00:00:04A.B.: I'm Amy Brainer. I'm an associate professor of Women's and Gender Studies and director of LGBTQ Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. I'm going to ask my interviewee and anyone listening in the future to bear with me, because I do still have mild laryngitis. I got sick on inauguration day 2025. That was three weeks ago now, and I never got well, so at this point I think it is just symbolic [laughter] of my body's protest against this administration. I will do my best to be clear, and thanks for your patience. Lisa, do you want to introduce yourself?
00:00:48L.M.: Sure. My name is Lisa Martin. I am a professor of Women's and Gender Studies and Health and Human Services at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. I am currently serving as the director of Women's and Gender Studies for the second time. Also department chair for Health and Human Services.
00:01:07A.B.: Not much. Not a full plate at all.
00:01:09L.M.: Never.
00:01:11A.B.: I'm thinking you served as director of Women's and Gender Studies from 2018 to 2021 and then now again from 2024 to 2025. Does that sound right?
00:01:22L.M.: I think so. [See the index for Lisa's annual reports.]
00:01:24A.B.: Tell me what you remember about how you became the director of Women's and Gender Studies the first time and the second time.
00:01:34L.M.: I think I was also interim director before that once when Suzanne Bergeron was on sabbatical.
00:01:42A.B.: Oh, so it wasn't your first rodeo.
00:01:43L.M.: I'd have to look at my CV to figure out. It was one semester, and we did it - it was early. I feel like it was 2013. Very early.
00:01:55A.B.: Oh, that's very early in your career, too.
00:01:58L.M.: It was very early in my career, and it was the semester we wrote the line to hire you. It was when we got the line approved to do your job posting the next fall. Whatever that winter was.
00:02:12A.B.: Well, I already learned something.
00:02:14L.M.: Yay!
00:02:16A.B.: You presided over that. That's awesome.
00:02:19L.M.: Yeah, it was fun. That was a very satisfying experience of trying to write a line and getting it approved.
00:02:26A.B.: And getting it. An experience I have never had. [Laughter]
00:02:30L.M.: We had a colleague serving as the CWP [College Wide Programs] rep on EC, the CASL [College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters] Exec Committee, who I needed to coach to get the line - to get him to understand what the line was and why it was important. He was super supportive. He really wanted to do us justice and to represent us well, so he was very open to that coaching. And then he did a good job, because the line got approved. It was ranked high enough that we got it approved that year.
00:03:06A.B.: That's incredible, and it changed my life. [Laughter]
00:03:10L.M.: And all of ours, and campus life, I think.
00:03:15A.B.: So that was your interim director experience. Then you officially became director. What was that like?
00:03:23L.M.: Scary. At first. I think that replacing, or following - I don't think of it as replacing, but following a director [Suzanne Bergeron] who had been in the position for a long time, and for me who had been such a strong mentor and was kind of synonymous with the program, felt like a heavy responsibility to step into those shoes, and it was a little scary. I remember the summer as it was happening and before it was happening, I was obsessed with needing to know what I was doing or having procedures, or I wanted protocols, or I wanted some structure to make me feel like I knew I was going to be able to do a good job. Or I wanted to try to anticipate all the things that people might want to talk about in the next year and feel like I had an answer before anybody could come up with a question. Looking back now, that was a long time - that feels like a very long time ago.
00:04:32A.B.: A very different Lisa.
00:04:34L.M.: And a very different Lisa, yes. What we do can have a profound impact on the lives of our students and our colleagues, but nothing is rarely so high stakes that you can't take time to take a breath or get advice or sit and think about your decision. So I think that relaxing my level of anxiety over pace has been something that I appreciate over time that wasn't part of that. It was intimidating. And you wanted to make your predecessor proud. I wanted her to be proud of me. I wanted all of the other affiliated faculty to feel that they were valued and knew how important they were to the program. I wanted you as our junior tenure track assistant professor to feel like your promotion and tenure was securely being shepherded and protected through that process. Then I wanted our students to just be able to graduate, navigate good curriculum, find opportunities to do internships or research or whatever they were looking for.
00:05:52A.B.: You wanted procedures and protocols. Were those there?
