EFTI Talk: Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Access (IDEA) is the Road to Excellence

good afternoon welcome to our mondays with efti talk and idea talk the eric friederheim tourism institute department of tourism hospitality and event management and then mike reeves including diversity equity and acids council in the college of health and human performance at the university of florida are proudly presenting to you efti talk and idea talk it is my great honor to introduce our highest leader in our college dr mike reed who is the dean of the college of health and human performance at the university of florida dan reed is recognized for his visionary leadership and research dan ritter will give us his welcome and introduce our prestigious panelists for today's program in read thank you dr phu it's an honor to be here it's a very kind introduction you gave me it makes me sound like i'm almost important but in comparison to the folks i'm about to introduce um that's certainly not true um it's my pleasure to introduce three leaders in um in academic administration who hold somewhat different roles who have bring somewhat different perspectives to the university experience and are willing to share that with us today dr jody gentry is familiar to many of us she's vice president of human resources at the university of florida jody has 30 years of experience in hr in higher education and she has a reputation for supporting performance accountability and achievement currently she oversees all aspects of hr operations both for uf faculty and for staff so her portfolio is very large most recently though i'm especially indebted to jody for spearheading the collaboration with university of florida health to keep uf personnel safe and maintain university operations during the covet 19 pandemic jody's done a wonderful job and we all greatly appreciate the work that she and her colleagues have done in that regard second i'd like to introduce dr tanjanita johnson dr johnson is a senior vice chancellor for academic and student affairs for the university of alabama system she's had 20 years of leadership experience in distinguished universities that span the eastern seaboard from mississippi all the way to new york after serving as executive vice president and ceo for the university of tennessee system she moved to the university of alabama system in her currently role she in her current role she directly advises the chancellor she also is the primary liaison to academic student institutional research and planning and inclusion officials at three different university campuses university of alabama uab birmingham and university of alabama at huntsville and finally it's a pleasure to introduce dr shirley rain the president emerita the university of memphis she is known in many quarters as powerful prepared and personable the first woman president of the university of memphis she served for 12 years in that role during which time her successes included a quarter billion dollar capital campaign that transformed that university campus and her ability to more than double extramural funding for research all of this while obviously maintaining a huge heart for students and academic affairs so i want to welcome all of these leaders we are looking forward so much to hearing from you um dr futh thank you for letting me do the introductions it was a pleasure thank you din reed again thank you so much for joining us everyone what a beautiful day to be together with our three wonderful leaders we have some questions for you all so uh again thank you so much dr johnson dr renz and dr gentry i'm going to call your first name if they'll be okay during our discussion of course thank you so our first question is please tell us about at least one barrier or challenge you have overcome to be named to your leadership role sherry dr renz yes well i am female and there had never been a female president at the university of memphis before me and the biggest challenge or hurdle i had was getting into the field to be considered because the search firm said she's not ready and because we rely so heavily on search firms if a search firm says you're not ready the search committee thinks that must be true but then when a former president of the university of kentucky who with whom i had worked closely said she's more than ready and in fact i had asked him would he recommend me for another job as a dean or a vice chancellor and his response was no and i was shocked he said no i think it's time you're a president so overcoming what search committee firms that are hired think of women as candidates is is the barrier that i overcame and a man a former president certainly helped me overcome that barrier and fortunately the search committee listened to him that's very wonderful very wise such committee thank you so much sherry for the story how about you tangjia well i thought it was quite interesting in terms of what dr raine's uh expressed uh having the search firm to uh say that she was not ready the biggest barrier i've had to overcome is telling myself that i was not ready uh i thought it was quite interesting uh when i was at the university of tennessee system i can remember very vividly the president of the system coming in after we had to suspend a search for the executive vice president and chief operating officer saying you know you are coming to us with this kind of experience from your position at stony brook university he said you know would you consider doing this job as we look at what our next steps would be and i said what are you smoking i'm not ready for this and um it was funny i i left that conversation i went home for lunch i told my husband what i thought would be a very comical story and he said are you crazy he said you go back there and tell him that you are ready for this you will take that job but it has always been this issue of getting out of my own way to the point where i did not feel like i had had to know everything about every role and