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The RIOS (for a Racially-just Inclusive Open STEM Education) Institute presents an interview podcast where Dr. Bryan Dewsbury of the Science Education And Society (SEAS) lab converses with individuals who do social justice work in science education and education in general. We hope people enjoy the conversation itself, and consider new ways in which education can be transformative whatever your situation may be.
Welcome back, Knowledge Unbound. Trucking along like Segef likes to say, I I Segif reported me to HR and a union and said I was overworking him. And so therefore, we have added to the studio a wonderful young man named Benjamin Pastanak. Benjamin is gonna help us introduce this episode. Ben, what's up?
Benjamin Pastanak:Hey, what's up guys? I'm great to be here today. So I'm glad to be at now part of the team and make a new difference.
Bryan Dewsbury:Ben, where are from?
Benjamin Pastanak:I am from Miami, born and raised, lived here twenty two years and just keep enjoying life.
Bryan Dewsbury:So you are 22, though. So I just say living here twenty years. Life for twenty two years. Exactly. You're joining feel, buddy.
Bryan Dewsbury:Well, you you say twenty two years as if, like, you live somewhere else before twenty two years. I was like, but no. But you are 22, so that means you just live here your whole life, which is fine. Now, guys, Benjamin has been great. And and because of Sega's great work, the podcast not just the podcast, our video requirements have gotten a lot of requests from elsewhere, and and so it's just great to expand the team.
Bryan Dewsbury:This week, we talked to a really good friend of mine. I'd I'd known her for a long time and you know, no matter what position she's been in, she's been a champion of of student success in the classroom, but student success for everyone, right? And that means a lot of things, a lot of different people. And she's been blessed to be in positions where she could, you know, articulate that in different ways depending on who she's working for. And so I'll say no more.
Bryan Dewsbury:Doctor. Kelly Mack, welcome to Knowledge Unbound. I'll see you at the end. There's a lot I can see. But I want to start with the fact that she's and correct me if I'm wrong here.
Bryan Dewsbury:You are a DC Maryland person through and through, right? Like, I I mean, have you left these two states at all?
Kelly Mack:You know, yes, I do get out. I made a decision a long time ago with respect to my career that I did not wanna bounce around the country.
Bryan Dewsbury:What drove that?
Kelly Mack:That I wanted to be close to everybody. I didn't like it, you know, things go down in the family and I'm the last one to find out, right? They're like,
Bryan Dewsbury:If don't you are we.
Kelly Mack:Yeah, right? It's like, don't call her, you know, because, you know, don't worry, she's busy, she's working. Or like the impromptu get togethers. Like I was missing those. And so I made a decision that, you know, whatever it was gonna cost, it meant something to me to be close to home.
Kelly Mack:Baltimore is where I was born and raised.
Bryan Dewsbury:And was that decision made like junior undergrad, grad school?
Kelly Mack:When I started teaching.
Bryan Dewsbury:Okay.
Kelly Mack:Yeah. So I had finished grad school and, you know, you start out as an assistant professor and you start seeing things and people start paying attention and you get offers and and all the things. And I saw others kind of move around and grow and their careers started to take off, but it just wasn't what I wanted to do.
Bryan Dewsbury:Yeah. Okay, I think that's a great way for us to start because what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna get to the preamble before that point, Right. I met you by the time I met you, you already at AC and you, the American Association for Colleges and Universities. But I know you at NSF, know you're a professor at University of Maryland Eastern Shore. So could you tell us from Baltimore to now, could we start at Baltimore and tell us what got you interested in physiology and cancer research and all of that good stuff?
Kelly Mack:So I feel like, you know, when they ask you to introduce yourself and they just want you to say your name and your title, then people like give the whole thing.
Bryan Dewsbury:No, I'll ask them for your whole thing.
Kelly Mack:Yeah, so I haven't thought about it in a while, so I appreciate the question. So I was, like I said, born and raised in Baltimore. I am my mother's only child.
Bryan Dewsbury:So
Kelly Mack:she and I are each other's only. And when it came time to go to college, you know the story, right? We didn't have money. And this was a time when I just developed such a profound respect for my mom because she kept saying, God will make a way. I've been praying about it, Kelly, and God is gonna make a way.
Kelly Mack:And I'm thinking, I don't see it. Like, I'm looking around here and I'm not seeing anything. She was just adamant that her prayers were going to be answered. What
Bryan Dewsbury:years were these, if I may ask? What? Because you were finishing high school, right?
Kelly Mack:I was finishing high school late 1980s. Okay. Okay. One day I get home from school, there's a letter because the acceptance letters were coming in and there was one from the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. This one was different though because it was offering me a full scholarship for four years.
Kelly Mack:And I thought, now this had not entered into our conversations, our consciousness, we hadn't been talking about Maryland Eastern Shore for college, the letter just came.
Bryan Dewsbury:Right.
Kelly Mack:And I
Bryan Dewsbury:thought only Had you applied?
Kelly Mack:No. Okay. No, I hadn't applied, didn't know much about It the wasn't on the list, you know how you make the list, like your aspirational institution and then the one you know you can get into and it wasn't on the list, but this letter came and I thought immediately, oh my God, she has a direct line of communication to God.
Bryan Dewsbury:My company. No intermediaries.
Kelly Mack:Direct line of communication to God and here it was manifesting itself. And so that was just kind of a no brainer for us. Was what we could afford, but it was a good thing. It was a good decision. So I finished there and went to graduate school at Howard University in physiology.
Kelly Mack:Physiology was just like a love of mine since high school, but just a favorite class, just like the way the stuff was working and it could make sense the way it was working and it had a pattern and a rhythm and you could predict the pattern and the rhythm and the more you got to understand it, like just the more respect you gained for Right. So I loved it from the start. So went to Howard. This would have been like the early nineteen nineties. Mhmm.
Kelly Mack:And, was finishing up there. And then at the time, there had been, I guess, like a turnover in leadership at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. And many of my old professors were sending into the positions of chair and dean and the like. And so it was it was a watershed moment for for both of us. So, they sent for me and I said, okay, I'll do that.
Kelly Mack:Like, that sounds good. It's what I wanted to do, teach. At the time, I didn't know all about like the other stuff that faculty get get, you know, thrown into and Mhmm. And all the other requirements. But I had a blast.
