinese and you see this woman ranting and raving and then the interpreter rants and raves, that's kind of quite a spectacle. So, I think we had great audience feedback.

Now, some of my guests for whom I interpret are these kind of high grade Chinese intellectuals who are saying something pretty dry. However, with the fascination of China that so many people have, we always get a good turnout and people are very interested and they raise questions and we always have a good discussion.

Our common room, where we hold these events until the pandemic, and now we're on Zoom. But the common room, I suppose, accommodates when it's full, 40 or 50 people at the max, and so it's pretty intimate. And when I share events—and I don't know about other colleagues—but when I chair events, it's pretty informal. And, once we get to the Q&A, then the audience are engaged. And we're all very much face-to-face. So, I think our audience are very appreciative of the events that we have.

 

Takayasu: So you mentioned this dramatic moment, as well as you mentioned, how China was perceived by America differently pretty much throughout your career. Fifty-one years.  And you're the Chinese expert. So, what has it been like for you to be the China expert and in the context of Weatherhead?

 

Nathan: Right. And I'm not the only one. Not the only China expert at Weatherhead by a long shot. And one of my colleagues who's now retired was Tom [Thomas P.] Bernstein, the colleague that I have now at Columbia's Tom [Thomas J.] Christensen. And we have, I won't go through the whole list, but we have a new guy now Junyan Jiang and we have Xiaobo Lü, who had served as director —. So we have a depth of China expertise just in politics, not to mention history and other disciplines.

 

But what's it like? So when I started studying China was in the year 1960, when I was a first year student at Harvard. And I had to pick some courses and I picked the course because it was so exotic and off-the-charts and something that existed in few places, which was the history of East Asia. And I really enjoyed that course. Then I went on to get my PhD in the field of Chinese studies, which I got in 1971, I guess. In the 1960s and 70s, not that many people studied China because you couldn't visit China. China was not rich. China was not important, really. And I studied really out of putting one foot in, just getting drawn in by the enjoyment of the intellectual learning experience about China, without much of a career sense of why that would be a good thing. Kind of impractical attitude. And when I arrived at Columbia in 1971, China was still the other side of the moon. Nobody went there. Nobody knew anything about it. It wasn't powerful. It was a mystery. But it has emerged, as you pointed out, more and more and more important and undergoing constant changes in the course of that. And more and more real.

 

So China first became—from being a remote, abstract academic subject for me personally—it became real when in 1973 I visited with this delegation. I mentioned earlier that Jim Morley was a part of that. It was not really real at that time because now we're still alive and everything was still, you might say, kind of fake. We had a guided tour and the made sure that we kind of saw things in the official way. So we used to, at the end of the day, we would get a bunch of beers and we would sit around and sort of speculate, Was that real? Did that person really mean that? And stuff like that. We couldn't figure it out.

But when Mao died, things began to change very rapidly. And I pivoted my own research at that point from sort of historical politics of late-19th, early-20th century to contemporary events, what was called the Democracy Wall Movement and debates that were happening in China. This is in the late 1970s and early ‘80s. Debates that were happening in China over whether China should undergo some kind of political reform and what it should be. And then, as the crackdown happened, some of the people that I was writing about showed up in New York as exiles. And this was kind of a shock to me because these names that I'd been writing about were actual people [laughs], with personal histories and problems that they needed to solve arriving as exiles in New York.

 

So, your question is, What has it been like to be a China specialist? I would say it has been intellectually fascinating, constant puzzles and changes, and rethinkings. One of my most cited journal articles that I ever published was an article that I published in The Journal of Democracy and I can't remember the exact title, but the key word in the title was Authoritarian Resilience. I published that article in two-thousand-and something. Maybe 2003. And that term, authoritarian resilience, is frequently cited and the puzzle of how the Chinese communist regime has been so resilient has been frequently addressed by scholars. And what happened was that after the Tiananmen crackdown, we pretty much, we all expected the Chinese regime had reached the end of the road and was going to collapse. And it didn't collapse. And I was swimming at the YMCA here in New Jersey. And, sometimes when you're swimming, it's your best thinking time because your brain sort of goes on its own while you're swimming. And I sort of said, Whoa, it's two-thousand-and-whatever-year-it-was and the Chinese regime was supposed to collapse and it hasn't. And I got out of the water and I wrote myself a note on the paper in my locker and went home and wrote this article about why hasn't the Chinese regime collapsed? And in telling this story to say that if in this period of time that we're talking about from 1971 up until 2021. And I hope continuing [laughs] from here onward.