every responsibility before i determined that i was ready to take on a new role and you know i i would think that that would be kind of funny in this conversation because again many of the barriers that someone in my position would face would be uh being an african-american female coming from a small town i'm from the black belt uh and so it was just starting to get out of my own way and then addressing all of the other issues as i took on the role thank you thank you how about you jody well it's interesting um you know they do say that women we will select ourselves out of a role right and men often will select themselves in um it's so interesting that you should share that story because i related to what both of you said i'm homegrown i've been at the university of florida since graduate school my first job at the university of florida was a grad assistant i certainly didn't have any aspirations for moving into this role but i will say that the fact from uh i tried to prepare myself at later in my career to be competitive if i were if i decided to be interested i didn't want to get in my own way but i definitely um was not ready for the job i always say i was probably ready for the leap um and so for me part of it was overcoming the lack of diversity of my experience i mean i i i've really loved my career at the university of florida i'm very grateful for it but i think there was some skepticism about whether someone who had actually been sort of grown within the university of florida community whether i had a diversification of experiences to be able to take the office of hr to the next level and so in many respects it was sort of convincing the search committee um and being i kind of trying to prepare myself to be at least somewhat comfortable raising my hand so i relate very much to what both of you shared that it was ultimately a function of my being able to position myself to be competitive given the fact that my background was primarily it's not almost exclusively the university of florida explaining how you can devalue the thing that you cultivate right so judy you have covered part of our next follow-up question how has diversity played a role in your career so do you want to was any particular yes well i will say so i i went to a small private college called berea college and y'all may be aware of it i mean so it was established by an abolitionist and it was i think it was it's sort of it was it's the first um i think first non-segregated co-educational college in the south and so my upbringing from the very beginning has been launched sort of kind of anchored in this idea of education as being a fundamental transformational piece for for for people of all types the logo is god has made of one blood all peoples of the earth and that very much has um that that very much was instilled in me as a very young person and i i believe that that has characterized how i thought about my career over the course of it and at the heart of hr even though many people often think of human resources being compliance oriented in my view it's all about helping create the conditions that allow people to do their very best work so in that respect it's a through line of my own personal commitment is this idea of diversity and inclusion although over the years we've used different terms it's an important part of who i am from the very beginning of my kind of evolution into becoming an adult thank you jordy dr renz yes thank you for um for jody's response i know berea college well because i spent six years in kentucky and maria has a great reputation for its values i think all of us bring what our values are to the position when i came to the university of memphis even though memphis is approximately 48 white and 52 african american the student population was only 19 african american and so giving opportunities to students and opening the door for more students was important part but before i could open that door i had to have leaders who were devoted to opening the door for achievement of african-american and minority students and there were no minority people on the vice president at the vice president's role so i was able to appoint the first african-american vice president for business and finance and also the first african-american vice president woman for student affairs and they instantly became leaders and recruiters and so forth and the other part was the person who uh was responsible for making sure that we had a an open search was a woman who was on our staff who was then called the equal opportunity officer these days i bet if she were still in that role she would have the title of diversity and inclusion but michelle banks i moved to reporting directly to me so that i had the opportunity to look at internal searches for people actually i went from at first it was only deans and vice chancellors and major directors and then i decided to ask her to report to me about searches for chairs because we know that one builds experience from being a good chair from being a dean or serving in other administrative roles so i'm telling you a lot of a lot here but it's uh appointing people who are it's recruiting students who are minority students and then creating an inclusive environment for them it isn't making sure that the people who serve on your immediate leadership team represent that diversity when i arrived there were no women on my team zero women on my team 12 years later when i left we were the majority and there are a lot there are lots of stories i could tell about that but i won't but you can call me later and i'll tell you some funny ones i'll only say this it's when i sent the athletic director out for coffee for the whole leadership panel that i realized that we really had achieved a lot more diversity but anyway there we go i'll i'll leave it at that thank you dr renz you thank you so much for your legendary stories you are the first woman president for universal memphis and also you have been there for 12 years as a president and