This book’s interest is to expand this approach to include a focus on mobilizing the settings of society themselves to foster successful integration. It sees these settings as having a capacity of their own, bottom-up, to foster successful integration— a capacity, perhaps underappreciated, to build trust across otherwise tenacious identity divides. It explores how to do this at several levels in society: in personal relationships and mentorships; in midsize settings like classrooms, sports teams, and small businesses; in larger institutions like universities and corporations; and in the overarching paradigms we use to design institutions like K-12 schooling.

For half of the participants, this letter was based on the letter normally sent to incoming students. It stressed four student goals:

• learning by exploring personal interests,

• expressing ideas and opinions,

• creating your own intellectual journey, and

• participating in independent research.

But when the letter conveyed a more collective campus culture— a culture better matched to that of working-class students— those students performed the same on the anagram task as students with college-educated parents. The representation of college culture in the president’s welcome letter was enough to immediately affect students’ cognitive functioning!

They haven’t dropped the practice of giving grades, or jettisoned the lecture format, or lessened their commitment to research excellence. They haven’t restricted their commitment to a narrow sector of the population. Rather, they’ve added capacities that detect and meet the developmental needs of all students, including the less resourced and identity-threatened. They don’t lean back, presuming to select students who have what it takes to succeed in their institution. They lean in; take responsibility for developing students’ abilities and talents. And following this developmental approach they’ve built solid foundations of institutional trust that greatly facilitate student success.

Can this approach be formed into a usable strategy for building foundational trust and lowering churn in diverse settings? I believe so, and propose a strategy with three goals: seeing, welcoming, and supporting.