 

If you're studying an object like China, it is a constant stimulus puzzle. Things are always happening. And the importance of it and the interest of it to other people has constantly increased. And so it was a mindless, unstrategic choice of mind to study China, but it turned out to be a very fortunate choice.

Yeah, so people, whether it's media, whether it's government, whether it's different policy groups, I've always been predominantly focused in my teaching especially, because I think teaching is also an important way to influence policy. Because your students go on to do so many interesting things. Some of my early students became very, very influential ambassador-level, national-intelligence-officer-level chair, senior chair, project director at important think tanks and have retired since then. They're retired and I'm not. This is student disloyalty [laughs]. So, I think I've kept nine of my ten toes in the pure teaching and academic scholarship, but your 10th toe is in the real world.

 

Takayasu: Well, that's wonderful [laughter]. You seem very proud of your students, you know, among the nine toes. Could you give us a little bit more texture about the personal rewards of being a teacher?

 

Nathan: Well, Some of it is the careers that people go on to accomplish. There's a lot of that and of course, many of my grad students have gone on into distinguished academic careers as well as government and so forth careers. Right now, we're at, near the beginning of the fall semester and I've been advising some students on Zoom. And I think part of the reward of advising, of students, as you get older, is that they're young and they have their future ahead of them and their energy—the energy of the youth. Like yesterday, I spoke to a freshman from Los Angeles. She's very, very young, younger than my youngest child [laughs]. Certainly, that's not unusual. And, she's very excited and she's apprehensive. She came from LA with her father, mother, brother, aunt, and uncle for the freshman convocation. And I'm like, Wow! You really have family support. You know, the excitement. And so I enjoy that very much.

 

And then my course this coming semester is Introduction to Human Rights. It's not really an Asia course. Certainly, Asia will be mentioned, as will other countries, including the United States, [which] has its own human rights violations that can be mentioned. But that course is very diverse. Some of the students are refugees, migrants. Some are victims of sexual assault at different points. Some are struggling with gender identity issues. They come from different races and nationalities and are very cognizant of racism. And many of them are in the course because even in high school, they were committed to children's rights or migrant rights or indigenous peoples' rights and so forth. So they bring an energy. And some of them know quite a lot, but many of them don't really. They know a little corner of human rights. And I have an opportunity to raise a lot of questions with them, some of which are quite skeptical. I want to raise these questions: Does human rights fit every culture? Who are we as basically privileged people? If you're at Columbia or Barnard, then at some level, you're from a position of privilege. Certainly, I'm from a position of privilege. What is the right of those of us from positions of privilege to sit in academia and to study with purported academic detachment, the problems of racism and genocide and torture. Is that ethical? Now, I think it is. But this is an elite liberal arts institution. I think that we should raise those questions that are philosophical and belong, to some extent, to the humanities as well as to the social sciences, and we should raise some of these big questions. But also, we have to say, What actually is human rights law? What does the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights actually say? And what does it not say? And why does it not say those things? Who wrote this covenant and stuff like that? So, there's some technical stuff and then there's some very fancy postmodernist [laughs] reflexivity that's also built into the—. Well, that's a very interesting course to me. And I love to see the student reactions to it.

 

Takayasu: Well, that's wonderful. I get excited just listening to you talk about how the students are excited. So in regards to human rights, which you're renowned for, was there any role that the Weatherhead played with your focus and efforts with human rights?

 

Nathan: Yes. Not so much as an institution, because as I mentioned before, the way that the Weatherhead works and I think other institutes normally at Columbia work is that it's an environment of academic freedom. If you're on the faculty, then you are trusted to sort of steer your own intellectual project. Of course, there are tenure reviews that take place which are not—by the way, that Weatherhead has, I think I'm safe to say, zero to do with tenure reviews or even hiring because hiring and tenure reviews are conducted by the academic department or school where the person has an appointment. And Weatherhead then sort of provides a gathering place for those who are appointed in different schools and departments that have a common interest in the region. So, when I talk about academic freedom, I'm not saying that there's no review, but that's done outside of the Institute. So, I passed tenure review in my department and I'm in the Institute and I do what I want to do. And the Institute has always facilitated that.

