Gisele Huff: Force of Nature

A Holocaust survivor, a champion for students and the dignity of the individual, and an embodiment of the American dream, Gisele Huff has been turning heads for decades. She recently published her memoir, titled Force of Nature, and she joined me to talk about her journey and lessons. For those who don't know, Gisele has also been a critical mentor in my life, so this conversation became more personal in places.

As always, you can read, listen, or watch it below.

Horn:                Welcome to The Future of Education. I'm Michael Horn, and I am really looking forward to today's conversation because it's with someone that I affectionately call my fairy godmother, Gisele Huff, who for those that don't know has been an incredible figure in the course of education, not just reform, but transformation and the movement to really rethink it, but also in her work now pushing for universal basic income in some very meaningful parts of the American society at the moment.

                        But I want to read from her new book, for all if you can see, Force of Nature, the remarkable true story of one Holocaust survivor's resilience, tenacity, and purpose. Gisele served for more than two decades as the executive director of the Jacquelin Hume Foundation, where I came to know her, which invested in nonprofit national organizations that worked on transforming K12 education. And now, she's currently the founder and president of the Gerald Huff Fund for Humanity and lives in San Francisco.

                        But Gisele's story is one where she escaped war torn France, as the back of the book describes, where 18 members of her family were murdered in the Holocaust. She arrived in the United States with her mom, it was 1947, and they had $400 to their name. And she quickly found her footing in America, eventually, earning a PhD in Columbia University, running for Congress, and launching the spectacular career in K-12 education that I've alluded to. Gisele also had many moments of devastation throughout her life that continued. And I think it's how she took those moments and what she built from them and what she learned from them that it's going to be a really interesting conversation as we reflect on education transformation, the resilience of an individual and someone who embodies the American dream. So with that, I will bring Gisele up to our virtual stage. It is so good to see you. Thanks for doing this.

Huff:                 Thank you for having me, Michael.

Horn:                Yeah, absolutely. And for those-

Huff:                 Nice to see you.

Horn:                Yes. And for those who are tuning in and want to ask questions, fire it away in the comments. I'll do my best to ask Gisele. She always is the first to ask a question at a conference, so you can be the first to ask her a question. But Gisele, I want to start with something a little bit bigger, which is what led you to write this book, this memoir? Why did you think that this was an important story, your story to tell for the world?

Huff:                 So in order to put this in perspective in terms of my life, I started writing the book 2015, mostly out of boredom. I had time and I like to write, so I thought, well, I'll write the story of my life. And I wrote 17,000 words about the story, with what happened to me during the Holocaust and so on. And I got to the place where I was actually working, and I was working for the Hume Foundation with you and many other people and trying to do something about K12 education. And when I got to that spot, I couldn't figure out how to continue writing the book while I was still involved with the people I was writing about. So I stopped and I put it aside and I didn't think about it anymore.

                        And then, after I retired in 2020 and I had lots of time, and of course, I was working on the Fund for Humanity, the Gerald Huff Fund for Humanity, which is the nonprofit I founded, I was able to pick up and to explain and describe how the years that I spent, the 23 years that I spent in the foundation, what my ideas were, what I encountered, how I dealt with it, without having to worry about how it would affect my relationships with people. And that's not to say that this is a tell-all. I'm not... No. I describe my relationships with people, but I don't go into the personal aspects of them. I mean, I had many, many discussions with Milton Friedman, who was a very funny man. And I had to go into where I agreed with him, where I didn't agree with him. That is not what the book is about.

Horn:                Yeah. So I want to... Actually, let's spend a little bit of time and then, we'll backtrack into your life a little bit, but just based on what you just said, I think folks tuning in would be curious to hear the arc of your time, the 23 years where you were running the Jacquelin Hume Foundation, making grants to education nonprofits, because you yourself had quite a transformation during that experience in the types of efforts you funded, and what you concluded was not just important, but necessary for American education and the development of each individual. Can you just talk about the work you did and the arc of how it changed over time?

Huff:                 So let me back up for a second and let people know that I was a lifelong libertarian, so I was self-made woman and I thought everybody could, if I could do it, anybody could, and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps was something that I believed in. And so, when I started with the foundation, we approached education, which was the thing that the trustees were most concerned about, from the viewpoint of reforming it. And our road to that was to support organizations that were involved in promoting school choice, so vouchers, charter schools, tax credits, all of that. And in order to do that, we were very involved with state-based free market think tanks, pure libertarian approach, let the market decide. So that was the first 10 years or so.

                        And then, as you know, I met Clay Christensen and started to correspond with him and was instrumental in inspiring him to write the book he wrote rather than another book he was going to write, which I thought was not going to do the trick. And after that, so after, I met him in 2005, by that time, I was already no longer happy with the school choice avenue.

Horn:                I want to stop you for a second.