Kelly Mack:Mhmm. Oh, man. They oh, I we had so much fun.
Bryan Dewsbury:Who's we?
Kelly Mack:My students Yeah. And was about three years older, three or four years older than my seniors.
Bryan Dewsbury:Oh, wow.
Kelly Mack:I was very young. Was only 24 when I finished at Howard. So you were like 20 and 21.
Bryan Dewsbury:Yeah, yeah.
Kelly Mack:And so if you can imagine us going to conferences.
Bryan Dewsbury:Right, right.
Kelly Mack:To present. It was
Bryan Dewsbury:They gave you
Kelly Mack:the ID. Was I the one who put us into the clubs in the evening. And yeah, we just had a really, really good time. And so I was doing a lot of mentoring and advising, you know, we had Mark at the time and then we had MBRS and we had HBCU UP and MSIP and all the things that were intended for the audience that I was serving. And so I was at UMES for seventeen years.
Bryan Dewsbury:Mhmm.
Kelly Mack:Somewhere around year 14, '13, '14 was when I went to NSF to lead the advanced program. Mhmm.
Bryan Dewsbury:And that those were the grants that focused on women.
Kelly Mack:Advance. Yes. Focused on advancing women Mhmm. In the academic STEM disciplines. But it it didn't just serve to fix women or just bolster women.
Kelly Mack:It was about transforming the institution in ways that serve faculty. It understood fundamentally that there were faculty that had certain advantages and faculty that had disadvantages as well. The fact that this program was based in organizational development, it was based in psychology and sociology, it looked at higher education and as a system, institutions, as organizations, was fascinating for me, particularly as somebody who liked physiology.
Bryan Dewsbury:Right, Could you have thought of it in
Kelly Mack:a It similar different mechanisms and they were all operating in certain ways. And they had rhythms and patterns. And once you got to know the rhythms and patterns and how they worked and what was disrupting them and what could get them to work in synergistic ways, in order to, help the the organism survive, the organism being the institution, the organism being the department, it was all fascinating for me. And then at a personal level, it was also, I would say, very moving for me. It really touched the parts of my own experience as faculty that I struggled with.
Kelly Mack:And it was
Bryan Dewsbury:What parts were those?
Kelly Mack:So it was the politics of the Department of the Institution. It was all the isms. Mhmm. Right? People think that at HBCUs, there is no discrimination against women because why?
Kelly Mack:Because we're all black. But it's all the isms and I would say racism as well. We think about these institutions and the undercurrents that get embedded within them. And so it was it was all of that. It was a struggle to leave the academy and go to NSF because of this desire that I had to serve, but it was also this promise that I had made to God long time ago when I was at Howard and was struggling with kind of the same things, right?
Kelly Mack:All the isms and the politics and the department and this was before Me Too.
Bryan Dewsbury:Right, right.
Kelly Mack:So some things went down
Bryan Dewsbury:Right, right.
Kelly Mack:Along the way. And I remember, this is part of my story I don't tell very often, but I'd go home from lab every day in tears. Drop my bag at the door, drop my keys at the door, just in tears. Call my mom, I'm not going back, I'm And not going she would talk me off the ledge. The next day I'd get up, put my jeans back on and put my coat on, pick up my bag, pick up my keys, go back to lab, do the experiments and this was like ongoing every day.
Kelly Mack:And then there was just one day I just, I was tired of that routine and decided to use the example my mother set, right? So I said a prayer. And my prayer was, God, if you get me out of this, I promise you, I will do all in my power to make sure more get through. That was the driving force behind what I did for students. It had become the driving force then when I got to NSF for what I did for faculty.
Kelly Mack:And it's the driving force for what I do now for faculty at AAC and U.
Bryan Dewsbury:Were there drivers that existed prior to that? And so I'm going back to Baltimore and I'll confess my own, the ways in which I got to know the city of Baltimore. As you know, I came to this country as an immigrant. I went to Morehouse College, not an HBCU. And in the summer between my junior and senior year, I got an internship at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, which is in Edgewater, Maryland.
Bryan Dewsbury:So about thirty five, forty minutes south of Baltimore. And I don't know why I remember this, but I remember on the radio, which back then you listen to people, there was incredible violence in the city of Baltimore. So this is about 2002, I believe the year was. Okay. And and and the the news coming out of Baltimore was talking about like gunfights in the streets and stuff.
Bryan Dewsbury:And I I even remember when we went to the Inner Harbor, which is, you know, the tourist trap or whatever, you know. And back then, if you took you went two, three blocks outside of the Inner Harbor, It just changed completely. Now, of course, I'm 22 at the time. So I'm not fully versed in American political and social history. I don't, you know, even the racial dynamics, I'm still kind of getting used to.
Bryan Dewsbury:And then of course later years when I watched The Wire as a series, read the book The Corner by Simon, I think his name is. And then my aunt lived in Owings Mills, is a little bit north of the city, right? So I'm saying all this to say that I know for a 100 reasons, Baltimore had some struggles. And given you said you were born there, you probably would have had to live through some of the more challenging social times with the city. I'm curious if any of that intersected with you, impacted you, informed your faith, your belief, the way you approach school, any of that.
Kelly Mack:Oh, absolutely. And like, I just give credit for I give credit to the elders in my family, my mom, my aunt, my uncles, particularly my mom and my aunt who came of age during the sixties Mhmm. In Baltimore. Mhmm. And so these were two of the most badass, would fight a dude Mhmm.
Kelly Mack:Strong, independent black women, right, that you, like, could ever meet. They tell me my mom carried a gun, like, openly. Mhmm. I guess it was legal back then. But they were fearless.
Kelly Mack:They were absolutely fearless. And that's the feminine energy that raised me because they knew what Baltimore was like. I was protected, I was sheltered, right? So not Kelly,
Bryan Dewsbury:not Kelly. So you didn't see it until old I
Kelly Mack:saw it. I it. I came very, very close to it. My mom was a housing manager for the projects in Baltimore. And she was determined was, while she was working two, three jobs so I could stay in private school, she was determined that I was going to see how others lived.