00:05:58L.M.: Some are, but some was - that was a manifestation of my anxiety and need for safety [laughter], and that I find safety in an institution. But Women's and Gender Studies has been in this liminal space of College Wide Programs that actually has no structural safety. So I think that was also driving my fear [laughter] I think a little bit. We were also in the first Trump administration at that time, and it didn't feel like a particularly welcoming institutional time. Nationally was really when we started to see a lot of pushback on gender as being coded for something evil or nefarious and problematic. While at the same time attracting a lot of interest and resistance from students, driving a renewed interest in the programs, at the course level. It doesn't always translate to majors, I would say, but just interest and conversation was definitely happening.
00:07:07A.B.: You said that one of the things you really wanted was to make your predecessor proud. That made me think I should ask you about your relationship with her. How would you describe that relationship? You said she was a mentor.
00:07:22L.M.: She was my, and still is, a mentor. I still call her if any big decisions come up where I need advice. I think that we both were able to adopt similar institutional lenses of critique. I consider her the sounding board to whom I always turn to. Right? She never, ever wanted - that doesn't mean I wasn't always free to disagree or have a different point of view, but that she was always willing to talk through pros and cons, ask good questions to help me think things through. She was great at having what I think I've developed now, having been in academic leadership since that time, to take that beat and to calm things down and not feel rushed. She helped me breathe and not always react as quickly or as ferociously [laughter] as I may have wanted to. I'm forever grateful that I feel that she - that I got hired. Right? That I was at an institution that never asked me to compromise on my research topics, or never worried about getting tenure because I worked on political content or controversial research. I didn't have to choose between my disciplinary training, which is public health and social science research, but not in Women's and Gender Studies, but didn't make me feel any less worthy of directing the program or being a scholar. Yeah, we have a lovely relationship. I'm so grateful to her.
00:09:19A.B.: I'm just thinking as you're talking how nice it's going to be to interview everyone and hear these stories collectively, right?
00:09:28L.M.: Yes. Absolutely.
00:09:31A.B.: You actually kind of led into this question. Tell me about yourself at that time. I guess we're still talking about first directorship. What did you specifically bring to the role of director? This could be your academic background you just mentioned, your personal background, or some other things about you.
00:09:55L.M.: I think when I entered as director - I am a different generation from our previous director, and I really felt like I came from a place where our value and place in the institution was accepted. I wasn't really willing to compromise on questions of if we should even exist or is this a real discipline? I felt past, like in a post-world of that, or that had not been my experience as a student growing up either and before that. I wanted to fight for legitimacy in the structure of the university, too. Those fights are still ongoing and we haven't won. If anything, we've just lost and lost and lost all of those. [Laughter]
00:10:46A.B.: Yeah, we’re gonna go through those.
00:10:47L.M.: But optimistically, at that time, I thought we were well poised to create some better, permanent structures that would recognize the value of our faculty. In thinking about procedures and protocols, some things we did do were change our program guidelines that actually set pretty strict parameters about what constitutes affiliate faculty or what conditions met to be an affiliate faculty. Then I would have some conversations like, "So, you're not teaching any courses for us or doing a lot of service. Do you still want to be an affiliate?" We did some changing of the membership of who was contributing to the program and who wasn't. I also think that with three tenure track lines, even though we were all partial at some point, and then you became 100% and the other two of us were partial, I think my leadership also saw a transition of affiliates in some ways stepping back because there were anchor people in the program. I think that also marked a change from how they had maybe interacted with Women's and Gender Studies at the time.
00:12:09L.M.: There were also a lot of competing opportunities for faculty, and we tend to just be made up of faculty who like trying innovative new programs, whether it's joining - Foundations was created while I was director, right? And people had opportunities to try out some Foundations courses, many of which benefited and could serve as feeders into Women's and Gender Studies programs. But the rotation of courses seemed to be changing a little bit. What was getting offered or who was consistently able to put WGST courses in their schedule started to change at that point, I think.
00:12:51L.M.: Other things that happened while I was director, that I had to lead through and figure out our position, was a big talk about an attack on cross listings as being "confusing" or not easy to deal with. None of those critiques ever involved pedagogical arguments around the value of cross listings. [Laughter]
00:13:14A.B.: Or epistemological arguments.
00:13:16L.M.: Or epistemological. Yeah.
00:13:19A.B.: It was mostly about software.
