It is our privilege to welcome today's speaker, Doctor Cathy Faye.

Margaret Clark Morgan, Executive Director, Cummings Center for the History of Psychology on the University of Akron campus.

The topic of Cathy's presentation is Why Akron?

Reflecting on 60 years of the archives of the History of American Psychology.

Doctor Faye has agreed to take questions from the audience following today's conversation.

Patrick Keating, Akron Roundtable board member, will moderate the Q&A.

To submit a question, please refer to the brochures at your table, or you can scan the QR code that will be projected on the screen.

Feel free also to submit a question at any time during the presentation.

You don't need to wait until Cathy's presentation is over.

If something that she mentions or you have something on your mind, submit that question and we'll make sure that that gets in the queue.

The ask for technology that we use is made possible by a gift from the Greater Akron Chamber.

If you would like to submit a question but don't have an electronic device with you, there no cards on your table.

You can write your question down to one of our staff members will collect those, and we'll also submit those for for our moderator.

Today's signature event is sponsored by the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, and we're grateful for their support.

We're also incredibly happy to have RJ Nemer, president of the University of Akron, two time alumnus, with us today to introduce today's speaker, RJ.

Thanks Barry, good afternoon, everyone.

It is my distinct privilege to introduce the July 25th Akron Roundtable speaker.

Today we will hear a remarkable six decades story, one that encapsulates both local culture and international appeal.

It is the story of an institution that serves as a gem for our city, and a point of pride for the University of Akron, its institutional home.

According to its website, the Doctors Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology just steps from where we are now collects, preserves and interprets the historical record of psychology and related human sciences.

It is the story of us.

It celebrates our humanity, explores the intricacies and diversity of the human mind, and ties together research, curiosity, and access to information.

The center houses the archives of the History of American Psychology, something we will hear more about today.

It is also a repository for the evolution of one of the largest areas of academic study.

In addition to its incredible archives, the center is home to both the National Museum of Psychology.

If you haven't visited, I strongly encourage you to do so.

And the Multi Disciplinary Institute for Human Science and Culture promoting education, research, preservation and documentation of the human experience.

At the University of Akron we hold our strategic values of flourishing people lifelong learning and social impact at the core of all we do.

With visitors from around the world and through opening its doors to scholars, students of all ages, and curious learners of all types.

The Cummings Center for the History of Psychology uniquely helps the university accomplish our values.

Today, we have the exceptional privilege and honor of hearing from the Cummings Center's leader.

Her talk is really less about the what and more about the why.

In fact, it's called, Why Akron?

Reflecting on 60 years of the Archives of American Psychology.

Through her reflections, historical context, and deep dive into just one of the aspects of the center she directs.

Today's Akron Roundtable attendees will no doubt leave edified, craving more exploration into this important field of human science.

Please join me in welcoming today's speaker, the Margaret Clark Morgan, executive director of the Cummings Center for the History of Psychology, and my colleague, Doctor Cathy Faye.

Thank you for that kind introduction, President Nemer, and thank you to the team at the Akron Roundtable for having me here today for the sponsors of the Akron Roundtable, as well.

It's always a pleasure for me to be among the wonderful folks of Akron.

I've been in Akron now for 16 years, and it's just been a really wonderful place to call home.

When I look out into this audience, I actually see a lot of familiar faces, and these are the faces of people who work every day to make Akron the wildly wonderful place that it is.

So it's really great to be here.

I have four goals in my time here with you today.

When you leave here today, I hope you walk away with four ideas or four pieces of information.

First, I hope you leave here thinking about how psychology shapes our everyday world, how it is around us every single day, perhaps in ways that we don't always realize.

Second, I hope you take away an understanding of how psychology can be an agent of social change, how it can impact our social world, and how sometimes it can serve as a catalyst for major changes in that social world.

Third, I hope that you leave here being able to see how stories from psychology and the history of psychology in particular, can help us better understand not just ourselves, but each other.

And last but not least, this is actually the most important.

I hope you leave with a burning desire to come visit us.

To learn more about psychology at the Cummings Center for the History of Psychology at the University of Akron.

Okay, so let me begin by sharing with you some stories from the field of psychology and its history.

These are stories about how humans interact with the world around them, how we make mistakes, how we fix those mistakes, their stories about how we adapt to a changing social, technological and political world.

Their stories about how we understand and see each other.

These are all stories about the human experience.

