Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Welcomes First Faculty Fellow

The Office of the Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion is pleased to announce a new Vice Chancellor’s Fellow position, which began this fall with Professor Ilana Redstone serving as the first fellow.

Professor Redstone is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences and will serve as the Vice Chancellor’s Fellow for AY 2024/2025.

Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Sean Garrick said the new position will allow Illinois Faculty to share their expertise with his office and campus.

“The Office of the Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion seeks to create a campus that is welcoming and inclusive,” Garrick said. “Doing so requires a diversity of ideas, strategies and expertise. A strength of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is its talented and enthusiastic faculty.”

Garrick said the program also seeks to develop future leaders by building awareness of challenges and issues in higher education. It also creates opportunities for talented faculty to explore academic leadership roles at the university’s highest levels, he said.

Professor Redstone’s current scholarship focuses on understanding and addressing how certainty drives our tendency to judge harshly, demonize, and dismiss people with whom we disagree. Her most recent book, “The Certainty Trap: Why We Need to Question Ourselves More – and How We Can Judge Others Less,” will be published in September.

During her time as Vice Chancellor’s Fellow, Professor Redstone will utilize her expertise to develop and deliver co-curricular programming for undergraduates with a focus on deepening the curiosity and regard for the opinions and perspectives of others that fosters greater ideological diversity. This work will involve regularly engaging students in examining the origins of difference and heterogeneity, and their importance in creating a common society from our diversity, Garrick said.

“My hope is that Professor Redstone’s work will help our society improve how we see each other across our differences and ultimately contribute to a richer understanding of how we engage in better discourse with each other,” he said.

To learn more, read the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion’s Question & Answer interview with Professor Redstone.

Q & A with Professor Ilana Redstone

Question from the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion: Tell us about yourself and your time at the University of Illinois. What is your background?

Answer from Professor Ilana Redstone: I have been at the University of Illinois since 2005. I have a joint PhD in demography and sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. Although my dissertation was a quantitative analysis of U.S. legal permanent residents, I have long been interested in moral and ethical complexity. So, when I started to observe what looked like a shift in the social and political climate, I was intrigued. I wanted to understand how so many people seemed to see contentious issues—especially those linked to race and gender—as having clear lines separating the morally right position from the morally wrong one.

Q: What is the biggest takeaway from your new book “The Certainty Trap”?

A: The Certainty Trap is what we’re in when we demonize, dismiss, and are contemptuous of people who disagree, especially on heated issues. Certainty traps us by leading us to: treat our knowledge as definitive, rather than provisional; be imprecise and vague about our assumptions; and regard those assumptions as unassailable. It has implications for knowledge production, democratic stability, and social trust. Avoiding it means understanding that no ideas, beliefs, or claims are exempt from criticism or questioning; shifting from certainty to confidence in what we think we know; and being clear about the assumptions, values, and principles that drive our opinions.

Q: What are your goals for your time as the faculty fellow for OVCDEI?

A: I look forward to bringing The Certainty Trap work to our students. I see it as an opportunity to help shape the kind of citizens and people they both are now and will be in the future. I hope my work within this fellowship helps provide University of Illinois students with a roadmap for thinking clearly, openly, and with precision—particularly when it comes to contentious topics. While avoiding the Certainty Trap is fundamentally about transforming how we understand the world, it has direct implications for how we interact with one another—especially across political divides. I hope that, upon completing the programming, students engage with the world and the people in it with more openness and curiosity and less judgment and rancor.

Q: Why are you interested in serving as the faculty fellow?

A: I’ve been teaching a course called Bigots and Snowflakes (SOC 230) for several years now. In spring 2025, I’ll be teaching it for the sixth time. I’m thrilled for the opportunity to work with the OVCDEI to bring these ideas to our students more broadly. In that class, we talk about many of the most heated issues we face. We think together through the underlying assumptions many people make when it comes to things like race, gender, identity, inequality, and other people’s intent.

Q: How can this work affect the quality of discourse on campus?

A: Certainty drives the contempt that we have for people who disagree with us, especially when it comes to heated issues. Understanding the way it shapes our thinking and our judgments can help us avoid it, which in turn can change how we interact with others.