00:13:21L.M.: It was software. Right? It was, "This is hard to do in the software. We don't know who owns this." Which ownership is just an odd - not a comfortable concept, right? That also started to change how - because our classes had always had strong fill rates largely because of their numerous cross listings. Students would stumble upon our class titles in a variety of mechanisms. Being in the Ws [in the course catalogue] - then I started to learn from advising that, "Oh, well, they're not really seeing all the cross listings." Or, "We don't as advisors know all the cross listings that are attached to that course." Which just started to terrify me about visibility and invisibility to students. We started to learn how their behavior changed when we stopped using paper schedules and started using electronic schedules. That also happened during my term where we stopped having these three-year paper, huge books that students used to flip through to find classes.
00:14:34A.B.: I can't believe that was that recent.
00:14:36L.M.: It really was, though. I know. It seems absurd. But it was. They were also electronic. But students were using those books.
00:14:45A.B.: They were able to look through a book.
00:14:47L.M.: Right. And now they just do searches. If they're thinking of a sociology course, they just do a search for SOC and see what courses come up. I don't know who is training students to explore. I sometimes get amazed that students even still find our classes. Or in the opposite way there have been many times colleagues have said to me, "Oh, do you know X student so and so? They're really interested in gender and health and they're graduating next semester and they've never taken a single one of your courses." You're like, "Uh, that seems problematic." [Laughter] They probably should have found me somehow. I still think that's having an impact, the way students select courses and how cross listings have become kind of invisible, and us being in the Ws [laughter] of the alphabet, I think is hard.
00:15:48A.B.: It really comes down to a lot of this logistical stuff. You have already answered some of this. How did your expectations, hopes, and goals change as you did the work?
00:16:07L.M.: Oh, it really depends. I think it's great to have goals and to have a vision or a plan, and then I think it's like holding water in your hands. It's just a leaky sieve, and it's all gonna wash away. [Laughter] Maybe you're left with a pearl or some silt. I don't know what's in your hand at the end of the year. [Laughter]
00:16:30A.B.: Or both.
00:16:32L.M.: Or both. Maybe you directed some of that water into a potted plant and nourished it, and maybe some of it spilled on the floor. I think I learned to be more flexible and satisfied on - my focus has really changed to how are the people I'm interacting [with] feeling? Do they feel confident that they know what our goal is? Or do they feel they can come get the resources that they need to teach their classes? Or do they feel that our schedule reflects their expertise, and they have a part of the program? Do our students feel we're actually preparing them for something and not just analysis of despair? I think it just shifted a lot more to be about people, and a lot less about things to tick off a checklist that we got accomplished at the end of the year.
00:17:34L.M.: If we had one event that made me feel like, "We worked really hard on that and we pulled that off," or if we had one thing that I could point to, then, especially once the pandemic hit and we were just at home alone, it became more the focus on the emotional labor. The focus of representing us on the committee to talk about COVID impact statements on faculty. [See the index for COVID-19 impact statement guidelines that Lisa helped to develop as part of the Care and Equity Task Force.] Working with the Hub [Hub for Teaching and Learning Resources] to make sure that our classes were accessible and still high quality and students could have a meaningful learning experience. The reflective questions I put at the end of my exams at the end of the semester so I could feel like students got something out of this, right? Something? [Laughter] Please, tell me what that was. It just became smaller in some ways. Which felt even more personal, and good. It wasn't a bad switch.
00:18:36A.B.: Do you think the switch happened through experience and necessity? Or were there some outside sources that helped you get there?
00:18:45L.M.: I think both. I think part of it was, the pandemic slowed everything down, and forced in some ways a slowdown. There was definitely a sense of, you can't ask people to do too much. They're barely holding on, right? Any grand plans, just shelve them. That's fine. We can revisit or maybe it won't seem important later. Then I think it reinforced that leadership for me is in service. It's not about what I do, or I can say I did. It's about serving the populations who I'm there to create resources and opportunities for.
00:19:41L.M.: Part of that also came by adding a second really important mentor in my life, and that's the dean in the College of Education, Health, and Human Services [Ann Lampkin-Williams]. Working as a department chair while being Women's and Gender Studies director let me learn about different types of resources and support, and to experience different models than the one we'd had in CASL [College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters]. And that was really important, I think, for my own development. It also allowed me to cobble together resources to do some coaching and some leadership training. Which too many of us fall into academic leadership by default or being a good citizen. Or because it was asked or it's our turn or whatever. I was always really clear that if it was a path I wanted to proceed, then I wanted training and tools. Because I didn't go to school to be a leader or in academic administration.