I think I mentioned earlier that I think that some of my colleagues in the Institute probably hold the view that as academics, we ought not to be messing in politics. And they may—I don't know, we've never discussed it—they may like what I do. They may not like it. They may like some of it and not like some of it. I really am not sure. But the Institute has never interfered and has always facilitated the things that I chose to do. And I for my part, I wouldn't do something that I myself thought was not appropriate to do in the Institute context, whatever that might be, I don't know. I can't even think of an example. My own thought is that the programs I've run and research publications and things that I've said or taught, et cetera, are appropriate.

But the Institute did play a certain role in the following way: in the early 1970s, Amnesty International had been founded in Britain in 1961, but in the early 1970s, it was beginning to expand to the United States in the form of what were called Adoption Groups. That's how Amnesty works predominantly. And so one of my then-PhD students, Robin Martin, who, after her PhD became a project director within Weatherhead, senior staff person running our outreach for secondary and college education. Robin was my PhD advisee in the early ‘70s, and she and her husband Paul decided to create an Amnesty Adoption Group on Morningside Heights area. And Robin invited me to join it and I agreed to join it. And that's how I actually got involved in actual human rights work. We didn't have, as I can recall, in that Adoption Group, a China case at first, maybe we got one later. But the Amnesty headquarters in New York, that is the Amnesty USA headquarters in New York, they picked me up along with another colleague named Jim Seymour, who was at the Institute at that time as a senior research associate, but has since retired and moved to Hong Kong. Jim and I were picked up by the Amnesty China Coordination Group. So that would be a USA-level sort of expert group to advise the Adoption Groups who had Chinese adoption cases. We became members of that China co-group and so I got more deeply involved.

And then in 1995, I think, which would be when I think I was still director of the institute at that time. Is that true [laughs]? Another organization called Human Rights Watch invited me to become, I think, to become chair? Member or chair of their Human Rights Watch Asia Advisory Committee and I switched over from Amnesty to Human Rights Watch because Human Rights Watch was more political. Tougher. They lobbied governments. I felt that they were more abrasive [laughs] than Amnesty International and I preferred that. So I became involved with Human Rights Watch.

So step by step, because of my interest in China and a sort of sense of responsibility toward China— because as I said before, that I began to meet and to know and to help some of these dissidents who fled from China—I began to feel a kind of a sense of responsibility.

 

So earlier with you, I raised the question of who am I as a white person to mess in the affairs of China? But that's an interesting intellectual question. But my personal answer was, how could I not, as a China specialist, speak up for what I believe to be the truth with respect to certain things going on in China when I have written about and studied and know some of the people who've suffered from this. That's been my position, which I don't indoctrinate on my students. I want them to, each of them, to figure out his or her own position. But that's been my answer to that puzzle.

So I got deeper and deeper into—so, starting from China—into the question of human rights: what are they, and who says, and how are they promoted, and so forth and so on. And now I find myself at this point in my career actually having done so for quite many years, teaching the Intro to Human Rights, which is not a China course.

 

Takayasu: Thank you for that. So, as we're getting towards the end of the interview, I'm just fascinated by all this, how much you've done to touch different people knowingly or unknowingly, and you've done so much more than what you probably launched your career in the early days of the ‘70s. So at this point, how would you like history—it may be the experts in your various field[s]—to remember you? And that would be part one of the questions. I'm not supposed to do two-part questions, but I'm going to set you up for the second part of my question, which would be, How would you like to be remembered by your grandchildren?

 

Nathan: [Laughs] Well, I think if I get an obit[uary] in the newspaper, which, you know, probably very few people get it, what I'm most notorious for, most known for is the Tiananmen Papers that I mentioned before. But, what I think what I—and I cared about that, I thought that was an important project, and I was willing to take the risk and to invest a number of years it took to put out that project. So I’m not, not to downgrade it at all, but I think I wouldn't be remembered in history, but I would perhaps be remembered in the hearts of some individual people—.

