Pathways Voices: Episode 3

Maddie Albanese and DeeSoul Carson:

From the Center for Faculty Advancement at New York University.

Group:

Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?

DeeSoul Carson:

I’m DeeSoul Carson.

Maddie Albanese:

I’m Maddie Albanese.

DeeSoul Carson:

Faculty development is at the core of what we do.

Maddie Albanese:

Our programs are devoted to faculty support and development.

DeeSoul Carson:

From recruitment to career advancement…

Maddie Albanese and DeeSoul Carson:

… throughout the faculty life cycle.

Maddie Albanese:

We are also creating pathways for a younger generation of academic scholars, researchers…

Maddie Albanese and DeeSoul Carson:

… and future professionals.

DeeSoul Carson:

Are we there yet? Are we there yet?

Maddie Albanese:

There are only beginnings.

DeeSoul Carson:

How do you get there?

Maddie Albanese:

Who paved your way? Your path?

DeeSoul Carson:

How did you get here?

Maddie Albanese:

Who brought you along and held your hands?

DeeSoul Carson:

How do you get anywhere?

Maddie Albanese:

Whose shoulders are you standing on today?

DeeSoul Carson:

Who paved your way? Whose shoulders are you standing on? Who brought you along and held your hand?

Maddie Albanese:

Are we there yet? How do you get there? How do you get there?

DeeSoul Carson:

How do you get there?

Maddie Albanese:

How do you get there?

Maddie Albanese and DeeSoul Carson:

There are only beginnings.

Ernest Gonzales:

I remember early on having to make a deal with my uncle because in El Paso, Texas, when I was living with my grandparents and my uncles and my mother, three, four different generations under one household, I did really well in high school. I was in the speech and debate team. I qualified for state and prose poetry, Lincoln Douglas debate, impromptu, cross-examination debate. I just loved it. And all of my friends in high school were going to some pretty amazing colleges, Yale, Notre Dame, Wesleyan. For me, I thought, “Heck, if I could even get into the University of Texas at El Paso, I would be really happy.”
And so, when I told my family on a Sunday during dinner that I was going to apply to colleges, my uncle Alex essentially said, “[inaudible 00:01:46], there’s no way that you’re going to go to school.” And I was like, “What the heck? I’ve just done some pretty incredible stuff in school, and I love it.” There was a big negotiation and he essentially said, “We’re Mexican, we don’t go to school. We’re mechanics. We’re truck drivers.” And I thought, “Yeah, empirically, you’re right, but I’m allergic to oil and I’m a horrible driver. And so for me to be a truck driver, I mean not safe for anybody.” And he acknowledged all of that. He essentially said, “You could go to school if you work full-time and you help your mother pay the bills.” And I thought, for sure, done deal like that’s a deal, signed and delivered. I will work full-time and help my mother with all the bills.

Ernest Gonzales, I’m the director to the masters program here at the Silver School of Social Work. I’m also the director to the Center for Health and Aging Innovation, and one of the James Welden Johnson professors. How the heck did I get here? I was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and essentially I’m the first generation of my family to go to college.

I started out in economics, because I never wanted to be poor again. And it was pretty clear when I was studying in London, this was before the European Union, this was after NAFTA. And so, we were analyzing how do economic policies make cultural ships around identity? That was really my question. And my peers were asking questions, “How can we make profits?” And at the end of the day, I thought, “How could social policy impact people in a positive way?” So I was a thorn in their side, and I thought maybe economics is not really the right path.

And so, then I went to sociology, went to philosophy at the age of 18 and 19, studying Durkheim, Weber. All of that was great. And at the same time, actually, I was studying dance. I was a ballet dancer and I was studying music and painting. That was such fertile ground and layer on top of that, I was caring for a woman who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. We called her mama, because she was really fabulous and hardcore feminists in Fabens, Texas. We didn’t really know her age, but she was very successful. Through the observation, because when I was taking care of mama, I would read to her Durkheim, I would exercise with her. We did the Cindy Crawford workout together. I noticed that and the family noticed that her cognitive decline sort of plateaued, that her emotional behavior was just more balanced, that she wasn’t erratic, she was getting better sleep.

She was actually starting to recall her children’s names. She was now recognizing that she lived at home. But I thought, “Wow, the power of cognitive plasticity, you could live with a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease or cognitive impairment, and yet there’s still something that we can do about it.” All of that really triggered a curiosity of how do you improve mental health as we age? There’s a statistic that was recently given that half of children in all Western societies today will be blessed, I hope, with living a century long, a hundred years if not longer. So the question now becomes, well, how do we create an equal opportunity for everybody to live a century in good health, in good community in peace and prosperity? And so, that’s my research today. But it was through a lot of mentorship along the way.

It was living in that multi-generational household that I saw the relationship that my grandfather had with his employer and through society. I saw that relationship shift among my uncles and my mother who are baby boomers and I continue to see it today. Just witnessing how we save for retirement, the types of jobs that we have, the benefits that some do and a lot of people do not have. I really commit my entire life to my grandparents, and it’s because of them that I know what love is. It’s because of them that I study what I study, but certainly it’s my uncles, it’s my mother, it’s my brother, it’s all that. I do have a list of just a ton of people. It’s family, it’s friends, it’s mentors, it’s teachers. They all had such a huge role in me getting here.

I’m becoming more and more convinced that the social policies we have today are not really maximizing the opportunity to live a century and good health. And today it’s living in a society and in a world in which there’s a lot of inequality, there’s a lot of racial [inaudible 00:07:40], there’s a lot of pitting generations and different groups against each other. We can’t really sustain that individually, at a community, nationally.

So a lot of the social insurance programs, especially around retirement here that we have in the United States, and worldwide, they’re a pay as you go system. They were adopted last century. In fact, it was Otto von Bismarck in 1880s that really created retirement, social security, retirement policy, but in addition, disability, unemployment, insurance. When I interview my colleagues in Germany, [inaudible 00:08:23] has a really fantastic interpretation. He’s a federal judge there. In the 1880s, a lot of Germans were leaving, coming to the United States for land, coming for the opportunity for wealth and just a better life. And Otto von Bismarck realized like with a shrinking German population and yet at the height of industrialization, he created these policies as a social, sort of contract.

If they stayed and helped develop Germany, building its roads and buildings and all of that infrastructure, if they were to become disabled, there was an insurance program for them. In the times of unemployment, there was a program for them. When they become old and retired, there’s a program for them. So it was a social contract. And I think we lose sight of that social contract. Right now and over the past century that let’s do it together, let’s do it as a community has shifted to, you’re going to do it on your own. And it’s in a wide range of public and private policies around that. I don’t think this value of individualism in the context of capitalism and growing inequality, that’s a recipe for disaster. That’s a recipe for a lot of strife. That’s a recipe for the have and have-nots and a zero-sum game. So I think we need a fundamentally shift how we support each other. And as we live longer and in a more diverse society.

And in gerontology, we inherently take a lifespan approach. We inherently take a look at different cohorts and one generation after the next, and we summarize ways of thinking across centuries, across generations. Right now, what really gets me out of bed is thinking, “How can I leave, I have 23 more years until retirement. What a great opportunity to make a significant impact in the lives of our students, to work side by side with our faculty and staff for affordable education, affordable good quality education, how to really inform social policies and programs to optimize a hundred years of living in good health, in good community.” So that’s the positive motivation. It’s no longer working out of poverty anymore and violence. It’s about how do we create and sustain an incredible society for everybody. So that really gets me out of bed.

Maddie Albanese:

Are we there yet?

DeeSoul Carson:

We’ll see you next time.