00:20:44L.M.: As a Women's and Gender Studies professor, I swallow a lot of that anti-establishment - It can be a really deep tension, right? To not know how much you want to embrace it. Or if you could even say that you liked it or embraced it and still be respected by your colleagues at the same time. [Laughter] Outside sources like the HERS Institute for Leadership absolutely helped. Taking a leadership role at the Center for Interprofessional Education in Ann Arbor that came with a group coaching mindset definitely helped. Just leaning into spending more time - reading more books or listening to podcasts about leadership styles and what I liked. It was all about communication and connections with people. The ones I was reading. Not the whole field, but the ones I focused on were about people and about how to do right by people.
00:21:44A.B.: Do you feel like being director changed you?
00:21:47L.M.: Absolutely. Yes. In a way that I really appreciate. It makes you feel like you're having an immediate impact in ways that sometimes research can feel a little far away from the intended audience, or you don't know what - maybe you're influencing that one person who read your published paper [laughter] and they cited you. Yay, thanks for citing me! [Laughter] But is it having an impact on the world, right? I think in administration and leadership in our program, I knew I was having an impact on students. Whether it was us securing resources for students who were struggling with housing, bad housing environments or living situations, or needing extra resources for textbooks or access to meals. We were doing a lot of care work during that time. Sometimes you feel inadequate and like you're a Band-Aid and you can't help everybody to the degree that you wish you could. But some of it feels good, to be able to feel like you're taking care of them or developing programs that put students' needs first.
00:23:02A.B.: Do you feel there was alignment between what mattered to you and how you spent your time as director?
00:23:11L.M.: Sometimes. Not always. You can feel good about a schedule in the abstract, but it never feels good trying to herd cats, which is what a CWP [College Wide Programs] schedule is. [Laughter] Because you're literally working with every department and begging for the crumbs of, "Please tell me if this class is running and when it's running," and "I asked them five times but I'm asking you, and the schedule doesn't match in all of these ways." That's a headache that oftentimes I felt, I really feel this shouldn't be - my job is to spend all these hours reconciling this stuff? That feels like a bad waste of me as a resource. [Laughter] But it is what it is sometimes. Then other times it was great to just think and be in community, or dream up programming, or reach out and hold an event that people actually enjoyed attending. That was fun. [See the index for an email that lists programming and other initiatives under Lisa's leadership, and enjoy the conversations in the thread.]
00:24:13A.B.: Did the amount of time you spent on other things change while you were director?
00:24:19L.M.: Yes. A big research project was wrapping up, and I let go of some avenues I might - if I wasn't director, I would have pursued other research ideas that I just didn't have the energy or capacity. I would say teaching felt very important. I probably revamped more classes, did other things with students, reconnected. Because we were also going through [a college initiative to promote] project-based learning. There was a lot going on while we were doing all of this. I really focused on teaching, and I really focused on the programs I was supporting. I became much more passive in my research. Now, that also coincided with getting promoted to full professor, which allowed me to feel like that was okay. I had played the tenure clock game. I'd gotten as far as you need to get, there isn't another hoop to jump through. I still do research. I'm still writing. I took on new projects, but they weren't the ones I probably would have proceeded. I ended some research collaborations that I'd had for 15 years, and that was hard to let go of some of those, but also felt right at the time. There are definitely times where I think like, "Oh, I wonder what if—"
00:25:46A.B.: In some alternate timeline there's a Lisa doing those things.
00:25:49L.M.: Doing those things, yeah.
00:25:51A.B.: Has being director influenced your life outside of work in any way?
00:25:59L.M.: Oh, probably. I think it has - We've had some losses that previously would have been devastating to my identity as a people pleaser [laughter] who does good-girl things and delivers the things she's supposed to do. I would have taken and often took losses very personally, as a failure to the program or students or colleagues or whatever. But I do think that also forced me to recognize that no institution is as loyal to you as they ask you to be of them, and so don't make your life about just those work things and products. It allowed the creation of space to - not always successfully, but to say, "Well, what is joy? What feeds my life?" It's not going to be the perfect schedule [laughter] or it's not going to be writing another proposal nobody is going to fund. Right? It made me more pragmatic about work in some ways, but it created more space for life outside of work, without guilt.
00:27:30A.B.: Do you want to tell me about some of those losses?
