Macalester College President Suzanne M Rivera

Dr. Suzanne Rivera is the President of Macalester College. She also is a Professor of Public Affairs, and her scholarship focuses on research ethics and science policy. Rivera has written numerous journal articles and book chapters, and she co-edited the book Specimen Science. Her research has been supported by the NIH, the NSF, the DHHS Office of Research Integrity, and the Cleveland Foundation. She is engaged in numerous civic and municipal leadership roles, including Chair of the Board of Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research (PRIM&R), Appointed Member of the Executive Council for Minnesota’s Young Women’s Initiative, Board Member of the Science Museum of Minnesota, Board Member of College Possible, and Member of the TeenSHARP National Advisory Board. Rivera received a BA in American Civilization from Brown University, an MSW from UC-Berkeley, and a PhD in public policy from UT Dallas.

Head Start Programs

Brown University Undocumented, First-Generation College, and Low-Income Student Center 

Transcript

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

students, people, brown, feeling, college, Headstart, Minnesota, Posse, support, low income students, financial aid, St. Paul, sponsored, day, job, brown university, group, Marian Wright Edelman, graduate, phd

SPEAKERS

Resa Lewiss, Sue Rivera

Resa Lewiss  00:36

Hi, listeners. Thanks so much for joining me with today's episode and I'm gonna start with a quote. You can't be what you can't see. One more time, you can't be what you can't see. Now this was said by Marian Wright Edelman. She was the founder of the Children's Defense Fund and was one of the original founders of the Headstart program. She graduated Spelman College and Yale School of Law. Now Marian Wright Edelman is not my guest in today's conversation, however, she was an inspiration for my guest. Today I'm in conversation with Suzanne M. Rivera, PhD MSW. Sue. Dr. Suzanne Rivera is the president of Macalester College in Minneapolis. She's also a Professor of Public Affairs. Her scholarship focuses on research ethics and science policy. She received her BA in American civilization from Brown University, a master's in social work from UC Berkeley, and a PhD in public policy from UT Dallas. Now Sue and I have a few areas of overlap. Number one, we graduated college one year apart. Number two is the Headstart program. Growing up in my small town, Westerly, Rhode Island, I was exposed to the Headstart program through my mother. My mother is an elementary school educator, and she did preschool testing for children. And my knowledge at the time was she helped with evaluating children for learning disabilities, for challenges with speech, sound, and sight. Let's get to the conversation where when we get started, Sue is explaining her ideas about mentorship, and who her mentors were, or at least a few of them.

 

Sue Rivera  02:47

I mean, one thing I tell young people all the time is, don't hold your breath waiting for a mentor who shares all of your attributes who can inspire you because especially if you're from a historically excluded or underserved group, the likelihood that there's going to be some inspirational leader who shares all your attributes is pretty small. So the mentors and sponsors who've made the biggest impact in my life have all been men. They've all been white men, they've all been white men who were significantly older than me and much more accomplished, and who came from backgrounds that were, you know, that had a lot more privileged than my own. And yet, we were able to connect on a deep level and they really opened doors for me. So a couple exams for Harry Spector at UC Berkeley was a great mentor is no longer with us. Another great mentor, for me was a guy named Al Gilman, a Nobel Laureate, who, who I worked for at UT Southwestern in Dallas, Texas, opened a lot of doors for me, encouraged me to go back and get my PhD when I was a 35 year old mother of two school aged kids. And once I got it, promoted me and then what, and then once I had a faculty appointment, invited me to co author a chapter for him with him in the kind of most important pharmacology textbook, that he was responsible for publishing, which means My name is forever linked with his in the literature, which is an incredibly generous gift for him to give to me. People like that have sort of stepped in at at moments where, if not for them, I might not have seen in my self potential that was there. Another person I would mention is a professor from my undergraduate days. Greg Elliot at Brown University in the sociology department, who sort of encouraged me to think about my own interests in social inequality and poverty as things that were worth studying things that were worth studying in a rigorous way as a scholar and not just sort of feeling badly about or complaining about or having a personal interest, but really taking them on as an intellectual project. So he sponsored me for a summer research assistantship, he had me serve as a TA in one of his classes. And he sponsored a group independent study project for me and a bunch of other students. And I'm still in touch with him to this day. He's somebody who certainly helped me think about myself as a scholar at a time where I was really thinking, I was just barely holding on, like, hoping I could graduate with a BA, I wasn't imagining that I could go on to become a professor and eventually a college president.

 

Resa Lewiss  05:36

People saw in you what maybe you hadn't yet seen for yourself. I was a sociology concentrator, and I took Professor Elliott's class, and I remember him reading from Kurt Vonnegut Mother Night, and it was really moving, he sort of cut to the punch line of we are who we pretend to be, so we must be very careful who we pretend to be. And that stuck with me. And that also launched a whole lollapalooza of reading Kurt Vonnegut.