In addition, these are all stories that are preserved and shared at the Cummings Center for the History of Psychology.

As President Nemer noted, the Cummings Center is a research and humanities center.

Our mission is to collect, preserve.

Our mission is to collect, preserve, and share psychology's history.

And our vision, which guides that mission, is to activate the history of psychology and other human sciences in ways that help us better understand ourselves, our world, and each other.

Now, I'm going to tell you a little bit more about the Cummings Center a little later on.

But for now, I want to begin by sharing with you a few stories from our archival stacks.

Our first story begins in the 1950s in the Bell Telephone Laboratories.

If all of us in this room now were to take out our cell phones and look at the keypad, the number keypad on your phone, what you would see is you all have the exact same keypad layout, okay?

You've got this three by four, three, row by four, column layout on your cell phone.

But why this layout?

Right?

There were a number of possibilities that could have been used for these cell phone designs.

Why do we have that specific layout?

Where did it come from?

Well, the answer to that question is that it came from psychological research.

In 1953, Bell Telephone Laboratories was about to change telephone technology in a big way.

They were switching from rotary dial up phones to the push button keypad.

But what should this keypad look like?

How should those buttons be organized?

To answer this question, they hired two psychologists, Alphonse Chapanis and Mary Lutz.

These researchers brought 300 people into Bell Labs and asked them to put the numbers where they would expect to find them.

So they said, you know, imagine a keypad that's going to be used in this way.

Where would you expect to find those numbers as a user?

Where would you prefer to find those numbers?

Now, the configuration that you see on your cell phone keypad today is with minor alterations, the same keypad that was chosen by those 300 people in a Bell Telephone laboratory in the 1950s.

Interestingly, this is something you would learn more about at the museum.

But later research also showed that this particular layout was also the most efficient.

Meaning it leads to the least number of errors when you're inputting numbers.

And it also allows people to input numbers quickly.

Alphonse Chapanis and like many research psychologists both past and present, was deeply interested in how humans interact with their technological environments.

This was just one of the many ways that his work influenced our technological world.

Chapanis has also assisted in research that impacted the redesign of the B-17 bomber plane.

Introduced in World War II the B-17, or some models of the B-17 were rushed into production.

So some of these models, while there was a long history of design on the B-17, some of the models went from the design phase to the runway.

In less than a year.

However, there was a significant problem with this plane.

It kept crashing, kept crashing upon landing specifically.

In a two year period of World War II, the Air Force reported 457 crashes.

What was the problem?

Well, many in the Air Force believe that the central problem here was likely pilot error.

Okay?

So somehow these pilots who are landing the plane were just making some kind of fatal error.

They thought perhaps they were fatigued, overworked, not paying attention.

Or perhaps they weren't properly trained.

The answer then, of course, to this problem would be more training.

But Chapanis came to a different conclusion.

He interviewed all these pilots.

He did research with all these pilots.

He spent a whole bunch of time in B-17 cockpits.

And what he found was that this was actually not necessarily pilot error, but rather it is better described as a design error.

Chapanis determined that the controls for the landing gear and the controls for the wing flaps were very, very similar.

Specifically, when a pilot would reach down to use one of those controls, they could not tell by touch which control they were using.

Okay?

So sometimes when they would go to land the plane, they would accidentally retract their landing gear when they were trying to deploy their wing flaps.

Chapanis solved this problem by designing new controls, ones that were very easily differentiated by touch.

This idea is now known as shape coding.

Okay?

So designing these kinds of controls in this way is called shape coding.

And today you will find it still in the design of airplane cockpits.

You'll also find it in video game controllers, industrial equipment and also in the controls in your car and in many other places in our increasingly technological environments.

Alphonse Chapanis was just one of many psychologists whose research has helped us better understand our technological environment and therefore better understand our human experience.

And this work has continued to contribute in meaningful and lasting ways.

Psychologists have shaped not just the way that we interact with technology, but also the way that we interact with each other and the way that we structure our social world.

In doing so, they have the ability to make really positive change in those worlds.

Our next story from the stacks takes us inside the US Supreme courtroom in the 1950s.

In 1954, a decision was made in one of the most important Supreme Court cases in U.S. history.

Brown v Board of Education.

In this landmark case, the Supreme Court ruled that separating children in public schools on the basis of race was unconstitutional.

This decision effectively ended legal segregation in the US public school system.

Now, some of you may know about Brown v board, but perhaps what you don't know is that psychological research and testimony were a part of this case.