00:27:33L.M.: I often feel like my directorship was just the culmination of breaking down everything our predecessors had built for the last 15 years, and it all went away when I became director. Which was not my fault. [Laughter]
00:27:49A.B.: Well it's interesting that you feel that way, because I kind of feel that way [about my directorship]. So that's really interesting.
00:27:55L.M.: I think that we could see that as institutional changes that just continued to exacerbate while you were director. That neither one of us was in a position of power to do much but try to staunch the bleeding or do the best we could with the resources that were left. So we went from having dedicated staff support to almost no staff support overnight. Being asked to shop ourselves around to a department to beg to share an admin over the summer. We lost an office, a dedicated staff person. We lost that office. We lost documents, computers, events, history that had been wiped from a computer that just kind of erased our history. We had the budget cut, the operating budget cut. We had support for the director cut during my time. Especially now that I'm directing again. Right? Very different landscape right now compared to what I had as director the first time, which was a course release a year plus one extra because I did it three and a half years. I started at an awkward time.
00:29:23A.B.: You started in January, I was noticing when I looked back.
00:29:25L.M.: I started in January. So basically, I took a sabbatical and then came and started back. We had had course releases every year. I had had support to go to both a conference in my field but also always supported to attend National Women's Studies Association meetings and the business meeting before that. Lots of support for events and programming and budget for those events and programming, and the course releases were also the time to plan those events. Then I had had the staff person to support those events. Really lost a lot of teamwork there. We had some affiliate faculty retire without replacement lines, so we started to lose some numbers of affiliated faculty. I'm trying to remember. It feels like we lost a lot more -
00:30:43A.B.: That was a lot.
00:30:47L.M.: CWPs [College Wide Programs] have always been somewhat precarious and overseen by an associate dean who is not a chair. But in the years that I was director, we had an associate dean who very much did the things chairs did for us. Sometimes we resented that because we had a little bit of independence and we didn't want to fall under being told what to do, but other times it was really appreciated. That associate dean worked really hard to make sure we tried to fill the holes where notices would fall out. Where they would use - for example, they would use departmental emailing lists, and those of us with CWP appointments who did not also have a department appointment would just not get information. Wouldn't get opportunities shared with them. Wouldn't get newsletters. Wouldn't get announcements from the dean's office. Somebody else would say something and I'd be like, "What are you talking about?" and oh, go find out, oh, yeah, they left me off that email again. We did have an associate dean who wanted to address those, who wanted to make sure the promotion and tenure process was smooth for CWP hires. Then during my directorship we switched to a new associate dean who has not expressed an interest in trying to get to know, understand, support, or advocate for our programs in any way. It's been disappointing. [See the index for an email from 1999 outlining CWP faculty needs that had still not been completely addressed at the time of this interview, as Lisa's description attests.]
00:32:19A.B.: What are some of the reasons given to you as director for why the losses were happening?
00:32:26L.M.: Everybody was making financial sacrifices is what we were told. But we were always first. Or no explanation. It was, this is what's happening. Do what you need to do.
00:32:49A.B.: Do you have your own ideas about why you think the losses happened the way they did?
00:32:55L.M.: I think they often happened in the summer because they thought nobody was paying attention, or that there were other things going on that were priorities for the college, or that we could be valued - I think that we were also simultaneously held up as examples while having all of our resources stripped, as if that was supposed to make us feel better.
00:33:20A.B.: And the "we" in this case, for folks who are listening and wouldn't know this, now we're talking about College Wide Programs. Specifically African and African American Studies, Women's and Gender Studies, Arab and Arab American Studies, maybe in particular, being held up but then not resourced.
00:33:41L.M.: Right.
00:33:47A.B.: Let me ask you this. It seems like a very natural question to follow. What are some things you've learned about the college or university as a result of this work?
00:34:06L.M.: The success of the university depends on the lens through which you're looking at, I think. If I'm looking, I'm trying to look at the gaps, the marginalized programs, to see how successful they are as an indicator of overall health, right? Of the university. But I've also learned that because the colleges are fairly independent, that there are parts of this university that feel great, that bring joy and validate you, and that the dark cloud that I would feel in some parts was just not present in others. I would just be like, "What? Why? Why don't they feel as bad? Are they not paying attention? Do they just not feel so bad?" No, they had different resources, and they had different opportunities. And that this university loves something new rather than resourcing something that works and has been around for a long time.
00:35:20A.B.: Yeah, that's for sure.