 

Sue Rivera  06:07

Yeah, actually, this is one of the beautiful things about a liberal arts education, I think is that you know, so you became a physician after being a sociology undergraduate concentrator. I dabbled in a lot of different things as an undergrad did not imagine I would eventually become an academic, but I feel like the tools I got, from that degree have served me really well, moving between jobs. You know, I originally went to go work for the federal government thinking I was going to do policy work. Eventually, I worked in higher education administration, then I went back and got a PhD in public policy. But, you know, all along as I was making career changes, the tools I got as an undergraduate to think critically and communicate effectively and, you know, think in an interdisciplinary way work with people who have really different perspectives than I have. All of that is just priceless. I mean, so so incredibly valuable.

 

Resa Lewiss  07:02

Speaking of liberal arts education, let's jump right in and talk about Macalester for audience members that aren't familiar with the college. Tell us about the college and tell us about how it's been to be President.

 

Sue Rivera  07:14

Well, it's a wonderful college. It's it's almost 150 years old, and it's a originally was founded by Presbyterians and although still Presbyterian affiliated his is a secular liberal arts college, a small private liberal arts college in St. Paul, Minnesota. It has a deep history of being committed to social justice. It was the first college in the United States to fly the United Nations flag, which is still flying outside my window in my office here. And in fact, Kofi Annan was a graduate of Macalester the four pillars of a Macalester education as they're currently described, our academic excellence, internationalism, multiculturalism and service to society. And I think the character of this place actually is not that dissimilar from the brown that you and I know, in the sense that social justice is really important part of the character read institution, but it also attracts people who dispositional li are attracted to activism, to wanting to make a more just and peaceful world who think about their education in a sense as not only a privilege, but also an obligation to go out and make things better. And so the students we attract at Macalester are really sparky, in the sense that they, they, they're, you know, they're really passionate. They all come with it, let's just set aside that they're really academically talented because they all are so that no longer is a distinguishing characteristic once they get here because they're all academically talented. So what distinguishes them when they get here is all the other stuff in addition to being bright, you know, they're, they're committed athlete, they're a poet. They're a weaver. They're a dancer, they're, they're an aspiring politician involved in political campaigns mean that they're all just how they're debater, you know. So whenever I meet students, one of the first things I say to them is, well, what are you really loving right now? Or, you know, what's keeping you really busy right now, instead of saying, you know, what are you taking? Or what's your major, I'm much less interested in what their major is. And I'm much more interested in like, you know, what's got them really jazzed? What are they spending their time on? What's what's so exciting that they're staying up into the middle of the night working on it,

 

Resa Lewiss  09:40

The timing of your start.  There was an overlap with the murder of Mr. George Floyd. And I'm wondering if you can share with the audience how that sort of set a tone and set an inspiration for your work.

 

Sue Rivera  09:55

Yeah, it was a really difficult time I actually accepted the job. On January 31, of 2020. So at that time, if you can remember back to the before times, none of us had ever heard of COVID. And the board of trustees who offered me the job, were saying, this is going to be a turnkey operation for you, the previous president had been here for 17 years, smooth sailing, really easy transition, you know, easy peasy. And three weeks later, you know, every college in America started closing because of COVID. And I realized, wow, this job is about to get a lot more challenging. I was in Cleveland, Ohio at the time at Case Western Reserve University. And I was sort of watching as the news was unfolding, but also doing my job at another higher ed institution. So I could anticipate how it was going to get more difficult to come to McAllister, then literally on the day that I got in my car to drive to Cleveland, to drive to St. Paul from Cleveland to take this job was the day that George Floyd was murdered. So as I was driving all day, north of Michigan, and then across the up of Michigan, going west to St. Paul, I would drive all day and then turn on the TV at night and watch the news. And as we approached St. Paul, the city was deeper and deeper in grief and righteous anger and fear National Guard troops were coming in, there were fires all over the place. In fact, I was supposed to start the job on a Monday and arrive on a Saturday and I got a call on that Saturday while I was on the road saying don't try and come into the city because we've got a curfew. And it's not feeling safe right now. Just get in a hotel outside of the city and try and come in tomorrow. So I arrived really on Sunday in St. Paul to start the job on Monday. And I and I recognize that my first day was going to be very different than what any of us had imagined. Because what the, what the moment called for was to name the pain and grief and anger everyone was feeling. And to try to address people's grief in a way that was honest about the challenges offer some comfort, but also a call to action about how we could be how we could be of help how we could be of service. So you know, the first couple things I did that week were one was I attended a silent vigil that was organized by the black clergy of St. Paul from various different faith, faith communities, I also attended a food and hygiene drive that was organized by our students, you know, it's just a lot, you know, we stood up a mutual aid fundraising drive, within the first couple of weeks, it was just a lot of attending to the immediate needs of the community. And also, all of this was complicated by having to do almost everything by zoom, you know, so, you know, Zoom is good for a lot of things. But when people are crying when people are scared when people, you know, our international students, many of them couldn't go home, because of COVID. So they were staying over the summer, it was just very, very complicated and didn't look anything like what we thought it was going to look like. And what I didn't have was a reservoir of trust built up with this community. And the only way I could talk to people was on a computer screen, which doesn't give the full benefit of body language. It doesn't give all you know, everything you learned from being in a room with somebody. The various facial expressions, the way the way that when you talk to a roomful of people, you see two people make eye contact after you've said something and you recognize you have to go follow up with them and see what that was all about. You know, none of that is possible on Zoom. And, and it was just it was just an impossible summer. It was very, very difficult. I was trying to introduce myself at a time where I also had to deliver a lot of bad news to people. You know, we were having to take all sorts of difficult decisions about keeping the residence halls densifying the residence halls by telling some people they couldn't move back in August that was disappointing for them taking decisions related to the college's finances, like suspending contributions to employees retirement accounts for six months until we could understand how we were going to do financially. arranging for testing COVID testing was incredibly expensive and something we hadn't budgeted for figuring out where to put hand sanitizer and plexiglass and what our masking policy should be. I mean, really, it was like being a full time disaster management person not being a college president. And in many ways, the whole first year was was not being a college president. It was it was just one really challenging, ethical or logistical decision after another all year long.