Many psychologists and other social and behavioral scientists of the 40s and 50s were doing a lot of research at this time on intergroup relations.

They were also doing research on racial identity and racial prejudice.

These experts were called to the stand in this case, to describe the findings of that research, and to provide their expert opinion on the effects of segregated schooling.

This was based on their knowledge of race, racial identity, and child development.

Two of these experts were Mamie Phipps Clarke and Kenneth Clarke.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the Clarks began studying black children in segregated and integrated schools across the United States.

They explored how these children viewed their own racial identity, and also how they felt about it.

In one of these studies, there were a number of them, and this was one that was done in 1947.

The Clarks met with 253 black children.

All of these children were attending segregated schools.

The children were shown four dolls.

Some of the dolls were black dolls, and some of the dolls were white dolls.

They were then asked a variety of questions, such as which doll do you like best?

Which doll do you want to play with?

Which doll is the good doll?

More than 65% of the children in this study chose the white doll.

The Clarks described their research in their Brown v Board testimony.

They also described a growing body of social science research that suggested that segregation had damaging effects on children's development.

This research was directly cited in the Supreme Court's final ruling in Brown v Board, and it was in fact the first time that social science research was cited in a Supreme Court decision.

Now, a caveat, as historians do.

Like most historical stories, this one's a little more complicated than the way I'm sharing it here.

There was massive resistance against school desegregation after Brown v Board, particularly in the South, and legal battles around this continued for a number of years after Brown v Board.

And of course, much work remains to be done in relation to educational equity.

Nonetheless, Brown v Board and the psychological research that supported the case was a landmark moment in the civil rights movement, and it's one that permanently altered our educational landscape.

The Clarks and their work also contributed meaningful change at a local level.

In 1946, the Clarks launched the Northside Center for Child Development in New York City.

Seeing few services being offered to black families in New York, the Clarks aimed to provide educational, social and mental health services for youth in Harlem.

They began this new center in a one room apartment with a staff of volunteers, psychiatrists, psychologists, pediatricians, and social workers.

In their first year, the Clarks and their team of volunteers served 60 children.

Today, the Northside Center for Child Development began by Mamie Phipps Clark and Kenneth Clark in 1946, is thriving.

It includes a school, a daycare, day camps, headstart programs.

They provide therapy, tutoring, nutrition workshops, and parenting classes.

Serving more than 2000 children a year.

Through their work contributing to the Brown v Board decision and the legacy they created with the Northside Center.

The Clarks left a permanent imprint on our social world.

So I've talked about how psychology has helped us better understand our technological world.

And I've also talked about how it has shaped our social world.

And I want to tell one more story.

And this one is about how psychology helps us better understand ourselves and also each other.

Our final story takes us to Europe and after the end of the Second World War.

At the end of World War Two, somewhere between 8 and 10 million people in Europe had been displaced from their homes.

This included refugees who had fled their homes, people who had been taken prisoner, and people who had been deported.

At the end of the war, many of them did not have the option to return home.

And understandably, many of them did not want to return home.

Displaced persons camps, centers and shelters became their temporary home in these years.

In 1946, a psychologist named David Boder documented this historical moment.

Boder was born into a Jewish community in Latvia, and as an adult, he eventually fled Europe in 1919, he went first to Japan, then to Mexico, before finally settling in the United States.

So Boder himself understood displacement.

He had first hand experience of this kind of displacement.

Furthermore, his identity as a psychologist really guided his work.

He was interested in understanding trauma and measuring trauma, and he believed that one of the best ways to understand trauma was to gather life stories told firsthand by people who had experienced trauma.

And so, in 1946, David Boder travel to Europe with a pierced wire recorder to preserve the voices of displaced persons in France, Switzerland and Germany.

He recorded over 100 interviews, resulting in 90 hours of audio on 200 magnetic wire spools.

Boder was not the first to record narratives in the postwar world.

In fact, there were an enormous number of interviews that had been done with displaced persons after the war.

However, Boder’s work differs from the others.

His recordings tell the story not just of adults, but also of children, teenagers and the elderly.

The interviews were conducted not in English, but in the language of the interviewees.

While many other interviews at this time were done on paper.

Boder recorded his interviews, and in addition to the interviews, he recorded religious services and songs as they took place in these camps.

These are, in fact, some of the earliest audio recordings of Holocaust survivors.