Kelly Mack:So she'd take me to work with her because I had to see how these kids didn't have what I had. I had to see how people were living. And I remember being just petrified in the projects, you know, just walking around and I was petrified for her as well because I was hearing about all the violence But she was like her fearless self and they loved, they loved my mom, the little kids. Hey, Ms. Mac.
Kelly Mack:Hey, Ms. Mac. Like they dragged me on the corner. She could walk to the corner. Yeah.
Kelly Mack:Where they were selling drugs. Hey, Ms. Mac. Hey, Ms. Mac.
Kelly Mack:And so there was this sense that she had, that I'm doing what I can so you don't have to live like this, but you need to know about it nonetheless. Yeah. And then I had cousins, you know, thank God for cousins, Like our built in best
Bryan Dewsbury:Yes, extended family, yeah.
Kelly Mack:Who didn't have as many advantages as I did. It wasn't until, like, and I knew they didn't have the advantages that I did. It it was also the case that all my cousins when I was growing up were boys.
Bryan Dewsbury:Mhmm.
Kelly Mack:And I was the only girl and I was the youngest of that generation. And so even they were taught, no, not Kelly. Don't take Kelly. Don't show Kelly. Kelly, you go and take a nap.
Kelly Mack:Go and read
Bryan Dewsbury:a You need one day. These are boys alone.
Kelly Mack:So even they were very protective and it wasn't until, I got we were in our adulthood that I actually knew what it was like for them. Right. With respect to gang violence and the guns and and all of that. But when you're a native of Baltimore, you just know where to go. Yeah.
Kelly Mack:And you know where not to go. You know where you belong and you know where you don't belong. Downtown that area around the Inner Harbor, like you just know, you go a block over and like you said, like, this is not where you're supposed to be. So you never make that left.
Bryan Dewsbury:Right, right.
Kelly Mack:Go straight or you go to the harbor and then you go back the same way that you came. So it did influence me, it did impact me. I saw it, experienced it, it wasn't in my home.
Bryan Dewsbury:Yeah. I don't wanna beat this horse too dead here, but this is interesting because it reminds me a little bit of my own life in the sense that I didn't grow up in a tough neighborhood or tough city. Right? But my but both of my parents came from pretty extreme poverty. And, you know, Trinidad wasn't The US in terms of like civil rights and all of that stuff.
Bryan Dewsbury:But, you know, there's a kind of a through line of if you were somebody who grew up in extreme situations and you're blessed to have a child, your instinct, right, then is to protect them from the that you went through. Right? And it doesn't necessarily mean that all of the decisions you make to protect them are the right ones, right? But the goal is you are not going to experience that, right? Yes.
Bryan Dewsbury:And so there's a sense in which I grew up working class, right? We didn't, you know, we didn't have extra, right? I needed a scholarship to go to my house. But in terms of my lived experience, I ate every day, I had my school uniforms, you know, so I like just what I woke up every day to was, you know, I dare say privilege, right? Like a privileged life, without knowing what it took for the parents to make that happen.
Kelly Mack:Yeah. You know what else happened? I experienced the same thing, right, with just seeing someone sacrifice for me. But in my mom's decision to say, No, you will not have it as hard as I did, you will go to private school, What it exposed me to was a whole other world of issues and and problems. Yeah.
Kelly Mack:I I hear a lot of people, especially older older people talk about, we we didn't know we were poor because everybody was poor. Well, at that Catholic school for girls, I knew. Right. Knew I was poor.
Bryan Dewsbury:You had a point of reference now, right? Exactly,
Kelly Mack:I had a point of reference and it was just like the little things, right? Like I didn't get a car when I turned 16, I couldn't drive myself to school. When we came back from summer break and everybody's talking about their summer vacations
Bryan Dewsbury:In Europe.
Kelly Mack:Right. Disney World. The things that I did not, I did not have that in my wheelhouse. And the messages then in that environment for a kid growing up that I don't have enough, no matter how much I have, I don't have enough because I don't have what she has, I don't have what they have, I can't do what they do.
Bryan Dewsbury:Then it forces the question, what exactly is enough?
Kelly Mack:Which apparently never gets answered.
Bryan Dewsbury:Right.
Kelly Mack:I was just gonna say, there's so many of my colleagues now and we struggle with, okay, so we're here, I can buy any pair of sneakers I wanna buy in the footlocker, any one of them, but I won't because I'm afraid that tomorrow I may not have what I need and so this sense of not having enough or when is it enough? Because I don't know. I don't, I just, I don't know. And there's so many of us who are functioning like this, like just not knowing when is it supposed to be enough or when do you get that feeling that it's okay now, it's okay now, like you're good.
Bryan Dewsbury:Well, I think another external factor that put some pressure on that question is when you talked about making the choice to stay in the Maryland area, right? And I'm a little bit behind you in terms of my faculty life. I've been one since 2014, so my thirteenth year, whatever. But even back in grad school, I could see how this system communicates a certain expected pattern of behavior that is emblematic of what we think success should look like, Right? And that means, you know, you get recruited to go elsewhere.
Bryan Dewsbury:You have diplomas from four different institutions. You are chair and then Dean and then Provo, you know, and you have to, if you just sort of blindly stay on that train, you know, and if you really want that, do you, right? But if you don't and you say, no, I actually want a life where my cousins are nearby, I want to take care of my parents, you know. So you have almost have to actively demand that for yourself and be willing to live with people maybe seeing you as not as successful because you chose. Right?
Bryan Dewsbury:It's an interesting thing that doesn't get talked about a lot. But I think it's connected to a little bit of the scarcity or the not having enough in the sense that having enough in the system is just go and go and go and accumulate and accumulate and accumulate. Sometimes enough is just when you have the people you love in your life.
Kelly Mack:It is. It has to be. It has to be. I had so two things come to mind for me. I had the privilege of caring for my mentor in his last days.
Kelly Mack:I say From Howledge? Yes. Orlando Taylor. And I say privilege because that was, in my lifetime, the closest I had come to someone who was that close to God in that moment in his life. And I reflect on that time all the time, but I can tell you, he wasn't checking for his degrees.
Kelly Mack:He wasn't checking for how many accolades he had or how many students he had mentored. I mean, he was always proud of that, but that wasn't chief of mind at that time. So it brings all these things into perspective. I don't know why I made that decision a long time ago, other than it was just out of maybe homesickness or just wanted to be near the people who cared about me the because it was something that I wasn't getting from the institution or the area where I was, but I did make the decision and it was freeing for me in a lot of different ways. I'm here now, you know, twenty, thirty some years later, having made that decision and I feel really good about it.