Well, there are two things, both having to do with individual people. And one is with Chinese individuals whom I've tried to help, when they needed help, and I've alluded to this a few times. But they show up here and they need an affidavit for political asylum. They might need some funding. They might need some, really, somebody to listen and to encourage. And I've, you know, tried, tried to be—. And so, there's no record, I think, of this except in the hearts of persons whom I helped at some point.

 

And then the students. Because I think to me, as I look back on my career, to me, the most important thing that I've done is my teaching.

 

One of the good and bad things about American academia is that each—. The professor who inspired me at the beginning of my career as an undergraduate, was a guy named John King Fairbank, who is the so-called dean of China studies in the 1960s and ‘70s who promoted the careers of so many people. And while I was in grad school, one of my grad school colleagues, a guy named Jim [James] Peck, published an article attacking Fairbank for his politics, that he was complicit. So this was in the late ‘60s and the student population was generally quite radical. This is the time when we had the anti-Vietnam War movement and so on. And Jim Peck accused Fairbank of writing scholarship that was complicitous in American imperialism. And Fairbank took it very, very cheerfully. And he said that in American scholarship, the younger generation—you remember that, I think it was the famous scientist, British scientist Newton, who said that science advances by the younger generation standing on the shoulders of the older generation to make progress—and Fairbanks said, “In American academia, the younger generation stands on the shoulders and steps on the faces of the older generation [laughs].” And he was like, Fine. Advance scholarship. Criticize me.

 

In my discipline of political science, people are always rediscovering something that has been discovered before in the 19^th century. A lot of the time these theories are there and then they’re rediscovered in the 1950s. And then they're rediscovered. And so, I accept the fact that my scholarship, which has been well received, will be forgotten. In fact, some of it is forgotten already. For example, I'll have students who come in, graduate students who say I want to write a thesis on blah, blah, blah, and I'll say, Well, have you read chapter five of my 1986 book? And they're like, No [laughs]. Because, 1986? Who wants to read a book from 1986? It's too, you know, too old [laughs]. So I'm OK with that. But I think what I feel like has been most important to me has been the teaching, the students. I really love that interaction with each individual student.

 

So, both of the things that I feel have been most important to me, whether it's helping Chinese individuals who are dissidents and democracy activists or whether it's just simply teaching students, most of whom are not in trouble and don't need any help. But some need help. That['s] what I'd like to be remembered for.

 

And I think for my grandchildren, my grandson, who is now four, says to me, Oh, Baba, you're such a jokester. And I think that's where it's at with the grandchildren is, you're a jokester. Just play around. Play. Play word games, puzzles, you know. Ask silly questions. Make faces [laughs]. And hopefully, they'll remember me that way.

 

Takayasu: That's lovely. Actually, since you did mention that there aren't really recorded description of what you did for these individual dissidents, could you kind of give us a texture of what it's like? I mean, how did they find you? Can you give an illustration of what you did for a certain person or a few people, or—.?

 

Nathan: I think that you get a reputation and they come to you when one sends another one to you. There's one case that has become especially important. And I'm sort of hesitating because it's not really my business to tell her story, but her story is publicly known through reports by Chinese journalists. Maybe I can sort of split the difference by not mentioning the name. But those who hear the story would probably figure out the name. But this is an elderly Chinese physician, woman, she's now 94, who got into trouble in China, and escaped. She was sort of spirited out. She was in trouble for criticizing the government. And I got a phone call from the State Department because I have had a former student in the State Department. This woman was quite well known to the State Department over the course of years. And the State Department person said that this individual wants to come to New York and can you sort of take care of her? So she came.

And this must be more than 10 years ago. She doesn't speak any English. Her health is very, you know, rocky at her age. So I became responsible for her affairs. She and I have a joint bank account. I've raised the money for her rent. Mostly from Chinese donors. Not inside of China, but in the world outside of China, which is, you know, who are anonymous. She doesn't want to know. I don't want her to know. They don't want—. I pay her rent through this joint bank account.