Boder’s goal with this research was to preserve these voices and stories for the future, to share them so that people living in the United States at the time could understand what happened in Europe, and to analyze them in order to better understand the human experience of trauma.

Because of his unique approach, Boder’s work provides listeners with an empathetic window into the lived experience of people displaced in war time.

These interviews not only help us understand what happened during the war.

More importantly, they provide us with first person accounts of the feelings and the experiences that accompany those events.

This psychological research documents and shares a profound human experience.

It also provides us with a way of engaging empathetically with the lived experience of others.

All of the stories I've just shared with you are preserved at the Cummings Center for the History of Psychology.

The original plans and the data from Chapanis's work with Bell Telephones.

You can find that in our archives.

The story of the Clarks and Brown v Board can be explored in our museum.

And the wire spools that hold the voices of Boder’s interviewees are preserved in our media collection.

These are all stories about psychology's history.

But as you can see, there are also stories of U.S. history.

Their stories about social change, their stories about the history of science, their stories about the human experience.

And there's a million more, and all of them are found at the Cummings Center.

I want to switch gears here a little bit and tell you a little bit more about the center now.

Give you a sense of who we are, what we do, and how we came to be.

The Cummings Center was founded in 1965 at the University of Akron as the archives of the History of American Psychology.

The archives are the only collection of its kind in the world documenting psychological science, research and practice.

The collections, which date to the late 1800s, contain personal diaries, research notes, funding applications, letters, photographs, film, sound recordings, books and objects.

All of these things help us understand how psychology has been put into practice in schools, in businesses and hospitals and clinics, in communities.

If you visit our collections, you will find all forms of archival materials that document important moments, ideas and practices in our shared history.

Unpublished white papers, for example, document research from NASA on how the mind and the body might adapt to life in space.

Film footage from the 1950s helps us understand the advice that was being given to parents in the 1950s on how to raise their children.

Letters between psychologists in the 1940s give us insight into early ideas about the nature and treatment of schizophrenia.

Today, this rich collection, which began in 1965 with two boxes of material today, contains more than 6500 linear feet of material.

For those who don't know what a linear foot is.

It's simply about the size of a banker's box or a standard moving box.

So if you imagine almost 7000 of those, that's what we're preserving at the archives.

Over the years, our archives and these collections have continued to grow steadily.

In 2010, with much support from donors and the gift of a wonderful historic building from Roadway Express.

The archives moved out of the basement of the Polski Building in downtown Akron and into a four floor facility on the corner of College and Mill Street.

This allowed us to continue expanding our collections.

Maybe even more importantly, however, it gave us the opportunity to expand our identity as a cultural institution.

In 2018, we opened the National Museum of Psychology.

The museum is the only one of its kind in the world focused on exploring psychology's history and its relation to U.S. society.

The museum examines how psychology has shaped our everyday lives, looking at psychology as a profession, a science, and an agent of social change.

In addition to permanent exhibits, the museum hosts several temporary exhibits.

Our current exhibit, I encourage you to come visit is called Psychology Takes Flight, and it explores the history of aviation psychology, looking at how, psychologists were working with the US Army Air Forces during World War Two to redesign aircraft, train pilots, all that kind of stuff.

I think you find Chapanis actually in that exhibit.

In this museum, visitors are encouraged to explore psychology and its history, but they're also encouraged to engage directly with the exhibits in order to learn more about themselves and each other.

If you come visit our museum, you can test your own reaction time.

You can take some personality tests.

You can take intelligence tests from the early 1900s, and you can test your ability to multi-task.

Spoiler alert you're going to be really bad at it.

In 2019, we launched the third branch of the Cummings Center, the Institute for Human Science and Culture.

The Institute's collections and exhibitions expand beyond psychology, and the work of the institute is geared specifically at hands on teaching and learning for the University of Akron and Greater Akron communities.

through the Institute, we offer graduate and undergraduate certificates that teach students from all disciplines about working in museums, archives, and other cultural spaces.

The students in these programs work directly with our historical and cultural collections, and importantly, they work with experts from across cultural organizations right here in Akron, including folks from the Akron Public Library, the Summit County Historical Society, Stan Hywet, Powerhouse, and other organizations.

In the course of this certificate program.

They learn how to tell stories about historical and cultural objects, how to manage cultural collections, and how to share those collections meaningfully with their communities.

More than half of the students who have completed these certificate programs have gone on to work in cultural spaces.