Kelly Mack:I'm glad that my little cousins know me, that my little nephews are getting to know me better. I'm happy that I can get to my mother when I need to, like within an hour, you know, when the call comes.
Bryan Dewsbury:Is that too far for her?
Kelly Mack:No, it's just right. It's just right for both of us.
Bryan Dewsbury:She loves her
Kelly Mack:loves her privacy, believe me. So it's just right for both of us, but I you also make me remember, when I was at Howard, they had pictures on the wall of faculty. I don't know if it was current and past faculty or maybe it was past faculty only, I'm not sure. But you can imagine there were a lot of men on that wall. Most of them were black men and there was one woman, Vivian Penn.
Kelly Mack:And she stood out as being like the only woman on this wall. They were probably others, but this, she stood out on the wall and she had been at Howard in physiology and then she left and went to NIH. And she was held up as the example for us to not follow. At Howard's like, no, don't do it. Don't do what
Bryan Dewsbury:Vivian didn't see that coming.
Kelly Mack:Don't do what Vivian did. You need to be faculty. You get you a faculty job, you become an assistant professor and, you know, we called it the one true path.
Bryan Dewsbury:Right.
Kelly Mack:But we all are like idolized Vivian, she must be having a ball, must be having a really good time.
Bryan Dewsbury:But was going to NIH a bad thing?
Kelly Mack:Well, so you have to imagine Uh-huh. Back then, there was the one true path. Yeah. You got a PhD so that you could go and teach at some university. At Howard, it was particularly important because those faculty in the department at that time understood that they were producing the black physiologists of this country.
Kelly Mack:That if there were going to be more black physiologists, it was going to be because they were producing the black physiologists So, to teach they were very adamant and focused, like we are here, you are here. Right? Because there is a need that we are going to fill with
Bryan Dewsbury:This this a mission, this is not just, yeah.
Kelly Mack:This mission oriented work that we do, we don't just show up. And so you gotta love them for having a mission being mission driven in that way. And their downfall though was that there was no room for any other path. There was no room for any other career decision other than the one for which we are all intended to be here. And the rest of us, meaning graduate students were like, wow, know, Vivian Penn, like who is isolating?
Kelly Mack:And most of us were women at the time, which was also very different about this department at Howard. So I only met her maybe once or twice, at some physiology conferences. I didn't know her well, but I followed her and I followed her and I followed her. Anything Vivian Penn was doing, if I saw it come up or would have been like, I'm like, Oh wow, okay, look at that. And then it was when I was at NSF that they announced her retirement and I got chance- From NIH.
Kelly Mack:From NIH, yes. And I got a chance to send her an email and say to her, you know, we never met and you don't know me very well, but I know you from that wall. And I had a chance to thank her for being a mentor, a role model, an inspiration and all she did, right, was get her face up, up on the wall. So, you remind me of that as well, we make these decisions based on what's around us, based on what's influencing us, sometimes we know, and sometimes we don't know. Yeah.
Kelly Mack:But who's to say that it wasn't my seeing Vivian Penn and her making a different decision.
Bryan Dewsbury:Right.
Kelly Mack:And these men in my space saying, don't do what Vivian did. And you know what happens when you
Bryan Dewsbury:tell a young person Right. No So they do exactly that. Right. Right.
Kelly Mack:So that, you know, that could have been part of my finding the resolution and the resolve very early in my career to say, I'm gonna do it my way. Yeah. I'm gonna have fun and I'm really not all that interested in what it is that other people are going to say about it, either now or later, I'm just going to make this what it needs to be for me.
Bryan Dewsbury:Yeah. You know, what your description of that experience, especially Howard part, really reminds me of how educational my HBCU experience was. Because I am of African descent, but I was born and raised in a country where the context for being black was very, very different than being in The US, right? And I moved to like one of the blackest neighborhoods in the country, right? Like West End, Atlanta, Georgia.
Bryan Dewsbury:And I moved to a campus of all male identifying students who come from all over the country. And so you have sort of blackness in different shades, different types, different cultures, the way they speak music. It was quite it's remarkable. But one thing, and I blame the immigrant in me for this, right? I've always had a little bit of a observing mindset, like try trying to understand what you're experiencing.
Bryan Dewsbury:And even back then I remember how aggressive the black male faculty in particular were about things like you can't wear hats in the buildings, always address me doctor. I mean I have no problem with it, but it's like a big big big deal to the point people get F's on papers and stuff slipping, that level of formality. And a couple of years ago, a young lady from, well she's now Doctor. Gandhi, but Saida Gandhi wrote a book called Respectables, fascinating. And one of the reasons I love the book is that she graduated, I think maybe a year after I did.
Bryan Dewsbury:So she was Respectables is about Morehouse College and its kind of male centered patriarchal type of mannerisms. She's spot on and she gave language to a lot of the things that I experienced. But what I would say, not necessarily in Morehouse's defense or those professors defense, I feel like many of them to the point you made about mission driven making black physiologists, they saw themselves as sending the next set of black doctors into The US like they were that pipeline, right? So when you showed up for biochemistry, this wasn't just about getting A's and B's, this was about like, no, no, no, you are the talented tenth we are sending forth, which is kind of wild to think about, you know, I'm just here because I'm a bio major. I just, I didn't sign on for the whole year, I understand now, right?
Bryan Dewsbury:Did both universities share a little bit of that mission driven type affect and yeah.
Kelly Mack:And to the point that you made earlier about the ways in which our parents came from certain backgrounds and were determined to protect us from that, Many of them also, many of our faculty professors were determined to protect us from what they knew was ahead or protect us from whatever was their experience, either in the classroom, in the lab, or just in life in general. I think it's a I don't know that our generation has done as good a job of that as they did. And I think I think we have to have a lot of compassion for them because they survived what they survived and despite that Mhmm. Attempted to do better for those coming behind them. One of the other things that I think about often when I think about that generation that came before us, they didn't talk about it much.
Kelly Mack:Right? They didn't, even in my own family, there are some struggles and some things that have happened to individuals in the family and they don't. They don't put words to it. Yeah. They don't articulate it.
