 Maurice who is currently the director of the school for mathematical and natural sciences Arizona State University. Thanks Jose and good morning if you're over here on the west coast and good afternoon if you're in another time zone and I want to thank Jose, Lydia and Cias for for putting on this workshop as well as the first set of speakers because I learned so much listening to the generation ahead of me. We were asked sort of three questions I think and I'll try to touch base a little bit on each of those and the time that I have and perhaps even address some of the questions that I saw in the in the chat which were some great questions there that had more to do with sort of actionable responses to structural racism and its different forms if you're at the student level of the faculty level and perhaps even at the administrator level. So first question was my what is your path to leadership including barriers and people in circumstances that were beneficial so I'll start off talking a little bit how I came to where I am I didn't actually expect you know going to college for me was a 50 50 or 60 40 70 30 where the lower percentage was going to college and mostly because of my experience in the public school system was was largely negative. The last teachers that I had who I actually had a good relationship with was my first grade teacher who I actually visited a couple of years ago. After about first grade it was largely combative and so my parents as most parents in my generation of my generation of folks demanded excellence so I couldn't slack off but I certainly couldn't I certainly had a choice by the time I was done and so I was sort of backed into college and I made a decision at the very last minute my senior year of high school largely because I happened to visit Atlanta and I went down to the Atlanta University center complex and saw people who looked like me having fun in college and I didn't think that was actually possible and so I applied came back home tried to apply as quickly as I could and was accepted into more house college went to more house college and got a very strong culture shock in that it looked like everyone there was was rich I rode the bus to college from Washington state I finished my high school in eastern Washington Spokane Washington which is very isolating and so I was looking to get out and just be some place where I did not feel put upon daily and so took the bus got down to Atlanta on the Greyhound picked up my suitcase of my belongings and went over to the Marta station and then took the train to the nearest train station to campus and then I walked the other three quarters of a mile to campus in August in Atlanta which is is not pretty and I got to the campus and the parking lot was filled with BMWs and Mercedes Benz and all these cars and you know families dropping off their kids and I said you know I I don't know if I'm supposed to be here and so in about two weeks I was trying to keep up with everybody else and it ran out of my tuition money basically and the person who kept me in school was Henry Mac Bay who stopped me as I was running through a building to get off campus to go find a part-time job to try to generate enough money to convince the registrar that I could make a partial payment and he stopped me and gave me directed me to a research job in chemistry with the condition that I major in chemistry and when I accepted that because he said he would buy my books buy my computer buy my calculator take care of you know you know give me a break financially until I could get the money to pay and get me a job he said well if you major in chemistry you got a major in math I said okay I'll major in in math I like math better than chemistry actually and that was how I stayed in school my first research experience with was with John Hall Jr who had a joint appointment at Georgia Tech and by the time I I loved doing research in the lab that's what kept me motivated kept me studying and kept me in school I was able to get other scholarships and make my way through and manage my finances a little bit better after that first two weeks and I looked at what those professors were doing and a couple of other professors actually from the same classes in chemistry would come out Jim King came out from Caltech Bill Lester came out from Berkeley and looking at those first role models sort of told me that there's something that I could do besides a job some you know besides go work for somebody I could actually follow my own curiosity and pursuits I could study this thing that I really liked which was chemistry and atmospheric sciences and um and stay on that path and not have to break and do something different it allowed you know required me to continue in school but you know that's what I was prepared to do at that time and so I entered Georgia Tech leaving Morehouse went to Georgia Tech it was the first African-American to get their PhD from that program and the numbers in geosciences there was one other black PhD who graduated in the same year that I graduated and this is before social media and all of these things you find out through Innocepo there's one other black guy and tracking down it turned out to be Greg Jenkins and we still are colleagues and friends to this day um but the isolation in graduate school I switched to barriers and and thinking about some of the things that I think Rita and Willie talked about are John about you have to just persevere one of the skills or or aspects of your personality that you must have almost is is a combative persistence that despite the things that are put in your path your dogged I'm not sure if that should be a requirement in the way that it is for minoritized identities but it it was for me and I think it was for most of the folks that I know who came in through my in my generation of folks I do think geosciences is marginally beyond what it sounds like engineering was in the 1970s if you look at the academy there are very few professors in the academy with degrees in atmospheric sciences who are black um um I think the numbers um are in the low uh think of BIPOC I think the numbers are maybe in the five to six percent range um from what we were able to garner from a recent study it's mostly male it's less one percent or less female um I think that's largely due uh to some of the things that have been talked about before but also greater choices once you get there that you don't have to work in a toxic environment to really realize or or fulfill what you want to do and so I think there's a lot of attrition from the pools of folks who would be qualified and ultimately be successful in the academy um but uh I think they've just got more choices uh and and psychologically and physically better choices uh than to compromise your your mental state or your health uh to try to survive and and the the academy as it stands right now um but the path of leadership uh as I went on I I went from Georgia Tech to Lawrence Livermore from Lawrence Livermore to uh University of California uh and then I returned um to Howard University and HBCUs at that time and even when I first came as an undergrad I think they're