In fact, you will find many of them in the growing number of world class cultural spaces right here in Akron.

Because we're celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Psychology Archives, I have focused most of this talk on our psychology collections, but the Institute for Human Science and Culture is perhaps our fastest growing and most dynamic branch.

It is quickly becoming a known and trusted collaborative hub for the campus and the community, bringing together educators, learners, artists, cultural specialists and creators from different fields and different backgrounds and different communities all across Akron.

As a result, the Institute and our collaborators are producing critical and thoughtful interdisciplinary exhibitions, classes, and community programs.

Together, the archives, Museum and Institute provide a space for experiential learning, practical education, creative collaboration, and community gathering in Akron.

However, our reach extends beyond the city of Akron.

The Center's collections and its programs have also made their way out into the big wide world.

If you have visited the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration in New York, you may have seen artifacts from our collections.

The Ellis Island Museum, exhibits six psychological tests from our archives.

These are tests that were used to assess the psychological status of new immigrants at Ellis Island in the early 20th century.

If you find yourself in Berlin, I hope you will visit the Jewish Museum of Berlin, where you will find one of the containers of the wire spools from David Boder’s interviews with displaced persons.

The spool is part of a larger permanent exhibit on Jewish history in Germany, and a section that tells the story of the Holocaust.

We have also shared our collections globally through our own traveling exhibits.

One of the most successful of these exhibits came through a partnership with the Smithsonian Institution.

Since 2002, the center has been an affiliate of the prestigious Smithsonian Institution.

This affiliation provides a vibrant partnership between cultural institutions and the Smithsonian.

This partnership allows us to exchange objects with one another.

But perhaps more importantly, it facilitates the sharing of knowledge, expertise and creative idea making.

And I want to give you one example of how we leverage this partnership.

In 2016, we partnered with the Smithsonian, the White House Council on Women and Girls, the American Psychological Association, and York University, which is in Toronto, Canada.

Together, we designed and launched a traveling exhibit that celebrated the contributions of women of color in psychology.

The exhibit relied on materials from our collections, but also the collections of our collaborators.

The stories in this exhibit were stories about women's psychologists whose work had a lasting impact on the field and on the world.

For example, we told the story of Ruth Howard, who in the 1920s began a career with the Cleveland Urban League and the Cleveland Child Welfare Agency.

She then went on to become one of the first black women to complete a PhD in psychology.

The exhibit also shared the story of Reiko Homma True, an internationally known Japanese American psychologist in the 1970s True helped to create the first mental health center in California devoted specifically to Asian American communities.

In 1989, after a 7.1 magnitude earthquake hit the city of San Francisco, True and her team quickly assembled a mental health response unit to help the public cope with this disaster.

Ruth Howard and Reiko True were two of the women's psychologists who are featured in this traveling exhibit.

The exhibit was titled, I Am Psyched Inspiring History, Inspiring Lives.

And actually Doctor Angela Neil Barnett, who is here today, was a part of the programing that we did around this exhibit in Akron.

This exhibit launched in Washington, DC in 2016.

Over the next three years, it traveled to more than 35 locations across the United States and Canada.

At each location, it was launched alongside a community event that celebrated the past, present, and future of women of color in the field of psychology.

Through our partnership with the Smithsonian and the American Psychological Association, we were able to reach a vast audience and to share our collections and new and meaningful ways.

As our national and international partnerships have grown and thrived, we have also begun to spend more time thinking about our role in and our connections to our local community.

As I mentioned at the beginning, our vision at the center is to provide a space where we can come together to explore our shared human experience through culture and history.

It's really in the last five years that we've begun doing that at a much more local level, engaging in programs and exhibits that explore the specific experiences, both historical and contemporary, of the folks right here in our city, our region, and our state.

Last year, we partnered with Ohio based Art therapist to curate a new exhibit on the history and practice of art therapy in Ohio.

In an exhibit exploring the idea of home, we worked with local Akron organizations such as Direction Home and Summit County Children's Services.

This exhibit explored themes of home using the history of psychology.

So, for example, you might have learned of David Boder and displacement and that exhibit, but you would have also learned about how local organizations have for many years been working to provide safety, security, and a sense of home and belonging for members of our community.

Most recently, they've been excited about successful joint work with Akron Soul Train and the wonderful resident artists that they support.

Because psychology and the human sciences touch our lives every day in so many different ways, we find connections to and touch points with all of these wonderful local organizations.