 

Resa Lewiss  14:50

According to my reading in 1991, you delivered your graduation class orration and I'm wondering if you can fill us in on about what you spoke

 

Sue Rivera  15:04

well, I, you know, I basically I talked about my unlikely journey to being an Ivy League graduate and what that could mean for all of us about the possibilities of you know pathbreaking of moving into uncharted territory. When I, when I went to college, we didn't have the expression first gen, and we didn't have really a sense of pride around being a financial aid student to the contrary, my experience at an elite institution was that if you were there on financial aid, and came from a low income background, that you tried to hide it as much as possible in order to fit in, you know, back then Brown had a policy of limiting financial aid students to 30% of the student population. And that meant even just students who only had loans and got no grant awards. So just imagine an environment it's not like that anymore, I should clarify, Brown is not like that anymore. But back then 70% of the student body were full pay, meaning their parents could write the whole check. And just imagine what that means when the tuition is significantly more than the, you know, median income for a family of four in this country. It means you're, you're in a really elite and I daresay elitist environment. So what that meant if you were a student on financial aid was that it was kind of a scary place, it was kind of an alienating place. And when I arrived there, I really felt like a fish out of water. I thought about transferring, had a job in the Ratty in the dining hall. You know, my work study job, where I was sort of serving other students and feeling I don't know if I would say inferior but definitely had a sense of imposter syndrome. Like you know, one of these days somebody is going to figure out I don't really belong here. And the turning point for me was that in in the spring semester of that first year for me, a chaplain, Reverend Flora Kashagian who I don't know if that's a name, you know, but she offered like a discussion group, she and Beth Zwick, who was the head of the Women's Center offered a discussion group for students struggling with money issues. So I opened the school newspaper one day, and there's an ad in there. That's like, I don't even remember what it said. But it was something like are you struggling with money issues? Are you on financial aid, you know, are things tough at home, and you don't know how to talk about it come to this discussion. And let's rap about it. And for whatever reason, that spoke to me and I, I went, and there were like, 11 or 12 people in the room for this discussion group. But it was like the Island of Misfit Toys. Do you remember that, that that Christmas cartoon where like, every toy is broken in some kind of way, but they all have their gifts, right? Every student who showed up for that thing had a different non traditional path to get to brown and we were all broken in some kind of weird way. You know, for me, I had grown up in an immigrant home on was on public assistance, food stamps, free lunch, you know, you name it. I was there on a on a Pell Grant, which are, you know, the neediest students. And there were other people in the room who came from really different environments. I grew up in New York City, but there were other people who were like, from a rural farm family, or, you know, I mean, just all everybody had different reasons for why they came to that discussion group. But it was magical because we all saw each other in a really like, pure and non judgmental way. And we could all be real with each other. As it turns out, one of the other 11 people was the person who would eventually become my spouse. And other people in the room that day are lifelong friends. I mean, we really bonded, we ended up forming a club called sofa students on financial aid. We even have little T shirts made up that said, so far, so good. And it had like a picture of a couch that was all ripped and torn on on the front. And by making it a student club, that got incorporated by the student government, we kind of created legitimacy for ourselves on campus, and started to create a way of talking about being from a low income background that didn't feel shameful, that felt prideful, not prideful, in the sense of hubris, but in the sense of like, acknowledging the distance traveled was great that we were not born on third base. And yet we were here sort of competing with people who had every advantage in the world and having a sense of deserving to be there or belonging there. So by the time I was a senior and I got selected to give the one of the two oratory addresses at graduation, the theme for me really was one of triumph of having overcome all of those hurdles and feeling like finally I feel like I deserve at this place. I earned my spot here.