unique in being able to provide you with leadership opportunities as soon as you decide that you want to undertake leadership opportunities and so when I came to Howard I came in as deputy director of a NASA center which um there's pluses and minuses doing that as a pre-tenure faculty but what it allowed me to do was see how larger research organizations are constructed, how they run, how the budgets work, how to develop larger center proposals at a very early stage um and that led to a number of other opportunities um through the NSF career award. NSF was very major in supporting me as a as a junior faculty um but also building relationships in Washington DC with the other federal agencies and inspired by some of those relationships and actually African Americans in the largely in the federal agencies at NASA, at NOAA, Department of Energy who were in related disciplines uh to support some of my ideas to build larger efforts and also at the same time try to recruit more African Americans to Howard and so you know one of the first sort of really big steps I think was developing a new atmospheric sciences graduate program at Howard University and um I think there was a lot of naivete there but um again HPCUs were a place where you by and large at that time people weren't going to tell you no that's a crazy idea you as an individual can't do that and so um actually Greg Jenkins was on faculty uh Sonia Smith who's still there, Everett Joseph who's now at NCAR, the Light of Moes, UMBC there's a cluster critical mass of Black faculty who assembled at Howard and developed a program that over its first 10 years produced about 60% of the African American PhDs in atmospheric sciences and and you know I was one of the folks who wrote the um plan for that program while I could get it implemented at Howard and ultimately got the program implemented um and actually in addition to the Black PhDs uh it generated 30% of the Latina PhDs in atmospheric sciences over that same period so one program um and successfully um while only two I think went into the academy the rest of the folks are working in atmospheric sciences largely in the federal government and private sector but um we recognized even at that time that the academy was not a welcoming place and so intentionally built relationships with the federal agencies with private sector industries in atmospheric sciences or system sciences climate sciences to make sure that we have the type of partnerships that students could move through and into careers successfully so they could follow their pursuits they could follow their interests and move through and so um um one of the um because that's not for me one of the uh you know things that I learned in doing this and taking actually what were probably large career risks um was learning how to organize groups of folks around a common idea develop strategic plans implement those plans and and keep um generating critical masses of um diverse talent from marginalized identities so we focused a lot on African-Americans Latinx identities there um and it was sort of like a snowball as as you know ran the NASA center successfully kicked off the atmospheric sciences graduate program it was going well we started a non-profit color of weather which sort of catalyzed sort of a hybrid mentoring model in atmospheric sciences largely at the American Neurological Society but that built momentum in these circles that helped us sort of continue with a sort of a positive feedback to build the program to build out relationships and establish a reputation and I will say NASA was a great partner NOAA is a great partner in then providing access to other leadership opportunities within those agencies on advisory committees seeing how other large programs worked and so we were able to I was able to leverage some of those to write for large cooperative science center at NOAA the educational partnership program with minority serving institutions was a program that came online in 2001 we successfully were awarded a cooperative science center there which I served as director for about 18 years but that program and its successor programs allowed us not only to support the the graduate program but also graduate research and expand that graduate research into partnerships with a lot of R1 historically white institutions and build partnerships out that way and again as we built the partnerships there was opportunities to see how things are done in a lot of different places bring back some of those some of those promising practices to Howard and continue to support the development of a large research infrastructure and so you know the leadership path I think John said there's a lot of fortune that goes along with and I think that's I think it's if I were to add to that I think the persistence and and not performing the risk analysis at each stage in a way that I think it it tends to overtake innovation and risk elsewhere so barriers were a lot but they varied over the course of the career I'd say the barriers that I had in graduate school as a postdoc working at Lawrence Livermore were very different from barriers at Howard University barriers of isolation were profound actually and I've published some on those but you know you it really does serve you well to have a strong sense of self I think not having having a network of mentors community I think as Rita mentioned of like-minded folks who value you as a person so that you don't feel you have to compromise yourself as you're doing your science and expanding out but the erasure certainly had an HBCU trying to do competitive research um when you come from a culture or a mindset that is collaborative in nature and that is looking to the generation behind you and say how do I lift you up versus how do I build my specific career and those appear as binaries a lot in the STEM community is it's easier to forget about the next generation and say I'm just going to do this science publish my papers and I'll worry about that a little bit later and that's a clearer path than saying I want to program build I want to build these lattices or these structures that is going to build a generation in a community that's no look different than the one that I had to navigate in my group of colleagues who went through geoscience programs in the 80s you refer to it as a razor's edge you slip you're going to get damaged pretty much you're going to lose an arm or a leg or you die so you can't make mistakes and that's how you navigate the path and that's not how most people navigate the path that's not how the broader um unmarginalized privileged portion of the community navigates it and I think that's um that's something that's a huge deterrent to students coming in who have great capacity potential but weighing what that looks like like why would you put yourself through that um there is significant expertise in salary devaluation both certainly at HBC use but even beyond that I think that's a struggle and a deterrent you know the personal taxes and limitations on you know I find that there is a lot of generational wealth that accompanies a lot of folks in the academy that is not part of a lot of students