00:35:23L.M.: But that it can help to make noise about those things. Right? To hold up programs like WILL [Women in Learning and Leadership] that have been an example of PBL before that was even noticed or a concept that we would talk about on campus.
00:35:42A.B.: PBL being project-based learning.
00:35:52L.M.: I think there used to be a reputation in our university that changed. There used to be a mindset, especially in CASL [College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters], that if you proposed or started to build something and you showed proof of concept, then resources would follow that effort. Now it just seems that you get a, "Thanks for that glorious effort. Keep doing that and add this other thing to it and add this other thing to it." [Laughter] People keep trying to build things but then the resources don't come necessarily. That can be really hard. I also think that we sometimes think that - CASL thinks the other units aren't playing fair. Or I don't know. It's a hard place to be in CASL right now.
00:36:50A.B.: What are some things you've learned about Women's and Gender Studies?
00:36:57L.M.: That it's great to be resilient. That you can be a great source of comfort to students who feel really scary about the - scared about the world. It's not just performative. That you can be a resource for them. They teach me all the time that when you come from a place where you know institutions weren't built for you, but you know your worth, that you can weather just about anything, because you were never waiting for those institutions to save you. I feel that way about our program. We're never going to be embedded in a department that celebrates us at the center or values us. But we're not invisible and we're not going to be erased, and we'll be here in some form. And those forms can change, but what we're telling our students, how we're developing critical thinkers, how we're impacting the world isn't going to disappear.
00:38:04A.M.: What are some things you are particularly proud of or cherish?
00:38:08L.M.: So many things. It's so hard to come up with a list. I cherish having been director of WILL [Women in Learning and Leadership] in addition to director of Women's and Gender Studies. Because the WILL students really make you feel like you're doing good work, I think. Any time you're really interacting with students in a student organization and putting on events or something reminds you why you're connected to that work. [See the index for WGST/WILL annual program reports with Lisa as director of WILL.]
00:38:44L.M.: I think I was really proud that your promotion and tenure process was flawless with no hiccups institutionally, and it was easy to manage. I was really excited about that. I think I'm really proud that we are always thinking about trying to future-proof our program. Like I'm really excited about the changes we made to our program to keep a core experience intact, but to be as flexible to withstand, whether it's changes in [the transition from 3- to] 4-credits, a demand for project-based learning, more of our faculty not being able to teach because they have to teach in their disciplines. We really structurally built something that I think can withstand a lot of changes and still offer value to our students. I'm really proud of some of the sendoffs that we've had around retirements and just our end-of-year events and luncheons I think are always lovely and fun to plan.
00:39:57L.M.: Things I'm not saying. I'm like, "Uh, what am I not thinking about?" I don't really care that I got the good Girl Scout service award. [Laughter] I appreciated it and I felt validated for what I did, but it's not something that really stands out there. Being on a team of interdisciplinary scholars to get the first Interdisciplinary Research Team Award with other Women's and Gender Studies affiliated faculty, that was really exciting. We were the inaugural recipients of that, and that was exciting because I think sometimes we worry that our research isn't seen as legitimate. Because it doesn't take a huge amount of funding or bring in a lot of dollars for the university. So that was important.
00:40:53A.B.: What advice would you give to future directors of Women's and Gender Studies, specifically here?
00:41:02L.M.: Don't be afraid to ask people for help, because even if they can't show up, it wasn't your weakness for needing help or for asking. You should just ask. Ask for help. Pick the things you care about and then be strategic about how you want to go about them, and let go of the things that you can't. Even if you wish you could prioritize everything, you can't prioritize everything. The program is as strong as all; it's not as strong as a single person, right? You can't build a program on the back of one person, so you don't have to worry about failing the program. Because one single person can't undo all of the work that we've been building towards. I hope. Except maybe - [laughter] There may be administrators who just cancel your program or something.
00:42:06A.B.: What do you hope changes, if anything, for future directors?
00:42:12L.M.: Compensation. I mean if it could go back even to the level that we had it, right? And embeddedness. Acceptance of the value that we bring to the curriculum. Feeling protected by the institution or just acknowledged that we're valued members to the community I think would be great.
00:42:47A.B.: What do you hope stays the same?
00:42:53L.M.: That we have a strong affiliate base in multiple departments and maybe multiple colleges, and that we just keep growing a coalition of people invested in gender research and teaching about gender and sexuality in our classes. Even if it doesn't look exactly like it is now, we know where it is in the institution, and it still has a home.