Kelly Mack:And so we just don't know. We really just don't know. But I am convinced that they did the best they could. Now there were some
Bryan Dewsbury:Which is one of my father's deceased but his favorite lines, I did the best I could.
Kelly Mack:Did the best, did the best that they could. And there are some that did not, Right? There were some that were just predatory. There were some that were just exploitative.
Bryan Dewsbury:You did
Kelly Mack:not There were some that were unbending and ruthless, right? Right. Just for the sake of being unbending and ruthless and and they have their place and God bless them as well. Right. But I think for the most part, right, we had similar experiences in that regard that there were people who were educating us who were determined that we were going to be successful one way or another.
Bryan Dewsbury:One way or another.
Kelly Mack:Whether we liked it or not.
Bryan Dewsbury:So let's talk about ADVANCE a little bit because, you know, I have to say, and I'm a little embarrassed to say this, I actually have never heard the ADVANCE program described the way you just described it. And I've been part of two universities, both of who had advanced grants, And they were successful to the extent I can see that, right? And one of the reasons I love your description, it talks about the rewiring and restructuring of a system versus, you know, just about giving a particular group a leg up, right? And the latter way of describing that opens it up to this sort of backlash and I don't need to go down that road, but to what extent do you think universities understood that system rewiring vision of the advanced program?
Kelly Mack:So many did. Okay, good. Many, many did. Many were working on policies, leaders and how leaders make decisions and data, where that data comes from. ADVANCE was one of the early programs that said, let's look at the numbers.
Kelly Mack:Can we just look at them? Like, let's not sit here and hypothesize, judge, like, let's really get into it. And so the early advanced institutions were required to turn in these just extensive elaborate tool kits. They not only looked at like how many women you had, but like over time. How many are getting promoted?
Kelly Mack:How many got through the promotion and tenure process? How big are their labs? Like down to the square footage. How is the institution setting up faculty to be successful? And then from there, we can figure out where we need to make change and how we need to rethink what it is that we're doing here in this department or in this institution.
Kelly Mack:So it's unfortunate that it gets winnowed down to it's all about women.
Bryan Dewsbury:Right, right.
Kelly Mack:Because it was, and there were so many institutions where men were actively involved and they were advocates of what ADVANCE was doing. It wasn't just advancing women. When the policy changed, all the faculty, all the faculty benefited from it.
Bryan Dewsbury:Because if my memory serves me correctly, what happened a lot especially in STEM was the woman numbers tailed off around the tenure stage.
Kelly Mack:Because
Bryan Dewsbury:unfortunately a lot of life events, they end up getting punished for those. And in fact, I'm thinking of the book I read called Do Babies Matter? Thought it was a fascinating book. And showing that those same things that punish women benefit men because you're now seen as stable and did you see some of that?
Kelly Mack:You do. And so so there are kind of national trends
Bryan Dewsbury:Mhmm.
Kelly Mack:Where we see certainly the drop off, of women from assistant to associate to full professor. But then every institution was just so unique and independent in the ways that that was materializing and operationalizing. So at one institution, it might be something like childcare or dependent care or maternity leave. At another institution, it wasn't that at all. Or even in one institution, it could be, oh, that's what's happening to the women over in biology, but over here in physics, it's a whole different story.
Kelly Mack:That's like, they have children, like they're good in that regard. And what I like about Advance is that it forced you to ask those questions. Like what in the world is happening to us right now? Yes, we see the trends, they don't look good, but now we got to dig deep into our own stuff and figure out what's the root cause of everything that we're seeing right now. And sometimes it wasn't what people thought it was.
Kelly Mack:Sometimes it wasn't that it was a certain tradition or a certain belief or value of a department. Sometimes it was really a simple fix. Sometimes it was just who we put on the search committee. It was just who's the first person they meet when they step on campus. Those were the little things that kind of clicked for many institutions, turn that light on and then changes then start to grow from there and get more sophisticated in nature.
Kelly Mack:So for me, it's really hard to just say that across the board, it was about babies. That was a big deal. That was a big deal, but it uniform. And one of the things that I still find interesting, the early advanced institutions were mostly research intensive institutions. And there were very few minority serving institutions or liberal arts institutions, master's focused institutions and change looked so different at those institutions.
Kelly Mack:And so part of what I saw while I was there was this understanding that it can look different, right? Like what we have to do at this big research intensive institution, they don't even have that problem. Lab space is not a problem over here. At this liberal arts institution, it's something else. And so just making room in that program for how it looks different.
Kelly Mack:Same thing about women of color, because early on, Advance primarily benefited white women to the extent that there was a belief that we didn't even need to focus on women of color because there weren't enough of them. And once we started to find the pockets where they were, then not only could we address those issues where they were, but then we can look back at other institutions where they aren't and say, so what's up? We got the answer over here. Right, if you're looking for something, they got it over, they're doing it over here. Can you adapt it or is it adaptable in any way?
Kelly Mack:So, it was an interesting experience, interesting community as well.
Bryan Dewsbury:The advanced community.
Kelly Mack:The advanced community, very interesting community. It's a mix of social scientists and engineers and biologists and evaluators and authors, just a lot of different perspectives bearing down on institutional transformation.
Bryan Dewsbury:So when you describe that, I can now very easily see how the transition from an advance to PCOW can occur, right? And I'll confess, and I don't wanna get into like, you know, faculty development workshop competition here. But I've been to many of them, a few of them, you know, most of them are good, people are well meaning. So none of this is, you know, intent. Right.
Bryan Dewsbury:But I guess my vision of faculty work of teaching in particular has always been very pastoral, right? And I understand my bias, was raised by a Baptist pastor, right. So I grew up in that tradition. So even if you took the Christianity out of it, to me, this is always about humans in a space and how do you position yourselves to get the best of each other in both directions. Right.
Bryan Dewsbury:And that type of paradigm doesn't, you know, there's clickers and all good stuff backed by evidence. I'm not against that, right? But those things exist in a context and the context is who we are. And I would go to so many workshops after workshops and it's fine, right? It's fine, but it's just missing the soul, it's missing the who.
