LCC instructor brings classroom lessons to board meeting with his last words

When it comes time for public comment at Lane Community College’s Board of Education meetings, Eric Kim typically gets the last word.

Since late 2022, Kim, an instructor in LCC’s Social Science Division, generally has been the last speaker in the public comment portion of each board meeting — sometimes waiting two hours or more for every other speaker to have their say.

Kim prefers to go last: Before each meeting, he tries to make sure he puts his name at the end of the sign-up sheet for public comment. 

“I’m always last, and I’m fine with it,” Kim told Lookout Eugene-Springfield.

And others are fine with that as well.

In an email, LCC board Chair Austin Fölnagy said he sees Kim’s contributions as “an asset to public discourse and (the) governance process. His teaching style and lessons are similar to what he brings to the classroom, but also sometimes distinctly relevant to the topics that are being acted on or discussed at that specific board meeting.”

However, Kim said his remarks aren’t intended as comments on specific issues facing the board at any given meeting. In fact, he decides on general themes to discuss during each school year’s board meetings years before — and they often draw on the material he teaches in his LCC psychology classes. This year’s theme, for example, is “Judgment and Decision-Making.” He’s already pondering ideas for themes for future years — “Job Skills,” perhaps, or maybe “Social Judgments.”

Working within each year’s theme, he usually writes his remarks for each meeting a week or so beforehand. 

But even though there’s not a deliberate connection between Kim’s comments and the agenda at any given board meeting, that doesn’t stop people from occasionally connecting the dots on their own. And he’s fine with that as well. 

“Some of it is for people to make their own connections,” he said. “I mean, there’s that balance — there’s a specific point that I’m trying to make, but you can apply it broadly in multiple contexts.”

And that’s the link between his short comments to the board of education and his lectures in the classroom: He’s trying to show how the psychological precepts he teaches in the classroom can be helpful not just to students, but also to administrators, board members, teachers and community members who cram into LCC’s boardroom.

“There are these concepts, and it’s up for you to decide how they might tie into your personal beliefs or personal concepts,” he said. “Can you make it relevant to yourself?

“There are things in psychology I think that help people in their personal lives, (their) potential careers, that are not obvious,” he said.

First words

Kim first stepped up to the podium at the LCC boardroom in November 2022. That first presentation focused on “egocentric bias” — the tendency to rely too heavily on one’s own perspective or to have a higher opinion of yourself than is justified by reality. 

For example, someone who thinks they contributed more to a relationship than they actually have — they believe, for example, that they tackle more of the chores than they do — is a victim of egocentric bias, he said.

“I had to choose something that I thought was interesting and wasn’t overly complicated — and was something that people could relate to,” he said.

The reaction to the first presentation was generally positive, Kim said, encouraging him to return with a fresh lesson to the next meeting. Soon, he was charting out broader themes for future meetings and working to improve his delivery.

And people started to take notice. He spoke at LCC’s 2024 commencement ceremony — where he got five full minutes to share “tips from psychology to increase the chance of being happy in your life’s journey.”

Kim doesn’t get the luxury of five minutes at LCC board minutes, where public commenters are limited to three minutes (two, if the list of people signed up to speak is long). So Kim has learned how to edit himself, how to “choose my words carefully, because I only have so much time. … You can’t be overly technical, because when you’re overly technical, then it takes up more time. … So I had to accept that.”

Earlier this year, he even added some audiovisual wizardry: A presentation at the last board meeting of the school year featured John Williams’ fanfare at the end of the first “Star Wars” movie — the scene in which Han Solo, Luke Skywalker and Chewbacca receive medals from Princess Leia. Kim, a fan of the movie, said the music felt appropriate for an end-of-term meeting.

“I was nervous because this wasn’t exactly protocol,” Kim said, “and I wasn’t sure how that would play out. But no one complained to me directly, so I assume it wasn’t bad.”

Connecting physics with psychology

Before he started at LCC in the winter of 2001, Kim planned to teach physics in secondary schools, “but I don’t have the temperament for teaching at the secondary level, so that didn’t work out.”

One reason why physics was appealing, he said, was “there are lots of different ways of representing problems in physics to be able to solve them — and how you frame a problem influences your ability to solve it.”

But as he was taking classes in science education, he was also taking psychology classes, and he saw a connection between the two disciplines.

“The problems that people were having were really more about how they thought about the world around them,” he said. “It wasn’t an issue about knowledge.” Maybe, he thought, problems emerge when people’s expectations “tend to be a large departure from reality.”

“If you don’t understand why you’re having these problems, you’re going to take the wrong actions to address them,” he said. 

That’s not always easy work.

“Changing your beliefs is uncomfortable,” he said. “That’s why many of us don’t do it.”

But Kim persists in taking two or three minutes at each board meeting to offer a slice of insight. With any luck, he hopes his traditional position at the end of the public comment period helps the messages stick — or, at least, offer a change of pace.

Fölnagy, the board chair, appreciates the effort.

“Personally, I think that public discourse in government bodies needs more people like Eric Kim,” Fölnagy wrote in an email. “Because he reminds us that education isn’t about teaching people what to think, but how to think.”