continuously being our role model that's so wonderful dr johnson would you like to add on how has diversity played a role in your career and the plus how did you make your organization more diverse well i thought it was kind of interesting i hope i wish we could have had someone from berea here because i think it was such a um when when jody mentioned uh her academic experience it reminded me that maria was one of the first uh colleges to recruit me as a high school student and i can remember having in my senior book having the little logo and and information that they sent to me and it was so exciting that they could be interested in someone uh like myself from a small rural town and and so when i thought about uh the question as you were asking it here it did take me back to my academic experience because i was thinking as as the child of um parents who had attended hbcus really that was going to be the direction i was going in i fully intended to go to howard university and i felt like that was an environment where i would meet people that were very much like me that had similar experiences and lo and behold my english teacher who also served as our newspaper advisor at my high school she recommended me for a minority journalism workshop at the university of alabama and i thought not sure that this is some place that i want to go but there was a limited there were limited slots for for this particular program and i got selected and i thought oh well i'm surely not going to waste that opportunity and from that opportunity i ended up receiving a new york times scholarship to the university and so that led me to ua for the first time and so it was interesting because that experience gave me the confidence that i could engage and interact in this traditionally white environment uh with the support of individuals who understood some of the challenges that i might experience as a as a college student oddly enough i'm a third generation college student so this idea of going to school was not foreign to me but when you grow up in a very small community you get used to certain you get used to certain ways of doing things certain people and you want to go where you can feel a level of comfort but just spending that time at the university of alabama gave me a sense that i could maneuver in that environment even if i had to be in places where i might be the one the only one in a group or one of a few and so i thought that was very interesting because i did not know at the time that was going to prepare me for my first job my first job i was the only african-american in the newsroom um and there i was thinking how in the world am i gonna gonna make this work and it was a very positive experience after a couple of years there i ended up coming back to the university of alabama to the they wanted to diversify their news bureau and so it was a great opportunity and i did not feel like i was coming into an environment where i was um going to have to be worried about not being able to find my my place in that space and so as i thought about what has happened since that point i have been the youngest person around the the table in terms of being on a university cabinet in many cases i've been the only female and you know those are some interesting times when you're sitting there um i i was teasing with uh dr rains a moment ago she was referencing uh about uh being uh young and i said you know i'm just well preserved i've been i feel like i've been in this space for so long with individuals who really um seeing someone as a female in some of these cabinet level roles being as young as i was at many points and i can remember situations where i've had uh i've been given different responsibilities and people would say well we're not going to increase your salary that much right now you have the potential to be a vice president one day and do you know how long it took me to be a vice president and i'm thinking where in the world is this so you know i have realized that you you engage in a lot of very conflicting types of conversations with people about who you are where you're coming from and it was very good to be able to be comfortable in my own skin moving in and out of these roles and so i've been very so as you talk about how do you make your your organization more diverse or how do you champion that diversity with an organization i'm very sensitive to recognizing that when people are coming into roles they're not going to think like me they don't have to think like me they're not going to look like me they may not they may be much younger than i am um i can always remember having a chancellor once tell me he said you know you look great on paper and i know i should hire you for this job but i have shoes older than you and i thought to myself no this is not some place i want to work and so i've been very deliberate in terms of as i looked at diversity across our organizations thinking about all the ways people bring diversity to that organization and the value of that and how to make people feel comfortable and feel like they belong uh and engage uh in ways that it's not just about me and i'm not just looking for a mirror image of myself when i'm trying to create uh you know a better environment within the organization that i serve awesome thank you dr johnson definitely you stand tall and shoulders back be confident and you know who you are that's what the inspirational statements you you are providing how about you jodi i think this question uh our uf uh faculty staff students we really love to hear from you how did you and how did you make your organization more diverse well so you know such an interesting question i mean i one of the things that we have put in place that i think is really critical is that we have put in place a strategic talent group to serve as a search committee going back to dr raine's question comment about how we higher ed often really relies on on search firms and that can be actually a very happy help it also can be a very