Bryan Dewsbury:And PKL was the only one that I felt was brave enough to ask that question. So I guess tell me a bit about what you learned from ADVANCE and maybe even before ADVANCE. And I know PCAL existed before you took it over, right? But what, how those things informed your approach to taking it over, what you learned from PCAL itself from running it for so many years.
Kelly Mack:Yeah. Yeah, you said that so well. There is so much human suffering inside of the academy and I experienced it as faculty. I saw it and I experienced it along with the advanced PIs. It was not uncommon for a PI to call me on the phone in tears because some stuff had gone down.
Kelly Mack:You know, once you become a change agent, you also become a target. Right. Right. Right. And some of our campus administrators are vicious.
Kelly Mack:Some of our colleagues are just vicious. And so when I got to PCCAL, my goal originally was not to address the human suffering in the academy. But after going to meeting, after meeting, after meeting, and we're talking about faculty teaching better and faculty doing more undergraduate research and faculty advising better and they need to be better mentors and they need to be more culturally aware and culturally sent, like there were so many demands on these individuals and they are hurting because they're human. Right? They are human.
Kelly Mack:And so seeing what I saw in advance and the way individuals who are change agents, faculty who are change agents are targeted by their colleagues and by the institution, and then we're asking them for more. And so as soon as I got the opportunity to create a space that could invite these individuals in, my goal and my staff will tell you is that they leave feeling better than when they came in. I understood, I still understand what a thankless job education can be. Sometimes it's just one student at the end of the semester who comes with a little card.
Bryan Dewsbury:Right, right.
Kelly Mack:You say, thank you, Doctor. Yeah, yeah. And that's gold for you, right? For me, it gold And I want the space to be one where if you didn't hear, thank you for the entire academic year, you're gonna hear it when you come into this space that we call Project Kaleidoscope. So as the years go on, we've evolved and we've grown and we've dug even deeper into what we also call the soul of this work, the soul of the experience and making sure that people feel cared for.
Kelly Mack:There's no way you can come and do the work of transformation and figuring out what your department needs if you are hungry, if you are tired. Sometimes people just need a nap. Like just half hour, thirty minutes to just stop or an hour just to stop. But it feels worse than that, right? And
Bryan Dewsbury:it feels like it's not just that, like the humanity of people are not being cared for. In STEM in particular, which is most of my experience, it feels like the opposite of that. Yes. Is what being in STEM is characterized as, right? Like so you have to be soulless, you have to be the sort of studge and just focus on the data.
Bryan Dewsbury:And this is not me saying objectivity is not an important part of the process, right? I get it, but it almost requests or requires of you to leave your humanity. And the only way for you to be good at your job is to leave your humanity at the door. I never understood that. I don't even know how it's possible.
Bryan Dewsbury:So each step of the way through grad school into faculty life, like I, back to the whole thing about wanting to stay in Maryland, I had to just keep claiming that. Was like, no, no, no, I am Brian, right? Like you don't get to claim that from me. Right? The PhD pays my bills and keeps the lights on, but I want Brian what I'm, you know, in the soccer field or teaching or my sons, whatever it is.
Bryan Dewsbury:I am Brian and I will keep that. Yep. And it feels like such
Kelly Mack:a fight. You're right. But here's I think here's where the rub is. So many faculty who are, I wanna say like just behind me, future generations or current generation faculty, because I'm I'm not in the academy anymore. They are operating as you were in graduate school.
Kelly Mack:They're saying, I can't do this like this. I just cannot give in to this because they've been conditioned to understand that they're individuals, that they deserve better. Right. That they won a trophy at the end, they deserve the trophy at the end, no matter what. And that there are softer sides of life that they wanna tap into, relationships and family and the like.
Kelly Mack:And it wasn't like that when I was coming through graduate school and when I was faculty. You kept your head down and you did that thing and you went through the process and you got hazed all along the way and you just
Bryan Dewsbury:Right, You just
Kelly Mack:it out until you got to a full professor and then you had some piece of freedom, but then at what cost did it come? Right. There are generations of faculty now who are saying, Ain't no way. Right? Ain't no way.
Kelly Mack:And so that's who I think we speak to the most because we create this space where we say, Yes, we see you, we understand you, we wanna take care of those personal and humanistic needs that you have while you do this really hard and difficult work.
Bryan Dewsbury:Mhmm.
Kelly Mack:Because we understand that what you are about to go back and face, you can't do that in your exhausted, tired, rundown, frenzy kind of self. Right. So take a minute while you have it, center yourself, find yourself again, build your confidence, find what it is that got you or inspired you to be who you are right now because you're going to need that every day. So we do all kinds of work around mindfulness and spirituality, depending on the conference. We do all kinds of work around rest, different kinds of rest.
Kelly Mack:All work around self exploration and introspection because when people decide to be change agents, they also become targets. And we lose so many in that part of being a target, because you have to be able to stand up against the scrutiny, the skepticism and all of the attacks because that, as you mentioned, so eloquently is embedded in the discipline. Some more so than others. Some more so than others.
Bryan Dewsbury:So do we, and I'm using a very general we, have a bit of a responsibility to transform the system so that people are not having to be resilient. Right? I'm not naive, I know these things are never going to go away 100%. But I guess I just don't want to envision a world where to do this work is to do this work from a place of struggle all the time. Right?
Bryan Dewsbury:A of a more Pollyanna way, right? Can you imagine a campus, let's call it Wakanda State University, Where show up and all the allness of your being is respected and valued and engaged and you do your work and you're not right, you're not I don't want say that you don't need to be mindful, but you don't need to be envision this as something you're always fighting every day.
Kelly Mack:I can envision it, but I cannot envision it soon.
Bryan Dewsbury:Okay.
Kelly Mack:And here's why. Because for those of us who are here now in this space and time, we are endeavoring to change the thing that we are benefiting from. And that's a hard thing to do, right? We benefit from the competition and skepticism, we are benefiting from it and trying to change it at the same time. So, Wakanda University, absolutely.
Bryan Dewsbury:Wakanda State University.
