Hashmi goes back to the classroom to talk about some important books

The lieutenant governor of Virginia is spending this week making public appearances west of the Blue Ridge.

Nothing unusual in that.

Lt. Gov. Ghazala Hashmi also is spending part of her time visiting important local places. On Monday, she toured downtown Wytheville with tourism officials and visited Wytheville Community College to see the school’s training program for powerline workers. On Wednesday, she’s visiting the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute in Roanoke. On Thursday, she’s touring the Galen College of Nursing in Roanoke County and holding a “listening tour” on the proposed Dominion Energy/NextEra Energy merger. On Friday, she’s meeting with firefighters in Roanoke.

Again, nothing unusual in that. This is what elected officials do all the time.

What is unusual are three other events on Hashmi’s schedule: She’s doing academic lectures on the intersection of literature and politics.

“It’s selfish on my part,” Hashmi joked during an interview. “I really miss not being in the classroom and not getting a chance to talk with undergraduates.”

For an hour Tuesday morning, the former literature professor (University of Richmond and Reynolds Community College) was back in a classroom — well, technically, the auditorium at Wytheville Community College, where at least two classes and various school officials and community members came to hear Hashmi talk about Studs Terkel’s book “Working.”

The full title of her talk: “Work and Meaning: Studs Terkel and an Oral History of Working Americans’ Reflections on Labor and the Human Experience.”

On Wednesday, she’ll talk about “Songs of Appalachia: The Role of Folklore and Memory in Sharyn McCrumb’s Ballad Series” at Radford University and on Thursday she takes on Barbara Kingsolver and Charles Dickens at Roanoke College in a lecture entitled “Labored Lessons: Kingsolver and Dickens on Institutions, Poverty and Grit.”

All politicians give speeches. Hashmi is unusual in creating a lecture tour series to go with her political appearances. She started in April with a lecture on the Federalist Papers at the College of William & Mary, then ramped the program up again this week with these three stops. She said Tuesday she hopes to deliver at least four such talks every year.

“The main goal for me is to help people make those connections between powerful literary writing and the issues and the concerns explored in literature and the way we’re working on those same concerns in government,” Hashmi said. “It’s allowing me to take a look at the work and the responses of government — where we’re failing, what we could do better, what we are doing well — and use literature as the vehicle to make those connections.”

Tuesday’s event featured a 30-minute talk by Hashmi, then a follow-up by Rodney Alderman, an assistant professor of English at Wytheville Community College, and a brief question-and-answer session with students, all within the standard one-hour class time. The focus was Terkel’s 1974 oral history in which he interviewed a wide variety of people about the work they do and how they feel about it. Hashmi quoted from various passages, offered her interpretations and then segued into how the literary intersected with the political.

She focused on one section where a steelworker told Terkel that he hoped his children would have a better life, and better jobs, than he did. For Hashmi, that leads to a policy position — not a particularly controversial one but a policy position nonetheless: “We can expand access to education and job training,” she said. “We can fund affordable community college —.” That line got interrupted with applause from the students, before Hashmi went on: “We can fund apprentice programs and retraining programs.” She noted that Terkel’s book dates from the height of the industrial era and since then “we have whole industries that are changing before our eyes.”

That was about as far as the policy discussion went Tuesday — and while supporting all these things may seem tame, there are contentious questions and decisions beneath the surface. Virginia’s community colleges historically haven’t been funded at the same level as four-year schools. This year’s state budget ramps up funding for apprentice programs to increase the number of students served from 15,000 to 18,400, but there’s always the question of whether the number should be higher — and what the trade-offs should be.

Hashmi said her talk Wednesday at Radford will deal with “displacement” in Appalachia — a region that has seen many of its traditional industries disappear — and Thursday’s talk at Roanoke College will touch on the foster care system and opioid addiction. All those are literary topics with real-world examples.

Hashmi was introduced Tuesday with references to her many “firsts.” She’s the first Muslim woman elected to any statewide office in the country; she’s the first Asian-American elected to statewide office in Virginia. There was one “first” that wasn’t mentioned: She appears to be the first person to hold a doctoral degree elected to statewide office in Virginia, and her press releases refer to her as “Ghazala Hashmi, Ph.D.” (We’ve had some Ph.D.s at other levels of government, including Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Westmoreland County, in the 1^st Congressional District; he has a doctorate in public policy and administration.)

Hashmi, who was born in India but moved to the United States as a child and grew up in Georgia, earned her doctorate from Emory University for a dissertation on the American poet William Carlos Williams. She went on to teach in Virginia for three decades before venturing into politics, first as a Democratic state senator and now as lieutenant governor. It’s no accident that her political action committee is named Next Chapter PAC. Earlier this year, she teamed up with Virginia Humanities to launch a poetry contest for K-12 students. (It’s still open; the deadline is Nov. 16.)

“My background in literature is something I’ve always felt was an asset to me in just understanding the issues and the people I work with,” Hashmi said in an interview afterward. “Having read extensively is to be able to feel really connected to people. A lot of people say, ‘You were born in India, how are you connected?’ but literature has a way to challenge that sense of identity and connectedness. I always say if you read extensively, you’ve met everybody in the world. It gives me an avenue to understand the complexity of a lot of people’s lives.”

Hashmi said she spent part of the summer reading up for the three lectures this week. “Studs’ is a massive book,” she said. (The original hardcover version was 639 pages.) “But I love to read, so it gives me an avenue to stay focused for something I’m passionate about,” she said. That’s a lot of work for a one-time event, she acknowledged, “but it’s so valuable. If there are only a few people in this audience, especially young students, who find something that resonates in their own mind or experience and they pick up the book, or another book, that’s my satisfaction. One of my concerns is so few people are reading nowadays.”

For some who were in attendance Tuesday, this was their first introduction to Terkel or his work — which, admittedly, was published decades before some of them were born. Claire Rudzinski, an engineering student from Speedwell, was struck by “how things have changed since the ’70s and how a lot of things haven’t changed.”

As for what hasn’t changed: Work is an important factor in how we see ourselves, said Mia Johnson, a forensic psychology student from Marion.

And what will Johnson tell people about the event? “I got to meet the lieutenant governor.”

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