Pathways Voices: Episode 6

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.

Hua-Yu Sebastian Cherng (程華宇):

The problem is that many people that look like me are not acknowledged, right? We don’t actually have a stronghold in many of these different industries, right? And so then the problem becomes how do we actually carve out a space where we can be recognized for our contribution and at the same time, how do we then actually in this kind of space of invisibility, how do we make ourselves visible in a way that actually fosters other communities as well and build them up?

My name is Hua-Yu Sebastian Cherng (程華宇). I’m the Vice Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Belonging and Associate Professor of International Education at NYU, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development.

Really, my motivation to try to answer the questions I asked really stem from when I was a middle school teacher. So I taught in a school in San Francisco that served largely five housing projects. The school that I was in and the classroom that I was able to manicure was a really sacred space for my students myself, not to say that the community that they lived in wasn’t vibrant and full of amazing things, but it was a very impoverished community.

The San Francisco government really did not provide enough resources and all of the kind of social consequences of poverty and marginalization you would think you could find in the community. A few of my students actually didn’t even survive to go into high school. I taught eighth grade. It made me really question. Do I … like what is the purpose of being a middle school classroom teacher when there are so many seemingly insurmountable issues outside the classroom?

So that’s why I returned back to the PhD to understand or to just seek out answers that I couldn’t have. I didn’t have the skills and I didn’t have the time as a classroom teacher to start to address.

I think the typical pathway is people excel in undergraduate. They directly apply for Masters and PhD programs, and then they’re a professor right afterwards. My work experience is what actually convinced me that I didn’t know enough. Not necessarily, I didn’t know enough to be a classroom teacher, but I didn’t know enough about the broader way that teaching fit into US society. And I wanted to learn more.

My family in many ways was a typical immigrant family where economic stability, kind of social acceptance was the number one. So when I told my parents I was doing a PhD, they were delighted. But then when I said I was doing a PhD in sociology with an eye of looking at addressing racial inequalities, I think they stopped listening at the PhD part and then immediately asked me how much money do professors make? Is this actually a stable career path? What are you doing?

So my mother had multiple, multiple degrees. She has like two master’s degrees and a dental degree. She was the first person in her family to go to college and really excelled. And there was an expectation that at least one of her two sons would get something beyond a bachelor’s degree. I would be lying if I didn’t say that my parents had a very strong role in their very high expectations for me and my brother. My brother never got a… He just did a bachelor’s.

So I really wanted to do a PhD because I wanted to learn more about education. It’s easy for me to say now as a social institution and the way that it played into racial inequalities, but really back then, I had none of that vocabulary. I wanted to do a PhD so I could learn more, and I knew that PhDs typically would become professors. That was the training that was expected of us. But I actually wanted to return back to public school systems. And when I told my advisor that very early on, she had very high expectations for me and said, Why don’t you try the academic route?

And if there’s one thing I know, it’s when I’m being given very good advice by very wise people. So I followed her advice. I was lucky enough to be able to land a job at NYU directly out of my PhD and I’ve never quite looked back.

NYU is one of the premier research universities in the world. I’m very grateful for many of the opportunities that I’ve had here, and I know that my pathway and I should tell you that my parents I grew up in a very middle, middle, upper class household. My parents had graduate degrees, yet even I had to navigate things that I never could imagine and I think my parents could never imagine.

When Vice Provost Charlton McIlwain created the College and Career Lab, I thought, what an amazing opportunity of NYU to not only… and I don’t like to use the term give back because part of it is we are part of the community. It’s to do our social responsibility and we are located in the heart of New York City, even though this area is one of the most expensive zip codes in the world.

You can walk 10 minutes in either direction and you’ll be in… you’ll be in areas and neighborhoods that have housing projects, that have schooling, systems that are under-resourced, that may not be able to provide the best resources for the students. So for NYU to kind of take up our social responsibility to provide those opportunities for young people, it is something that for me, it’s just something simply that we have to do.

The barriers that I’ve faced have oftentimes not been what we would say are really aggressive or kind of these like very obvious barriers. Is actually a barrier of something that I study, which is the invisibility of many immigrant communities, but particularly Asian-American communities. Look at the place that you work in.

Think about different types of diversity, but particularly racial ethnic diversity. Does it exist in your office? And I’m not talking about that one person. Does it exist in the C-suite? Does it exist at all different levels? And does it reflect, for instance, if you take a ten minute walk anywhere in New York City, does that diversity in your office mirror the diversity you see walking down the street? And if the answer is no.

And I’m almost positive the answer almost always is no. There needs to be work done. What other institution besides the university that trains the future leaders of the United States? What better institution than a university other than NYU in the most diverse city in the United States to take on this task, to make things what we say truly diverse, not performatively diverse, not superficially diverse, but truly diverse.

So there is I think there is the kind of social science side to it, which these are in school settings and also work settings. There studies have done that are done at Google that show that diversity particularly measured by racial ethnic diversity, is beneficial, that when you have people that don’t look like each other, that have different experiences at the table together with equal power, right, that there’s more creativity, there’s more productivity and there’s more happiness.

And what better wish would I want for someone’s job? I wish for you to be more creative. I wish for you to do more and I wish for you, I think, most importantly, to be happy. There are so many studies in virtually every study of diversity, particularly within the academic or work setting, is that, it’s only positive. It is amazingly positive, over the top positive.

So just through that lens, it seems like a good intervention. How do you have a better company? Seriously, consider diversity. So that’s one argument. I also think that there is a very strong moral imperative. Most Americans and most people in the world, but particularly in the United States, we believe in this message of you work hard and you should have equal opportunities.

I have had the privilege of working with many different neighborhoods and communities within NYU and across the United States and also in China. And I would always say that the more marginalized the community, the harder they work. Because doesn’t that make sense? They have to work harder in order to survive and to thrive. If we believe that this hard work should pay off in some sense, don’t we then owe it to people that have had not the opportunities that you and I may have had for them to thrive?

And what better way for them to thrive than having access to universities like NYU?

Maddie Albanese:

Are we there yet?

DeeSoul Carson:

We’ll see you next time.