Kelly Mack:Oh, Wakanda State University. Yes, Wakanda State University. But here's the thing, right? Wakanda State University will only exist to the point that it can be tested and it passes that test. So you can build Wakanda State exactly as you described, but when there's a real external struggle or pressure,
Bryan Dewsbury:like
Kelly Mack:the kinds of external pressures that we're seeing right now in the world, that's when Wakanda State is going to be tested, just like we're being tested right now. So the goal then is to build the individuals. If you come to PCAL Leadership Institute and you gain deeper awareness of yourself and what makes you tick and how you function, how you move in the world and how others are experiencing you, and it clicks for you the light bulb goes off and something is burning in your heart and it's shining brightly, when you get to campus, I don't have to worry about what's gonna happen. I know from where you're going to make your decisions. I know you're gonna go back to that place that changed you or facilitated a change or got you to think differently or lead differently, that will always be with you.
Kelly Mack:And so you'll always make a different kind of decision than one in which you might feel tired and hurried and then, you know, who knows how it's gonna land or how it's gonna come down, or you get caught up in the politics or you get caught up in self promotion or self protection even worse. So, you know, I'm kind of hopeful for Wakanda State, but I don't know that Wakanda State could survive into perpetuity without constant nurturing and intervention of the people that are there.
Bryan Dewsbury:Yeah, yeah. You agree? No, no, I do agree and it's segueing to my last point. Okay. Because I think your focus on care and building the individual comes from a particular place.
Bryan Dewsbury:Because you brought up your mom several times in this conversation, right? And know, it feels like it's an ongoing reflection for me too, right? So I'm the last of three, my dad passed in '21, my mom is 75, she's still alive, right? Spent a lot of time with me. And, you know, like I said, I grew up working class and I don't think it was a civil rights thing per se, but kind of like some of the elders in your family.
Bryan Dewsbury:The elders in my family also didn't talk. Like my parents didn't talk to us about their growing up. I only found those things out when I became an adult and they were willing to share some things and not even all the things. So you don't have a full picture of what it took just to get me to the steps of Morehouse College until I was like 30. Like to really understand what that day meant to see me enroll, right?
Bryan Dewsbury:At 19, was just like, I came to college, right? Whatever. So there's a sense in which I don't feel indebted to my mom in the sense, not in the like, you know, kind of financial way, but in a sense maybe because I'm also a parent now, right? That care, that love, that this is my offspring and I laid it all on the line for you to hopefully have a better navigation of this world than I did, for you to see things I've never seen, for you to know things I've never knew, never known, to see her be able to witness that, I cannot think of something I'm more proud of. I cannot think of something I'm more proud of.
Bryan Dewsbury:So when I think about how I run faculty development or how I teach or how I think about any of the things I work on in the academy, right? I understand, I think I understand on a very, very deep and personal level, how those relationships govern, how your whole outlook on your professional and personal life. And you can, to me you can do any kind of professional development work if you're not trying to tap into that in some way. Yes. Right?
Bryan Dewsbury:And I don't know if you remember this, but we had a meeting, this was you, myself, Maisie, Maisie, David, Sai. I forgot his name from UC Berkeley.
Kelly Mack:Was it John Metzoe?
Bryan Dewsbury:Yes. Yeah, Ronnie Biology Scholars Program. And you were given a story about your cells not working and your mom praying over yourself. I don't remember. You But told us that but I'm just bringing that up to highlight how impactful that raising was to you and how it seems to manifest and how you can think about your opportunity to raise other individuals.
Bryan Dewsbury:Am I in the ballpark?
Kelly Mack:Oh, no doubt. No doubt. I learned compassion, from my mom. Remember she worked in the housing projects and so she was the manager. And she had stories and so every day she came home, she had a story.
Kelly Mack:But the rhythm was kind of like this, Ms. Mack, I can't pay the rent this month. And there were a series of questions she would ask and she could discern who was lying to her immediately and dismiss them. But the ones who were truthful and honest with her, she gave them all kinds of breaks, gave them extensions. It was, you know, just like in the movies, you know, you got till 5PM, right?
Kelly Mack:Movers don't come, they victory until 5PM. If you go and you get this form or whatever, right, I'll give you that. And she just had a knack for understanding how to care for people who were suffering when they were down on their luck. And it's impossible for me to have grown up with that and not be applying it in the work that I do now. And so certainly, you know, faculty are not like down on their luck like that, but the condition in which they arrive at our institutes.
Kelly Mack:I mean, just literally exhausted and gray and, you know, it's not a race issue, right? But you know the haze, right? The gray haze that we all get because we're not sleeping right, we're not hydrated enough, we're not eating enough vegetables. Right. That gray haze that people get and to be able to invite them into something as small as get you some pancakes in the morning, I got good pancakes now.
Bryan Dewsbury:And the next few minutes,
Kelly Mack:people, right? The light is back, right? The color starts to come back, the enjoyment starts to come back. So yeah, it's impossible for those things that you and I saw as kids that we still aren't able to put words on, it's impossible for that to not be showing up in the work that we do right now. Totally impossible.
Bryan Dewsbury:So after all of these years of PCOW, and when you look out at the higher ed landscape right now, and this is a broad question so you can answer it any way you'd like. What do you think is the next step for higher ed? What what is the next thing we need to be doing to reclaim our humanity? So
Kelly Mack:I can tell you that from where I sit, a lot is going to be asked of faculty. I am learning this new lexicon of workforce development. And it means everything from broadening participation to on the job training. Right. And everything in between.
Kelly Mack:So we're not even talking about the same thing anymore. But at the core of that, right, somebody's gotta teach these kids. They don't just arrive knowing how to solve equations and do calculus. Somebody has to mentor them and inspire them and be role models for them. Somebody has to get them in the lab.
Kelly Mack:Somebody has to train them. Somebody has to teach them how to pipette. All of that is falling on the shoulders of faculty. But what's missing in that conversation is how then do we ensure that the ones on whom we are depending for our future workforce are able to stand? It's missing.
Kelly Mack:As soon as we begin to talk about faculty development, the conversation shifts and we move to something different. And I am at a point where I have a decision to make. I can lean with the rest of the flow and the rest of where we are going into how do we create conditions for our students to enter the workforce, or I can stand 10 toes down and advocate for what we do about and for faculty, even in the face of nobody, I shouldn't say nobody, but even in the face of many not finding it attractive, even a good value proposition for us to throw our weight behind. And I I gotta be honest with you, like I'm wrestling, like as I'm sitting here right now talking to you, I am wrestling with that because it has implications.