When she arrived, I said, What's with your political asylum? She said, My political asylum is with this law firm. I called them up. I said, What's with your—? They said, Well, it's been sent back to headquarters. Why? Well, because she was an obstetrician gynecologist [OBGYN] in China and in American political asylum law, there's something called the “persecutor bar.” If you yourself were a torturer or something like that, you can't get political asylum. Well, under the interpretation of this law that was mandated by the Congress, if you engaged in forced abortion in China, then you're a perpetrator. And she was an OBGYN. So, the original asylum interview that she got, the lawyer that handled it—and this woman has a very, very thick accent, by the way, of one of the regional provinces—the lawyer that handled it, messed it up and failed to make clear, to arrange things in such a way that the hearing officer would understand that this particular applicant did not participate in abortions. Actually, she was the opposite thing. She was curing uterine cancer and stuff like this so that people could have children.

I was really furious. I yanked the case from that law firm. And I went to Human Rights First, which is an organization that arranges for pro bono representation. And they got pro bono representation from Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Garrison, and Wharton, which is one of the most expensive law firms and the partner that was handling this case [laughs] was the same partner that was defending, what's his name, the governor of New York, who had to step down because he was patronizing prostitutes, Eliot [L.] Spitzer. This was this high-level partner that was defending this schmuck governor, you know, and she had this team together with an interpreter and a junior partner and everything like this. So they got the asylum.

Finally, second hearing. It's not easy to get a second hearing for an asylum case. And I had to write letters to Congress and to this and that to like put pressure on the Immigration and Naturalization Service [INS] to give a sec—. You couldn't send this person back to China. That would be a political disaster. But you couldn't give her asylum either until they cleared away this persecutor bar.

Then the next thing was that after seven years, you have to get citizenship or else. What is it or else—. The one thing she needed was Medicaid. I mean, she's 94 years old now and she has 24/7 home health aides that are paid for by Medicaid. She's bedridden. But if you don't get citizenship within seven years of your asylum claim being approved, you can't get Medicaid. And I got another pro bono lawyer and you know, nothing happened. And so finally, we were getting close to the seven years and I had to, well, you know, long story, but shake all kinds of trees to get the INS and they finally sent a man and a Chinese woman from INS and the Chinese woman with an interpreter and staff member who was able to interpret, to the bedside. And I was there. And I cried at that point and took photographs because they were so nice to her. And she had to answer questions. These were stupid questions you have to answer if you get naturalized that as a citizen. "Have you ever served in a hostile army?" [Laughs] Like this 94-year old, 5-foot tall, you know. "Are you a terrorist?" and all this. And I'm saying the answer to that is “ No. OK. So go on.” [Laughs] And, so that would be an example. Now, that's the example where I have invested the most amount of time.

This all started it up after my father passed away. And my wife says that I want to take care of one elderly person at a time [laughs], she believes. She makes a joke out of that. But that has been for me, has been extraordinarily worthwhile. This individual that I'm talking about is a very feisty person. You could sort of imagine. Really, really tough. Opinionated. Some of her opinions are very old fashioned. She's shocked about [laughs], men who have divorced one wife and married a younger wife. She's very, very angry at those kind of men. I happen to be such an example, so I haven't revealed that to her. She probably heard it from somebody else [laughs].  That's an example that you asked for, but it's been very interesting for me.

 

Takayasu: Well, thank you for doing what you've done. It's remarkable.

 

Nathan: Well, I don't think it's anything too remarkable, but I have enjoyed it. It's just been opportunity.

 

Takayasu: That's great.

 

Nathan: Thanks for your great questions.

 

Takayasu: Is there anything else you'd like to share that we didn't cover today? I know you have so many more stories, so I just want to give this one opportunity.

 

Nathan: I always tell my students when they want to do fieldwork based on interviewing, I always tell them people love to talk about themselves. So [laughs] I said you'll do very well with your interview project. And so, of course, there's no end of talking about oneself. One's self is the most fascinating topic. But no, I think you've covered a lot of things. And this should be about the Institute more so than it is about me. So, thank you very much for listening so patiently.

 

Takayasu: Well, thank you. It's been fascinating. Time flew and we really appreciate your generosity with your stories. So thank you.

 

Nathan: You're welcome.