expensive hurdle that you can insert in the way of of talented people in your organization and outside and so one of the things that my team and i have done over the past few years is we put a place a strategic talent group that's positioned to be able to source candidates and to do so in an inclusive way with an eye on really advancing the university with wonderful candidates from a range of different places with intentionality um and this so for us bumping up our skill set as hr professionals to really serve as the kind of consultants that we know the organization needs um applying inclusive hiring principles to support that search and being very intentional about where how we cast the net you know we know that this idea of really having inclusive process practices at the very beginning of a hire really increases the chances and the likelihood of having diverse applicants and candidates upon selection and so well that's a one small example for me i know in my profession we are responsible for a lot of systems that can either encourage success or get in the way and we're trying to be really thoughtful about the systems that we're responsible for and adjusting them to make sure that they're um as inclusive as they possibly can be given the fact that we all have biases and sometimes don't even know what we don't know my team and i are working really hard to to look at a range of different ways to do that to promote inclusion so that's an example and i think it builds very nicely to dr rain's comment which is her obstacle was the search firm i'm like well we built our own because we knew that right you can spend a lot of money and never even know the wonderful people who wrote who sort of said i'm interested or that sometimes it's to reach out to say hey are you interested and even if they say to you what have you been smoking that we say no no we really mean you so it's designed to really help with both of those i'm very proud of the work that we're doing and continuing to do thank you dr gentry dr renz would you like to tell us more about how did you get candidates from underrepresented communities well i found that in certain fields it's easier to get candidates and to say that we are going to have an open search that and for me as the person who had to approve these search pools to say i'm not going to approve a pool that does not have some females and minorities included in that pool and often some of the fields would say but we don't have any and i would say go look for them because quite often they're not the people who come to mind first but they can be found and then if they could if we could talk to them about the possibility of joining us that was great we didn't want someone who wasn't qualified i know that always comes up but in reality there are many qualified women and many qualified minorities in many fields there is a shortage in the stem fields and others so one of the things we did that perhaps works with jody's comments earlier is to identify some women and minorities who are in the doctoral programs at your institution and groom them for opportunities that are going to be coming up or make an opportunity for them that became another avenue we found that to be true even with the doctorate in nursing and trying to expand the nursing field we did not have people in that intermediate zone of people who had been administrators in nursing so some of the fields that you think it's easy to find people it is not but finding an alternative way to either find them search further better longer wider and also not be afraid to search in canada or other places but then if you can't find the people grow your own but growth make sure that the opportunities you give them are going to allow them to be highly successful when they are among your colleagues thank you dr rens how about you dr johnson well i tell you i love what i've heard so far because these have been very uh critical uh components of assisting with finding underrepresented uh candidates a couple of other things that i would just add to that that i know have worked well for me is one putting your network to work i have never hesitated to when i know there's a job coming and i know i have connections with individuals within these communities where we are looking for candidates say look here's a position description spread it far and wide getting on the telephone to call people to say look you know i know you may be content where you are but uh here's something that's um that's coming up something that you might have an interest in uh if you're not interested pass it on to someone else in your network so really putting that network to work another thing that i thought was very simple and you know a lot of times you just kind of overlook it is really doing an assessment of how you're promoting yourself and what you're putting out there as an organization i've been in a couple of institutions that decided to take a a deeper look at how they were describing their institutions the the type of language that was being used in many when they were putting out advertisements because what they discovered in many instances when they checked the profile of the institution uh with even internal uh underrepresented members of the community people would say you know if i weren't already here this would not attract me to this place this does not sound like some place that would be a good fit for me or my family so really being able to take a look at how well we're talking about who we are and making sure that the language that we're using and trying to attract underrepresented minorities uh and underrepresented uh populations that it's an attractive proposition for them to explore coming to work at your organization thank you dr johnson i would like to come back to dr renz would you tell us and share your experiences and your advice what is the most difficult part of implementing an increasing diversity equity and assets program i think the most difficult part is to say it's for everybody