Bryan Dewsbury:Yeah.
Kelly Mack:For Project Kaleidoscope, it has implications for AAC and U, it has implications for me as well. Yeah. And for all our faculty.
Bryan Dewsbury:Yeah. Yeah. I wish I had an answer for you.
Kelly Mack:You don't? Well, other than say
Bryan Dewsbury:let's go back to Wakanda state and build it from scratch. You know, I was reading an article this morning about, know, when did these big political movements or big political wind shifts, What you find and perhaps what people count on is a lot of people who privately see what's going on and disagree with it or see it as nonsense. You fear the repercussions of speaking out and so you go along with it maybe in the hope that something will come along that would cause it to shift back in the other direction. But that silent compliance has consequences.
Kelly Mack:It does.
Bryan Dewsbury:Right? And you know, just feels like right now we're in a weird moment where people are not quite sure, you know, are you willing to live with the consequences of the compliance? Yep. Or the consequences of putting tentacles in?
Kelly Mack:Absolutely.
Bryan Dewsbury:And that's not an easy question to answer.
Kelly Mack:Not for any of us.
Bryan Dewsbury:Not for any of us.
Kelly Mack:Not for any of us, it is not. But I knew, I thought you had that answer, but that nevertheless, I think that Wakanda State University gives us a common goal
Bryan Dewsbury:to
Kelly Mack:be striving toward.
Bryan Dewsbury:And in all seriousness, like, if I didn't have that sort of aspirational vision, I don't know if I could have done this work. Right? This is not go with the flow work, right? This is rooted in something bigger. So when you make that choice, at times like these put that vision to the test, but just you have to remember that vision is what sustains us, so.
Kelly Mack:It has to. Yeah. It absolutely has to. Otherwise, it's really, really hard to get out of bed in the morning.
Bryan Dewsbury:Right, right.
Kelly Mack:And those, I tell, when I meet students and when I get a chance to talk to students, I tell them, You have to be so sure about this thing that you are about to do because you gotta do it every day and there are parts of it that you're not gonna like.
Bryan Dewsbury:Right, right.
Kelly Mack:And you have to do that with the same kind of joy and enthusiasm and zeal that you do the things that you do like doing every day. Every day.
Bryan Dewsbury:Doctor Mac, thank you for joining us. Doctor Deusperry,
Kelly Mack:thank you for having me. This has been a blast.
Bryan Dewsbury:I enjoyed it. Thank you so much.
Kelly Mack:Appreciate it.
Bryan Dewsbury:Knowledge Unbound is brought to you by the Rios Institute for a racially just, inclusive, open STEM education. We are generously funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Thank you to our guest, doctor Kelly Mack, for sharing her life, her stories, her homes, her dreams. Thank you for the great conversation. Thank you as always to our indefinite producer, missus Segev Amesai Segev.
Bryan Dewsbury:Doctor Mack talked about her growing up in Baltimore and and not not just growing up in Baltimore, but being a child of a mom who grew up in Baltimore at a time where it was way more turbulent, right, and how that came to impact her choices as an academic. I know a little bit about your history. I'm not gonna get into details, but but I I I'm curious just a little bit about how your life in New York, Haiti, impacts the way you see your work now.
Segev Amasay:There's a lot I can
Bryan Dewsbury:say
Segev Amasay:about how someone's childhood can be turbulent and how it affects people in several aspects of their life. For example, I remember Doctor. Kelly Max saying that she felt that she wasn't enough
Bryan Dewsbury:to
Segev Amasay:How should I put it? She believed that she wasn't enough to do certain things and that's unfortunately something that does come up. Mhmm. Well, for me at least. In a few aspects of my life.
Segev Amasay:So this is where I kinda relate it. So Yeah. But it it really takes a lot to to get rid of that mindset. Yeah.
Bryan Dewsbury:I I yeah. It it stuck with me, and and it's it's I don't wanna say it's tough because on one hand, I'm an associate professor, and I have a lot of things to be grateful for, and I am I truly am. But I will tell you that that feeling of not enough never fully leaves. And I'm not saying that for you to feel sorry for me or for anyone who said that to you. I'm saying that that's kinda just how it works.
Bryan Dewsbury:And maybe it just sits there idle to kinda keep driving you, to keep being better at whatever it is you do. Say, in your case, you know, DJ, cameraman, electron whatever it may be. So I guess I hope that's my way of saying I hope that's what you took from it, and I hope people who listen to the episode took that from it. You know, she's had that feeling, but look at all the changes she's influenced from oppositions at the NSF, University of Maryland Eastern Shore, the American Association of Colleges and Universities.
Segev Amasay:It's a lot, honestly. And, you know, that feeling there's a positive and negative side to that feeling.
Bryan Dewsbury:Mhmm. Mhmm. Like,
Segev Amasay:for one, it pushes you to be better than you were yesterday. But on the flip side, it can also make you feel like, oh, I have to do more, and then it just pushes you into this, like, near close to burnout stage, and
Bryan Dewsbury:Yeah. That's not what we want. Yeah. So so maybe just hope just lean into the positive. Right?
Bryan Dewsbury:And that's that's the that's the message I wanna leave with you. You are enough. Keep making changes in the world. Thanks for joining us. Thank you again, Segev, assistant producer, new new personnel, Benjamin Pastanak.
Bryan Dewsbury:Welcome on board. We'll see you next week. I
Kelly Mack:hear a lot of people, especially older older people talk about we we didn't know we were poor because everybody was poor. Well, at that Catholic school for girls, I knew. Right. Knew I was poor.
Bryan Dewsbury:You had a point to reference now, right? Exactly,
Kelly Mack:I had a point of reference and it was just like the little things, right? Like I didn't get a car when I turned 16, I couldn't drive myself to school. The messages then in that environment for a kid growing up that I don't have enough, no matter how much I have. I don't have enough because I don't have what she has, I don't have what they have. I can't do what they do.
Bryan Dewsbury:And And then it forces the question, what exactly is enough?
Kelly Mack:Which apparently never gets answered.
Bryan Dewsbury:Right.
Segev Amasay:Did you forget something, Brian? I
Bryan Dewsbury:didn't forget it. I just I thought that, like, the way I said what I just said had the same meaning. But I will say it. My friends, please be excellent to each other.