Yesterday, August 6, 2025, marked the 80th anniversary of the day that an atomic bomb was dropped by the US military on Hiroshima, Japan. The bomb killed 140,000 people, including 34,000 children and 20,000 Korean nationals subjected to forced labor. Another 40,000 people were killed instantly by an atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki three days later. Many more people in both cities were badly injured due to these attacks.
What, you might ask, do these horrors have to do with deliberation? Other than the perhaps obvious point that such death and suffering caused by war ultimately represents the breakdown of deliberation, when the involved parties no longer are able to come to any mutual understanding and compromise, but opt to resort to force and violence? Well, last year the DCI was asked by Davidson’s Vice President of Academic Affairs (VPAA) Shelley Rigger to utilize a deliberative process to develop text for signs to introduce a set of Ginkgo trees that were planted on campus in 2024. These trees, donated by Green Legacy Hiroshima, are descendants of survivors of the atomic blast in Hiroshima, and were planted as reminders of the general dangers of warfare. Some students and alumni from countries that had been occupied by Imperial Japan, however, were concerned that the focus on the trees overlooked the broader and more complex history of World War II in the Asia-Pacific.
The DCI accepted this request and formed a working group (Keya Zhou ’25, Luna Noguchi ’25, Flo Moser ’26, Casey Scheiner ’28, Lily Ogawa ’28, and Faculty Director Graham Bullock) to respond to it. The working group recently submitted its recommended text for signage to accompany the ginkgo trees to Dean Rigger. This text is based on suggestions made by participants who attended the forum that the working group hosted in the spring of 2025 (you can read more about the forum here). The forum participants’ thoughts and suggestions were deeply thoughtful and heartfelt, and the working group did its best to capture them in its recommended text for the signs.
Over multiple discussions and several draft versions, the working group coalesced around eight general themes that were expressed in the participants’ comments. These themes are summarized both as short sentences that could be included on signs next to (or near each tree) as well as longer sections of text that could be included on a companion website accessible via QR codes on the sign(s). You can check out both sets of text recommended by the Working Group in the document below.
Ginkgo-Tree-Project-Recommended-Text-for-Signs-and-WebsiteAlso included in the document are recommended links and resources that could be included on this website. If such a website is created, the Working Group recommends that it also includes the ginkgo project summary document, which provides more in-depth background about this effort. This document is also provided below.
Ginkgo-Tree-Project-Summary-6.2.25-1Draft text developed by the Working Group was shared with the forum’s participants and panelists (Professors Multhaup, Mortensen, and Zhu), and their feedback was incorporated into the current version. Members of the Working Group also presented the draft text in a poster at the Verna Miller Case Symposium.
The VPAA’s office is waiting to see how many of the Ginkgo trees survive in the coming months before ordering the signs for the trees. Depending on how many survive, some of the text drafted by the Working Group may be combined and consolidated so that there is one sign per tree. We’ll share a further update on this blog once the signs are finalized and installed.
The DCI appreciated this opportunity to demonstrate how deliberative principles and practices can be used to respond to a challenging and contentious issue in a respectful and productive way. The Working Group believes that its work provides a model of a constructive deliberation process that both emphasized inclusivity and delivered a tangible output in a timely manner. The DCI welcomes similar requests from offices and organizations on and off campus that have similar challenges that we might be able to help them respond to using a deliberative, intentional, and meaningful process.