And we're excited to see what we can do in the future, to work with them, and maybe with you to explore our shared human experience.

Now, let me finally address the title of my talk.

Why Akron?

This is a question, you know, a lot of our team is here today.

And our team answers this question all the time.

Why Akron?

Why is the only psychology archives of its kind in Akron?

Why is the National Museum of Psychology in Akron?

This story, my final and favorite story, begins with two Akronites and a bottle of bourbon.

The archival record tells us that one night in the 1960s, two psychology faculty members at the University of Akron were chatting over a bottle of bourbon.

Doctor John Popplestone and Doctor Marion White McPherson, both faculty members in the Department of Psychology at the University of Akron.

We're talking about the fact that no one was saving psychology's history.

All of the objects, the letters, the films, the things that documented psychology, history, and the way that it was impacting our world were simply disappearing.

John Popplestone taught the class that I now teach the history of psychology class at the University of Akron, and he wanted to be able to use these primary sources, and this is how they realized, you know, they just didn't exist.

So recognizing this loss, they bowled with bourbon, decided then and there that they might be the ones to launch an archive for psychology.

They proposed the archives to the University of Akron's Board of Trustees in the fall of 1965.

The board supported this novel idea, providing a small space, a small budget, but a lot of freedom to make something really wonderful happen.

Popplestone and McPherson began in earnest, writing letters to every leading psychologist of the day, telling them about this new venture and asking them to entrust their legacy and their life's work to this new little archives in Akron, Ohio.

They established an advisory board, they gathered together a group of generous supporters who saw the importance of what they were trying to do.

Slowly but surely, a world class collection was established.

So, like so many other Akron innovations, this one was the result of a couple of Akronites with a really good idea and the fortitude to make it a reality.

This year, as we celebrate our 60th anniversary and look back on our success and our growth, we are extremely grateful for that fortitude.

We look forward to spending the next 60 years continuing to share stories about psychology and its history.

Stories that help us think more empathetically and constructively about our world, ourselves and each other.

We hope that we can find ways to do this work in collaboration with all of you.

Before I close, I want to acknowledge the people and the organizations.

These are just some of them whose generous support of the center has made the work we do at the University of Akron possible.

This includes the American Psychological Association, the Doctors Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Foundation for Behavioral Health, Jim and Vanita Oelschlager, Peg's Foundation and Roadway Express.

We value their leadership, their collaborative support, and their investment in us, in the university and in the greater Akron community.

If you like some of these stories and you want to know more, I encourage you to please come visit.

Our museum and gallery spaces are open to the public five days a week.

You can come on in and explore the Institute and the museum galleries.

You can also explore the archives.

This vast trove of historical material in our archives is open to anyone by appointment.

You can find more information about all of this in the pamphlets at your tables on our social media, in our e-newsletter, which you can join, and also on our website.

I would also love to see you at one of our upcoming events, especially this year as we celebrate our 60th.

Please also feel free to contact me directly any time.

I'd love to meet with you, learn more with you, and welcome you to the center and to the University of Akron.

Thank you.

- Now you get to stay for the Q&A.

As, Barry announced previously, I get to coordinate the questions.

We have several questions here.

And Doctor Faye has graciously allowed us to ask them.

So let's get started.

I need my glasses, though.

All right.

You have talked a lot about the archives and the records there.

Can you tell us what is, in your opinion, the most important item you have in the archives?

- I think... That's a tough question.

It's like choosing your favorite child.

I would probably have to say, the Nobel Prize.

If you come visit the National Museum of Psychology, one of the items you will see is a Nobel Prize for the category of physiology that was won by a psychologist named Roger Sperry.

Sperry's work is a little bit complicated, but highly important.

Sperry did groundbreaking work on the brain, specifically, he was interested in how the brain processes information and how the two halves of the brain communicate.

And he was one of the first people to really help us understand how the two sides of the brain work together and communicate.

And I think these kinds of groundbreaking scientific findings have changed everything that we do.

So I would argue that that's probably one of the most important items in our collection.

- All right.

Now, you mentioned in your talk that the museum is world class.

Does that mean if I wanted to get the notes of Sigmund Freud, I would find them there, or at least some of them.

- You would find letters from Sigmund Freud.

There are some again, on exhibit in our museum.

You will find a letter from Sigmund Freud to another psychologist.

We do not have the papers of Sigmund Freud.

Those are held in, another archive.