people will say well that's for the equal opportunity officer or that's for the diversity officer or that's for the hr training and getting the word out that this is a program for the whole of the university one of the best ways for us in addition to the faculty was the student government having student government elect minorities and women and then they talk about creating an inclusive environment on campus was was a tremendous asset then there are some departments that are so well known for being inclusive and inviting it may sound as a surprise but the philosophy department at the university of memphis was one of the most diverse and in many places it's one of the least diverse but we they made it the department made it a source of pride that they were very diverse our difficulty became that people particularly the ivy leagues would come and raid our department all the time so we had to be sure when we were raided to not let that stand in the way to say we're still going to be a very inclusive and diverse department but finding the ones on campus the departments that are very inclusive and making sure you highlight them as departments and i would say when i found a success very successful researcher who was a minority and if she were a minority and i could take her with me to some community organization and when i was asked to say a few words about the university i would mention her and her research and that upped the level of attention from the community of seeing it as a a place uh where the faculty who were diverse were were going to be recognized and rewarded now it is a struggle to make it a university-wide but i think it uh initiative or initiatives and be willing to have the hard conversations we dr rosie bingham who was our vice president for student affairs had a series of conversations using the common ground format and uh our history our history ourselves was another initiative that we had that was very inclusive inclusive but having real conversation about what needs to change is important so it's wonderful to be able to brag on what you've done but having a real conversation that opens the door for people to say how can we get better and you know i'm a developmentalist i really believe that no matter how good you are you can get better thank you dr renz vice president gentry any insights on this topic well i will say that i do think that often when we talk about diversity and inclusion we talk about in terms of the lens of recruitment and that's certainly an important part of it but for sure what you want to do is really look at whether you are able to cultivate a sense of belonging throughout the organization and whether people really are positioned to do their very best work and that's hard to do it's hard to do it in any kind in any context i mean it goes it maps back to the quality of your managers and leaders and whether they're prepared to to engage in the challenge and to see their role in in helping others to kind of run alongside faculty and staff often in higher ed we promote people because they're smart and while that's necessary it's not sufficient um it's a real skill set to be able to lead and manage well and to do it in a way that's inclusive that really allows people to capitalize on on their on their skills and aptitudes in a way that you know sort of allows them to excel and to completely connect with the organization so i mean i think it's it's difficult because well so the short answer would be if it were easy we would already have already be there um but i think honestly it is a it's a the kind of thing where you have to have both patience but also a sense of urgency it's an odd thing right it can't be the kind of thing where you hear people talk about the pipeline and i think it's overused i think it happens certainly in certain cases but i think that can be overused as an excuse so you've got to be urgent you've got to push but there is pace there has to be patience as well the workforce doesn't change overnight right you've got people who we want hope that come to your university and stay 20 or 30 years um students you have a little bit more of a turnover but often what your your organization is really an artifact of hiring practices that existed 20 or 30 years ago and so as you which really do have to see is every new hire through a lens of opportunity for that person and for the organization and to be really intentional about that but that means that depending on how many how much turnover you have in a year or how many new positions you have you really have to kind of again both approach it with a sense of urgency but also with an eye on the on the long game that the way that you shape cultures through experiences right people have experiences that are positive they have experiences of success they have experiences and that then begins to shape what they think which then shapes their beliefs and drives different actions and that's a long term game thank you jordy dr johnson well i think judy hit on something that that is very critical here this whole notion of urgency and patience and because sometimes we want to see change and productivity overnight and we fail to recognize some of the long-standing counterproductive cultural norms that have been in place that you just can't change um overnight and so really the difficulty in implementing many of these programs in this space is trying to change these long-standing uh barriers that that you're always encountering i think the other thing that often has um uh puts a barrier in the way in terms of implementation has to do with measuring success and somehow we can confuse activity with accomplishments and so i i'm constantly mindful of the fact that we can be busy busy doing things in the diversity equity inclusion and access space um having programs and all sorts of things but at the end of the day do we know what success looks like and oftentimes what we're trying to accomplish in this space you can't really count um and so it goes down to