00:43:22A.B.: I asked you a lot of questions that were kind of focused on your first directorship. For example, we talked about some political things that were going on at that time. I want to give you a chance before we finish - what's going on right now? And not just political. I mean we talked about the pandemic, I think that was one of the most impactful things. But things that are going on in the world that you feel affect your work as director this year.
00:43:58L.M.: Yeah, so - things going on in the last two weeks. First, let's just say the political climate in the university changed so that now I am directing this program as a service project with no compensation of any kind. I gutted any programming. I'm doing no programming this year because I have no resources, bandwidth, or support to do any programming. I am barely doing the minimum of scheduling our classes, holding a faculty meeting a semester, and will write the annual report. Personally, it feels like I'm half-assing my job because I know what I did as director the first time, but it also feels important not to do more than what is valued and compensated. And to know your worth isn't to just give. It doesn't serve the program for me to do all the same things for no compensation. Because then I'm just setting everybody up to come behind me to have an unrealistic level of service.
00:45:12L.M.: That's I think important to talk about, how very, very drastic that change is. No stipend, no course releases, no support. Unclear directions as to whether College Wide Programs are allowed to still exist or if the faculty need to be housed in departments. But no direction, no leadership given on a process of how to do that. I'm sure that I'm being set up to fail by the end of the year. That's fine. [Laughter]
00:45:46L.M.: Then in the world, we are facing data breaches that put us and all of our students who might have student loans at risk, because we have personal financial information in the hands of people who shouldn't have it and [should] have no access to it. Huge losses of financial aid resources. There's a millions of dollars shortage Pell Grant fund that we think is going to impact our students' ability to continue to be enrolled in the university. Loss of indirect costs from research that is going to hob-nobble our main campus in Ann Arbor that then, even though we often feel we don't get enough support from Ann Arbor, their ability to support Dearborn and Flint I think will be reduced even further in the next few years as they have to make up their own budget shortfalls from the change in structuring of federal funds from research. Students who are fearful that ICE will be on campus, that it's not safe to leave their homes let alone go to class. I think that's a huge one that is impacting a lot of our students right now and their feelings of safety. Not just psychological safety but actual physical safety. I think that costs with tariffs are going to increase, so we're going to have students facing more housing and food insecurity than we've ever had before. I think they're going to be trying to come to us for support or asking us for support. So those are a lot of the things.
00:47:23L.M.: Then, of course, it being declared "illegal" - basically that we aren't allowed to do what we do. It should be deemed illegal. That we are divisive and ruining the country, and don't say "women" or "gender" or "trans" or -
00:47:37A.B.: "Intersectionality."
00:47:39L.M.: "Intersectionality." Any research project with the word "female" in it. But if you collect any demographics, that's every research project in the world. Let alone my work in abortion and reproductive rights. So I think all of it is coming. I keep waiting for the letter that tells me I'm illegal and not allowed to teach anything that I'm expert to teach anymore.
00:48:06A.B.: So where is your center in this? Because my sense from you, both in this interview and just knowing you for years, is that you have a very strong center. And I think - who knows who will listen to these interviews. I'm guessing that it will be some of our students, and I'm guessing it will be some junior faculty. They might look up to you like I do. Tell me, in this storm, how are you anchoring yourself?
00:48:45L.M.: I think part of it is that responsibility and that service to others. So that at least publicly, it is my job to be the anchor and to be unwavering, right? To make sure I'm creating an environment where a junior faculty member can still get tenure doing the work that matters to them, and this can still be an institution where they can do that work the next four years. Right? Let's hope four years. [Laughter] Who knows how many years? Part of that comes - I think having purpose helps you have a center, and if you have a really clear purpose, then that doesn't mean you don't feel negative things or have racing thoughts or high anxieties, but it means that you can be focused on, what do I need to do to create the outcomes for that purpose? In my head if I can just hold onto purpose and curiosity and try to remember, "What are you so afraid of? Why are you so scared? Why do you want to do that?" When I can maintain my own ability to think critically about things, then it just helps me hold my sanity.
00:50:09A.B.: Before I ask kind of my conclusion, is there anything else that you wanted to add or say?