But, you know, we do have if you come to the museum, probably our most popular photo opportunity in the museum is a recreation of Freud's office.

So when we were designing the museum, we worked with a really fantastic team of designers and fabricators in Columbus design team called Roto.

And they very diligently looked at photographs of Freud's office, his original office and his original therapy room.

And recreated that right in our museum.

So if you, look us up online, I would bet large sums of money that one of the first images you'll find is people laying on Freud's couch, with their co visitor sitting in a chair beside, serving as their therapist.

So this has been one of the ways that we've really tried to help people learn more about Freud, his work and the ways in which he helped to create the idea of talk therapy.

I think this is an important story that we try to tell in the museum.

The really wonderful thing that Freud did was he helped us understand that just talking about things helps make them better.

Before this, there were a lot of somatic treatments, bodily treatments for mental illness.

And Freud's innovation was sort of saying, you know, actually, if we just talk about this, it helps people get better.

So we do include Freud in the museum, but we won't have the Freud papers anytime soon.

- All right, we have another question here that goes off on a slightly different tack.

What advice would you give to a young student considering psychology as a field of study and specifically for the chances of employment, post-graduate?

- Yeah, I can answer this pretty enthusiastically.

The really, really wonderful thing about psychology is that there are a million ways to be a psychologist.

I think, again, this is one of the things that we really try to convey in our programing and our coursework is that being a psychologist doesn't just mean being a therapist or a counselor.

That is really important and good work.

But you can also be a psychologist who consults with businesses.

You can be a school psychologist, you can be a research psychologist, you could be a historian of psychology.

There's a million ways to be a psychologist.

And I think that, by training in this field, you would just really open up a wide world of opportunity.

So there are psychology students get jobs.

That's kind of the simple bottom line of it.

Our psychology students at the University of Akron have gone on to do really good things.

And, I don't see that trend changing anytime soon.

So my advice would be to do it and do it well.

- Thank you.

That leads now to a follow up question.

Not that I'm connecting dots necessarily but if psychologists are so important in our modern economy what would you identify as the greatest threat to mental health in our modern culture.

- Decreased funding.

I wish I had a more nuanced answer, but I think until we have systems that really invest in mental health care in this country, we're going to struggle to make improvements in this domain.

That includes funding to support training the workforce, to support people living with serious mental illness, to support the families who are supporting those who live with serious mental illness.

There are many good organizations that are doing this work.

Philanthropic organizations that are funding this work.

But we really need a permanent social structure that funds and invests in mental health care in meaningful ways.

- Since you brought up funding, we have several questions relating to funding for your work.

And, then specifically...

So I'm going to just combine these together.

Specifically, has the Cummings Center been affected by cuts in federal funding or Ohio's Senate Bill 1?

- No, I'm happy to say not directly.

Our funding, we are of course, the University of Akron supports our wonderful staff.

And we have support as you saw, from several private foundations and local individuals who, thank goodness, invest in our work every day.

I think the only sort of concern I have around this right now in terms of our own funding, I have a lot of other concerns is really just that, you know, we all of our programing, and all of our exhibits, all of the things we do really are supported by donor funds.

And right now, I think that philanthropists are pulled in a lot of important directions.

So that does mean that sometimes I think folks who would normally support us are needing to put that support in other places.

So, the short answer is no.

I think everybody is doing the best that they can right now with their charitable giving.

And, I hope we all continue to do that.

- One of our members of the audience has asked whether the center has any materials on another important event in Akron history, and that is the founding of AA.

- We don't, we've maybe found a document here or there in our collections, whenever there is something related to mental health care that is, Akron centric or anything related to psychology that is Akron centric.

Of course, we always, as our team calls it, we go down that rabbit hole and we spend some time there and we look really hard.

But unfortunately, we don't have a lot of materials on the history of Alcoholics Anonymous.

We do have some Akron centric stories in our collections though.

One of those is the story of Ross Stagner, who was a psychologist at the University of Akron who was very involved in studying labor organizing and labor unions.

So Akron was a good place for him to do that with the rubber workers and all of that.

We also have the papers of Fred Frese, who some of you may know, significant advocate for those living with serious mental illness.

Another very interesting Akron centric story that I think will help us, do some really good programs and exhibits on the history of mental health advocacy here in Ohio.

- Thank you.

We have a question here about AI in our modern culture.

And if you could address this generally, how that is affecting psychological health and psychology.