the very fabric of the organization the other thing that i think is a major factor in terms of implementation has to do with the internal and external politics that's often involved in moving uh this issue and i know uh that dr raines you know was well familiar with tennessee politics as you know uh issues of diversity and inclusion were at play even during the time when i was at the university of tennessee system um where you know it is you're you're trying to do all the right things and you hear a legislator legislator say well how many is enough and and you just sort of freeze in your tracks and you realize that so much of what you're struggling with in terms of implementing effective pro programs and and making change really has a lot to do with the amount of change that the uh that the powers that be will tolerate at the time that you're trying to to move things so uh politics can be a major concern as you're trying to uh implement uh programs uh in this space thank you so much so we talked about strategies urgency and the politics and the strengths so this is a follow-up what role can leaders or managers play in creating an inclusive environment dr johnson well i think first of all you have to really start as an advocate and and being willing to vocalize your support and what you believed in uh another thing that you have to do is to identify and address your own personal biases and preconceived ideas because before you can really um be a part of leading a more inclusive environment you have to deal with all of the of your own baggage that you bring to this conversation and it doesn't matter what you look like you come with biases and issues and um and and i think you have to get to that point where you're beyond that uh leading by example i think is another thing that you have to be able to do uh as a leader you've got to show some courage in this space and to be able to um recommend support and engage in activities and practices and behaviors that demonstrate um that you're committed to an inclusive environment and if it doesn't start at the top it's surely going to be much more difficult for those who are um somewhere in the middle of the ranks or in the lower ranks trying to make change if as leaders we're not out up there really being the strongest advocates for uh diversity equity and inclusion thank you vice president gentry but so i agree completely that it really does start with some serious self-reflection i i what i found out i realized about myself is i had a tendency and still do to tend to talk about things in terms of helping all people right um we put in place a paid parental leave program and i remember i was at an event similar to this and someone said well i see this as sort of a women's issue but i'm for sure it certainly does just there's a there's a positive effect but i said you know i kind of see it as a human issue um and i realized in that moment while i i was both of those terms were true right yes it certainly is very supportive of women in the workplace and disproportionately so and yes it benefits all of us as a human but my tendency to kind of equalize things was getting in the way of people actually hearing kind of my commitment to diversity and inclusion they sort of sort of watered it down so i've asked for help from my colleagues it's a reflex for me how i talk about how i talk about the workplace and i've asked them to hold me accountable like help me tease out the the the effort that we're making so that people can see the impact that these best practices have on diversity and inclusion in a more intentional way and that that and so that was it begins with sort of that self-reflection i think all of us to your point dr johnson no matter what we look like no matter our background if we don't start with that self-reflection we can inadvertently get in our way and most likely will and even if you are doing that so ruthless self assessment like i i like to talk about in lots of different ways you still will you still need really good colleagues to kind of help hold you accountable and hold up the mirror when you when you stumble or you just need some help i think broadly and if you're at the i think most of the folks who are participating today at the university of florida we do have an inclusive leadership workshop that i'm really proud of and it talks a little bit about our um that we need to sort of recognize the uniqueness of each person and the belongingness of each person you do that by creating a safe environment right where you can you really work hard to build trust you make sure everyone's heard right really we're focusing on your communication skills making sure that people are known feel known and valued through coaching and being really treated fairly through you know being thoughtful about accountability and to me it goes back to an earlier comment i make i think that we all have a duty to challenge ourselves in terms of seeing leadership and management as an actual skill set that we can cultivate into dr rain's point that we're never done that we're always developing that we really are continuing to challenge ourselves to be the best person we can be be reflective of the biases we bring whether they're conscious or so subconscious that implicit role that they they occupy as part of our software and then also really thoughtful about skills development because i think we all can learn and and do better every day thank you jordy veterans you are our leader what would your advice for the leaders well i i did like uh what jody was saying about the training i thought that was very the the individual points were absolutely right on i think as leaders having the right people around you makes such a difference and because i was so fortunate to have wonderful minority and female leaders around me and i was willing to listen frankly you know all good ideas do not come from on high in fact there should be a wonderful exchange that occurs in leadership councils and so forth i wanted to bring up