Pathways Voices: Episode 5

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.

Susan Antón:

So I love this idea that we’re all a variation of being human, but we also know that when you put people together who think the same way, they often come up with the same solution to a problem, and it’s maybe not the best solution and they maybe don’t take into account things that other people can’t interact with, or things that other people see that they don’t see.

I’m Susan Antón. I am a professor of anthropology in Arts and Science at New York University. I am also the Vice Dean for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Faculty Development in arts and science, and a divisional dean at large in arts and science.

I’ll give you an example. So my mom, from the time she was about 20 years old, couldn’t smell. She lost her sense of smell. Now, smell is a kind of an invisible sense, and you take for granted that you can do certain things. You can tell if your dinner is burning or you can tell if the baby needs to have their diaper changed, or you can tell if the lilacs are blooming, and that gives you some information about the environment. So I knew this, I knew my mom obviously really, really well, but I would always forget that my mother didn’t have that particular sense.

And having her in a conversation about how we were going to do something, she could remind me, “Oh, but I can’t tell that, it’s fine.” I’d say, “Well, mom, we can’t do this because it’s going to be … I can’t do this varnish in the house because it’s going to be really stinky and it’s going to drive you crazy.”

And she’d be like, “I don’t care. That’s not a problem for me. I can do this.” And so I think one of the things that’s really hard to keep people into is the things that they can’t see. The things that they only see because they are a certain height or they have a certain way of looking at the world. And when you bring people together that have different ways of looking at the world, then you reduce something that’s called confirmation bias where you say, “Oh, I think this is a good idea.” And I say, “Oh yeah, I think that’s a good idea too.” And then we go and do it. Not because it was a good idea, but because we’re thinking about it in the same ways.

My parents were college educated. My dad was the first one in his family to have gone to college. That sense of difference was always there for me. That’s partly because my dad grew up in the barrio of East LA and had not a lot as a kid, and yet his family and my mom’s family were adamant about education and about that being a pathway forward in the country and how to move through different kinds of levels of society. And so I always sort of fancied myself, I think, a bit on the outside. I looked a little bit different than everybody else. People were always asking, “So who are you? Where did you come from?” What do you mean? I grew up down the block.

And I also had the advantage that I have three older siblings, so quite a bit older than I am. So I sort of had five parents. I think of that as an advantage now. It was not an advantage at the time, but I had five kind of role models of how to be in the world. And they all thought that I was smarter than them. And the reason they thought I was smarter than them was because I had gone to better schools. I had older parents who knew better what they were doing. They had more resources. I had all kinds of privilege that they didn’t have.

And guess what? I had better SAT scores than they did. I had better grades in school. And everybody just kept saying, “Oh, you’re the smart one.” And I knew I wasn’t. I was a natural experiment. I was a product of my environment. They were a product of their environment. And I thought, well, that’s it. That’s the answer. It’s environment. So I went off and I did my scholarship, but I started to see that within my discipline, there were not a lot of people like me in my discipline, and the reason that I’d been able to do it was because I’d had all that privilege. I had parents that went to college. I knew what that meant. I knew that I was going to go to graduate school when I was an undergraduate, and my fear was I wouldn’t find anything I loved, not that I wouldn’t be able to do it.

So I had all of this privilege that allowed me to move into a space where I wasn’t the norm, and allowed me to excel in that. And I wanted that to be possible for other people. I’m in a discipline that studies human variation and we’re incredibly not variable in terms of the scholars that do that kind of work. It’s getting better now, but it’s getting better because intentionally we’ve been working to make it more open. And then that just sort of cascaded into all of these other things that I do now. So it started very local. It expanded to kind of a more global kind of university level.

With all of the privilege that I’ve had, I mean, I was born into the family I was born into. I got really lucky. And I mean, yeah, I worked hard. Everybody worked hard, whatever. For all of the good luck, good mentors, good family that I’ve had, I feel like if I don’t sort of pay that forward for other people that might not have had those things, then, well, then that’s bad. It’s in some ways the least I can expect of myself, is to be able to create possibility for other people when I’ve been given all of this possibility.

And so that really drives me. And it’s a constant, I think, kind of conversation to make sure that you’re meeting people where they are and with what they need, as opposed to what you think that they need. So what I needed when I was in an early faculty position probably isn’t what people need now. Not only because it’s now, but because I came from potentially a very different background. So I think really listening is really hard. It’s hard to try to get the best out of people, and yet that’s what I would love, for everybody to have the possibility to be their best selves, to do the best work that they can, and in the most supported kind of context. And so that’s why I’m here.

Maddie Albanese:

Are we there yet?

DeeSoul Carson:

We’ll see you next time.