And also, is there anything that we in the audience can do to put boundaries around the use of AI, both for ourselves and our children?

- It's a really big question.

We are talking a lot about AI in the field of psychology, but I think our focus right now, I'm kind of, not going to answer your question.

I'll be up front there.

I think right now in the field of psychology, where our focus on AI is, is in mental health, because AI is starting to be used in therapeutic situations.

Okay?

So this is neither bad nor good, but it's something we have to think really carefully about.

What does it mean to introduce AI into a therapeutic relationship?

So this is kind of where my thinking about AI is sitting from my vantage point as a psychologist, in terms of the use of AI, I don't know.

I mean, I wish I had a good answer to that question, but I'm learning along with all of you in terms of how it is going to continue to shape the way that we learn, the way that we interact with each other.

And the way that we gather and present information.

So no good answers except to say that it is one of those things that it is a giant part of the human experience right now.

And it's going to continue to be a very big part of the field of psychology.

- Well, that will keep you busy in the future as AI will keep all of us busy.

We have several questions here about the number of people that come from an international location to come here to study the archives or go through them and somewhat related to that is, do you know the farthest distance someone has traveled to Akron to study the archives?

- Well, we used to have we should bring it back, we used to have a map.

Actually, when we were in the Polski building, we had just this small little entryway.

When you first walked into our office space and we had a big map of the world hanging there, and every time someone would come from a different location, we would put a pin on that map.

It was really this nice visual way of tracking.

You know, how far we've kind of managed to spread our wings.

I don't know about the farthest distance.

I mean, we just had a fellow last week from Israel.

We've had visitors from Australia.

We've had visitors from, I think every continent.

We also have hosted international conferences at the Cummings Center that take place, you know, right in our Institute for Human Science and Culture.

So we have a large international audience that way.

But it is kind of interesting because our collections focus, you know, you got to draw the line somewhere.

So our collections really are based in the US.

We focus primarily on US psychology.

But nonetheless, as you can see from the story of Boder, these are international collections.

So we do get folks from all over the place.

There's actually... Again, last week or the week before, I toured a psychologist from Brazil who is interested in getting a better understanding of what psychology looks like in the United States.

And she came to our museum to do that.

So we definitely have a very wide international reach.

- All right, for this next question, we will pivot from the international to the local.

Does the center partner with the Akron Public Schools on any educational programing?

And I would just add, what about other local public schools in the area?

- Definitely.

We've done this in a number of ways over the years.

We did this even before we had a museum.

Today, mostly we got classes that come to do field trips and tours of the museum.

Again, it is sort of applicable to a lot of different age groups because of the interactivity of the museum.

I think it's appealing for many kinds of folks.

But maybe I'll give you an example of one project that we did, and I think this was something we did before we had the museum.

My colleague and I, Doctor Jody Cairns, created this project where we went into Akron Public schools and taught children about what it was like to be at Ellis Island in the early 1900s, what it would have been like to get off a boat after being on there for three weeks, and arrive at Ellis Island and go through a series of tests.

You know, the people who came would go through a legal test.

They would go through a medical test.

Most folks don't know, they would also go through a psychological assessment.

Okay?

And so we made recreations of the kinds of tests that people would have had to take when they arrived at Ellis Island.

And we took them into Akron Public Schools, and we created a project where these students, I believe, were middle school students really got to sort of understand that experience and see what it would have been like to be in that space.

So that's one example of how we have used our collections to partner with Akron Public Schools.

And, it's one of many.

We've had a lot of partnerships in the school system, for sure, at all levels of learning.

- I've been informed by the powers that be here that we have time for one more question.

So this will be it.

What is it that we here in the audience can do to help promote the center?

And more generally, better psychological health?

- I think you can do both of those things by coming to visit and encouraging others to come visit the center.

If you have folks who are not physically here, we have a very active website and social media platforms.

And I think any way that you can help us to connect with a larger audience, that would be helpful.

You can also give to the center and to the University of Akron.

We do rely pretty heavily on gifts from donors.

So if you like what we're doing, if you believe in it, we would be grateful for donations as well.

But most importantly, I hope you'll engage with us in whatever way works for you.

That might be partnering with us if you are a local organization that might be visiting, that might be bringing your students, that might be bringing your family, we just want to connect with all of you.

And for us, that is the greatest show of support.

Thank you.

Thank you for being with us today.

We look forward to seeing you next month.

Have a great day.