another point that we've talked about faculty we've talked about administrators but our universities are run by wonderful directors and executives of programs and staff who have ranking systems all of their own as well and one of the ways that i tried very hard and maybe jody would appreciate this since she was appointed from within was to when there was a senior director or executive position and there were lots of people who had worked there many years at the university to look within and see if we could promote them because the tendency had been at the highest levels of these executive and directorships among the professional staff was to go outside much like we did for faculty i remember one time we were promoting someone who was director of the student program that we will just call student engagement it had another name and he had been very active and was one of the most popular people and could say no to students but said yes to students and built these wonderful opportunities for students and when it came time for an executive director he didn't apply because he was internal and i said to him tapped him on the shoulder and said i'm not saying you'll get the job but i'm saying you should apply so it's we often have a much more diverse and frankly inclusive arena of professionals on our campuses who are who are not faculty and are not higher level administrators but when we give higher level staff an opportunity it sends a tremendous message throughout the whole of the university thank you dr renz our audience we are going to open up for q and a so please type your question in the q and a box on the screen this is one question for dr johnson what are some ways to expose students to different cultures in meaningful ways well you know in terms of students i think providing them with opportunities to collaborate and developing solutions to some of our problems in this space you know i've always found to be um a very fruitful exercise a lot of times we struggle with issues trying to feel uh figure out how we're going to come up with something uh to help our students but we fail to engage them in the process where they're coming together to talk about some of the issues and we hear some of the real world things that that our students are struggling with uh along with this one of the things i'm reminded of is just going back to the classroom where you know as an administrator i try to teach at every institution because i think it's always a good opportunity to keep your finger on the pulse of things most recently i've been teaching in the higher education administration area and one of the things i would do is to provide students with an opportunity to explore academic issues from a variety through a variety of lenses so i try to find something say presidential derailment and look at that through different types of institutions so i would take a common issue and give students and assign students now you're going to look at a particular example from the perspective of an hbcu or from a traditionally white institution or tribal college give them that opportunity looking at some of the same components but trying to understand the different dynamics that are in play when uh they're trying to see what really happened here what are some of the opportunities that we might learn in in this environment where we are but because i may not be as familiar with hbcus i wouldn't have taken a look at something like that so it really comes down to exposing students and others to look at life through a different set of lenses besides the one that they're constantly looking through thank you dr johnson jody well i'm not i'm not really an expert on students but i will say that i think for me that that notion of encouraging travel is such an important important piece it was such a heartbreak this past year for the study abroad programs to be halted but i know in my own experience going someplace where you're the other is a life-changing experience right when you're the only only person um in a sort of a japanese family resort and you and your your and your partner are it it's like the first time in my life where i was the other and you don't forget that it shapes you it influences your thinking and i think about learning about other cultures and how powerful that must be on students and at berea i did that was my first travel experience they sent me away for a month and it changed my life and i can't help but think that that's a similar experience for our students today thank you dr renz i would also add about travel is to be certain that you and your fundraisers are seeking money for people who are not able to afford travel or to have that opportunity many of the students who would have had great experiences traveling at the university of memphis could not have afforded to be away to be away from a part-time job or to be away from family responsibilities or whatever so in terms of international travel being certain that we recruit some money to add to that pot so that it's possible for many people to be away and i'm sure i'm sure jody had a great experience through berea college because they always made sure that students did not lack financial resources to support them but that is not the way it is in most other international travel organizations thank you uh fyi i'm the department chair tourism hospitality event management so definitely our department within our college of health and human performance we offer lots of uh study abroad and again how fun is our major even our dissertation we study travel tourism event yes yes so in terms of global globalization including diversity so this is celebration department and we are very happy and definitely that's how we make a cognition i remember 20 years ago my first job on my former department had asked me uh if i would take the offer for university of tennessee and i said no i'm on my way back to taiwan and she said well if you take this offer you're going to bring the world to the classroom so that's the