00:50:15L.M.: I just love this project, and I can't wait to hear - I want to know more about our own history. Were there any times when it felt as bad as you and I feel as directors? Where we were this - What happened in the '80s? Maybe that would make us feel better. [Laughter]
00:50:39A.B.: I was kind of thinking the same thing.
00:50:41L.M.: Also, the idea that these are chapters, and our chapter can only go up to today because that's the time we're living in, but that there could be a second wave of this, or there could be another wave of this where - History is long. I'm glad we're preserving these moments now, because they do feel particularly scary and vulnerable. There is a lot of uncertainty about our place in the university, but I know that there's not a lot of uncertainty in our worth and how we're going to show up for students. With compassion and with as much grace as we can.
00:51:28A.B.: It's interesting because when friends outside [academia] ask me about what's going on, I give them this long litany of the chaos that you described. And then I'm like, "But I'm okay." [Laughter] And I'm not really sure why. [Laughter] But I think part of it is the purpose part. I think in situations like this, purpose gets really, really clear. And distilled.
00:51:54L.M.: Very distilled. Very clear. And people talk about - being local - I think we have a job that also exceedingly grounds us in local action in some ways. I'm obsessively thinking about an interaction I had with a student where I'm not super satisfied with what I did in that interaction, and it's been on my mind all week. I'm like, "Well, tonight I get another chance to plant a different seed or ask a different question or resolve that in some way." Again, it's those relationships. Knowing that I have a classroom where students are looking for answers, but they're also waking up to asking different questions. And when I can get really excited about that, because then I start thinking about all the students who have done that over the years, who might not have, if they weren't in our courses. And that's exciting.
00:52:59A.B.: This final question is one that you may feel you've already answered, but I'll see if you want to add anything else. How do you see the Women's and Gender Studies program directorship fitting into the larger picture of your career and life?
00:53:15L.M.: Well, I think that it was a defining moment that let me really learn. It was something I really, really wanted and was terrified of failing at. It's hard to sometimes go after the things that feel like there are big stakes. Even though we had a bunch of failures, I don't think I failed as a director. I think there were just a lot of learning opportunities in doing this. It actually is a period that made me feel less lonely than I think typical academic jobs do. Because I think a lot of the typical work of an academic is thinking about your classes in your own head, and then you go and you maybe connect with the students, but not your peers. Right? There's not a lot of peer interaction. You maybe do your own - if you do your own writing, maybe you work with a research team, but a lot of the thinking is on your own. The problem solving is on your own. This has just been collaborative and collective, and just teaching me so many things about like, "You don't have to rush - " The lessons I always relearn and relearn are, pause. You don't have to rush. You don't have to know all the answers just because a question was asked. You're going to facilitate finding the answers. But I don't hold the weight - that leadership isn't just a weight of responsibility, but that it makes you really plugged into community. That was a really nice lesson, I think, that really changed how I think about leadership and opportunities in general.
00:55:00A.B.: I feel like I learned - like it was like a podcast. [Laughter] I was like, "Oh, I feel better." [Note from Amy: this was my first interview of the series.]
00:55:11L.M.: But who's going to interview you?
00:55:13A.B.: I had asked Rose to interview me. Then Suzanne volunteered to interview me. So now I'm kind of choosing an interviewer. [Laughter]
00:55:21L.M.: Nice. Well, I'm glad somebody external will interview you.
00:55:26A.B.: Someone will interview me, and it will be interesting to be on the other side. I'm actually really looking forward to that, too.
00:55:33L.M.: That's so good. I also realize, we talked about my mentor, and it is Suzanne [Bergeron], and I again in research mode didn't say her name as we were talking about it. That wasn't deliberate. Suzanne, I love you. Thank you for being my mentor. [Laughter]
00:55:45A.B.: You know, the other thing we'll do with this is I will, when I'm preparing these to live somewhere in an archive, we will have annotations attached. If there are places where somebody used an acronym and didn't explain what it was, or referenced a person that's important like a mentor who's also in the study, we can link even to her interview. We can start to have people start to see how it takes a village to raise a program type of thing.
00:56:16L.M.: It really does. Because if we hadn't gotten to hire you, we wouldn't have any of the LGBTQ certificate courses. Let alone the certificate. At the time, I don't know what would have happened with Pride and other student orgs that needed some leadership and community building, and so those are wins. We had wins too.
00:56:39A.B.: We've had wins for sure. [Laughter]. All right. Thank you.
00:56:44L.M.: Thank you.