experiences who come from African-American and Latinx backgrounds who I've been affiliated with and that's really a significant barrier even for me as a single father in graduate school how do you you know how do you go to conferences where you marshal the funds to to do the things that everyone else is doing at the time and then I think the tokenism that accompanies being one of the first or one of the few the term that I've talked about with um Ryan Emanuel whose uh North Carolina uh state the sort of the uniform the unicornification of um minoritized individuals especially in geosciences is is profound um and it is also a deterrent because it's you know one person is successful therefore anyone else's failure is individualized it's their fault because this one person can do it and if this one person did something exceptional then everyone should be able to do it because they did it and that means there must not be any barriers and so that your success is weaponized in certain ways that you have to be aware of if you're going to try to bring other people alone especially along the path as fraud is uh the paths that that we were able to navigate um and I think uh that's something that does not get discussed in critical ways in mentoring a lot of times um you know and I think the mentoring model is also problematic the single mentor mentoring model is is is outdated I think there's more and more literature that's suggesting that that'd be different um but I think it's vital and again the first panel did a great job in covering a lot of ground it's vital that the whatever the you call the mentoring it needs to be critical enough to always place a value on the individual's person your self-care your worth your innate worth that you bring into the field because I don't think that equity and justice is always it always has to be transactional but it has to be we do this because we benefit because if it's if it's lends only as being transactional because it's actually a moral imperative just like equality in society is a moral imperative um if it's couch is being transactional then if if you don't receive greater benefits because you included more people then you have a rationale for saying okay let's not include those people anymore because we didn't get the benefit we thought we would get and so I think it is incumbent upon leadership uh moving forward um in the academy in particular that they be fully accountable for equity for justice in STEM and the full representation that goes along with that um the representation is a is an indicator of a greater quality of community and the goal should not be how many people we have in the room who look this way or that way or identify this way or that way but does everyone you know is it an equitable and just community so that everyone has the ability to be their true self in the space and when you're trying to you know when you're trying to address the types of problems that we need to address especially in geoscience but really in science and society that you're doing it in a fully equitable way you're recognizing the value of indigenous knowledge you're recognizing the value of um cultural knowledge across all the cultural richness that's in the united states and you're doing it in a critical way where you recognize where the structural barriers are so I don't want to I'll jump to uh a little bit of the other questions uh and certainly yield time to my colleague uh Gilda but where are we in terms of preparing and nurturing rising leaders I think in terms of a comprehensive strategy um what came to mind is that we're in the great dismal swamp and first sound that might not sound so great and we're not in a great place but the history of the great dismal swamp is is really complex and unique it was a place where african-american uh enslaved escaped and built coalitions across uh indigenous communities uh across uh sort of proletariat working communities that were actually marginalized and developed a knowledge base and skill and society that was turns out to be very valuable and translated a lot of things back into the main society um but it was a harboring place um it was sort of a um temporary um stage and I hope that we are in a temporary stage that will lead to a much better place in terms of generating leadership that is equitable and just and inclusive um we've got to be intentional about it though and I don't believe that we are um we're very intentional about focusing on barriers that happen early I think that's good you know recruitment is very intentional uh is intentional in a lot of places but there's a number of people at various stages in the pipeline who if there was an intentionality at the mid-level uh bringing in cluster hires of folks back from industry recruiting uh people who decided not to go into academy but brought them in you still have a huge amount of talent um that exists right now that doesn't need to be erased or excluded or ignored at the expense of trying to generate a new fresh pool of students coming through I think you can do that in simul you know in parallel I think that there can be some creative ways of recruiting into the academy in particular um leadership from industry leadership from the federal government more um balanced partnerships with hbcu programs which are producing these outsized numbers of students who go on to get phd's but also have more diverse faculty and how do you uh support and recruit and cultivate diverse faculty if that's if that's truly the challenge um and so I think it's another part of the leadership generation is doing it is moving from the the current models that we have that current tend to dominate in the academy um I think we've got to um flatten the academy I'm not convinced that we can make the changes that we need to make and preserve the hierarchical structures in the academy the current dominant forms of promotion and tenure um evaluation that we currently have um because I think they devalue specifically the types of contributions and um knowledge ways and intellectual frameworks that a lot of BIPOC students and scholars emerging scholars and existing scholars bring to the fore that can actually enhance the scientific community and so I think we have to be transformational uh in the academy and that means policies have to change uh and it means that power structures and decision-making structures have to change and be more inclusive um because if you have if you're only bringing in junior faculty you're only bringing in graduate students you're only bringing in undergraduate students they're not making any decisions um and they're and if the you're bringing them in on a transactional basis okay you're a diversity hire or you're a diversity you know scholarship or we're bringing you in because we need to get more diverse but you're going to have to navigate this added disadvantage you're kind of setting up people to fail unless they happen to be these unicorns that you then tokenize once they get through the system so this is just feeding the system in the same way that it's been operating for the last 50 to 70 sort of Jim Crow years um is that a time signal for me yes