key statement i decided to say that's beautiful that's wonderful right that's beautiful that that that's that's a lovely that's i'm so glad you shared that that's a lovely thing yeah and then that one step and changed my life and i've been building the relationship with students with you all i've been i'm the luckiest person on earth love my job travel tourism i'm having fun every day so do our faculty member i love it when a university of florida faculty member says that i love it so here's one question from one of our attendees i'd love to hear what each of your internal threat holds are for saying no to opportunities in order to keep your sanity dr johnson you want to go first i will start there because no was initially never in my vocabulary i would say yes to everything just because one i didn't want anyone upset with me and uh i just always felt like i needed to i needed to be active and busy and what i realized that i was saying yes to so many things that it was hard really to um focus in on any one thing because you were just going from one thing to the next and so one thing that i will that i've had to learn to do particularly when you are uh the only one in a particular space you know i have been in those situations where i was the only uh african-american and every time you look up someone was calling you for some opportunity and i had to start really beginning to introduce folks to other people who could engage in processes on committees and that sort of thing but you know the one thing that i tried to use as my threshold really is what kind of impact can you have in this space is this something that you're passionate about uh the one thing that it is hard for me to say no to really uh would be opportunities to connect with people because i know some people i tell folks all the time the the greatest resource i have is my time so anyone who is interested in um wanting to share ideas and thoughts just wanted to talk to someone or have a connection with someone just to bounce off ideas my calendar is always open um so that's the place where i can't say no i've learned that the threshold for engaging in every activity or opportunity that comes along you just can't say yes to everything so you just have to be selective about what you're passionate about and what you can impact thank you jordy well don't ask me i struggle with this i'm lis i'm thinking dr johnson's right impact is the way to evaluate it but i really do struggle with this this is a life challenge for me i will almost always say yes um even when even when i probably shouldn't and it's a struggle for me so i i i would be a hypocrite to give you words of wisdom but dr rains probably has some thoughtful things and i can't wait to hear it i i appreciate dr johnson's viewpoint and wish i were better at that as well jody uh but when you're a university president there are expectations of you as a person and then there are expectations of you as a role the enroll and then their expectations of you from the community and deciding whether this is something i should do or i must do because i'm the president of the university or they really need me within the community to represent the university became became the issue my husband and i used to go to everything together and then we devised this calendar that said must go should go don't want to go and and let him say there were things that he just did not want to go to and i won't tell you what they were and there were things that he must go to and things that he had a question mark that he could go to and i think actually his calendar probably would have been a good device for me as well because there's some things you just don't want to go to and then there are things that that you really should go to and then there are things that you know maybe would would expand your horizons in the community and i joined a lot of community boards that i wasn't sure at the beginning that i should have been a part of but i felt the university should be a part of them and and i wound up being the first woman chair of the chamber of commerce for memphis now and and it had been in existence for 150 years so uh i i couldn't quite believe some of the doors that opened for me and that i changed the organization because i was there not so much because it was me but was because it was a woman there was an academic involved in community initiatives so i think there are a lot of there are a lot of sides to this and the personal side is the one that i like dr johnson and jody have struggled with am i saying no because of what i personally believe and think but as a president there were many things i felt i must say so for the the university and other things that i felt like the presence in the community would make a difference but now that i'm president emeritus the past president i would have to say that is still an issue for me personally what am i going to say yes to because you if you're a new past president of a university who moves into a community my goodness so they want you on everything and i had to say for a year i'm not going to accept anything well one of the pediatricians in town knew how much i cared about people with disabilities and so he said well i'm sorry i've already put you on the board of the emory valley center so other than that i managed to wait a year before i said yes and really weighed what i wanted thank you so much it's been wonderful one year at one hour and the one hour feels like one minute and i really want to thank you you all have said yes to our today's program we are very honored for the privilege to have you vice president gentry dr renz and dr johnson we are so grateful for your insight for your advice for your leadership stories sharing for your visions and for what you have done in the past now and in the future thank you so much for joining us our audience thank you for spending time with us thank you you all have a wonderful day you

2021-04-08 21:59

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