 

Resa Lewiss  19:57

In my freshman unit, there was a woman with whom I'm still very, very close. She is an attorney. She's an LA county judge. And she transferred from Brown for some of the reasons that you considered transferring. And she to this day says that it's one of her biggest regrets. And also she really feels if they were more visible vocal support for first gen students than she thinks it would have made a huge difference for her.

 

Sue Rivera  20:29

Yeah, no doubt and and Brown has come a long way. In this regard. I consider them a real leader. Now they have this you fly center. It's like it's an actual center on campus for people who are undocumented first gen or low income. And they get extra support. They have a dedicated Dean, they have programming. I think it's a real testament to the seriousness with which Brown has taken the unique challenges that face low income students going to a place like that. It also helped a lot that between Vartan, Gregorian and roof Simmons, two presidents, who I greatly admire from Brown, they were able to raise the money to provide financial aid to students who need it, but also to go need blind. So I told you that at the time that I went there, they limited the number of students on financial aid to 30% of the student body, that's no longer true. Now, when you apply to brown, you are admitted without regard to ability to pay and they commit to meet full need. So I think it's a much more socio economically diverse student body today. And I think Brown has really been a leader in how to increase access and support low income students when they get there, because I think it's a two part problem. You know, just letting people in. But allowing them to sink or swim is really not helpful. You need to increase access, but then also provide the support necessary so that the that educational opportunity is a ladder to economic mobility, people have to actually be able to finish, you know, complete the degree, and then go off and have a career afterwards in order for the opportunity to really, you know, fulfill that promise.

 

Resa Lewiss  22:16

Yeah, it reminds me a bit of what you described with the Headstart program of not just, you know, supporting this one individual child, but it's actually the system in place. So similar, like it's one thing to get in, but you have to help the student, succeed, thrive. Be healthy in that environment. I believe I've read that you that you're actually doing work to increase access and admission of students that may have fewer resources in the state. Can you talk a little bit about that initiative?

 

Sue Rivera  22:47

Yeah, I'd love to. So when I arrived at Macalester again, just like a little over a year ago, Macalester already had a relationship with the quest Bridge Program, which is one way to recruit first gen and low income students. But of course, we take those from all over the country. We also had other cohort programs like the Bonner Scholars Program and the Mellon Mays program. But after the murder of George Floyd, one thing that I heard a lot from people on campus was that while Macalester had done a great job recruiting a diverse student body from not only all over the country, but also all over the world. We have a very international student body that we hadn't done as much to focus on students from right here in Minnesota, especially talented students from historically excluded groups from right here in Minnesota. So we did two things last year. One was that we established a new fund called the Minnesota Opportunity Scholarship Fund, which is an effort to raise scholarship dollars that will be targeted specifically to talented students from Minnesota. And the second thing we did was that we joined forces with the Posse Foundation to sign on as a posse school, whereby Macalester will become recipients of the first posse from the state of Minnesota. I don't know if you're that familiar with posse, but that's a program that's 30 plus years old, that that's based on the Really clever idea that that their founder Debbie Bial had, which is that if you pluck one student from an under resourced High School, and you send them across the country to a private liberal arts college, they may feel like a fish out of water. But if you cultivate a cohort of students from a city, and you give them in high school leadership training and other kinds of support, and you foster trust and friendship among them, and then you take a group or a posse, if you will, and you take those 10 students and send them all to the same liberal arts college, the chances are, that they're going to be better equipped to persist and complete because they have each other you know, they don't have that feeling of walking into the dining hall and not seeing any familiar face. We're not having anybody who knows what it's like in their home city neighborhood. You know, the same feeling I had when I walked into that room and I saw the other Misfit Toys sitting around in a circle. The posse already formed a trusting cohort that can keep each other company and offer support through the four year experience of college. So we are adding posse to our other cohort programs here on campus. But we've specified that the posses gotta come from here in Minnesota, they will come from the Twin Cities, either Minneapolis public schools or St. Paul Public Schools. And we're going to get our first group of 10 in September, and we will give them all full tuition scholarships. It's really exciting. Yeah.

 

Resa Lewiss  25:47

Wow. What a conversation and honestly, I could have kept speaking with Sue for quite a while. I think she enjoyed the conversation too, regarding my friend that I referred to in the conversation. Attorney judge Serena Murillo. As I said, we're still friends, and she knows that I had tipped her during this episode. And all I can say is, listen to your heart. Listen to your brain. Have a growth mindset and know that your professional path is not linear. Thanks for joining and see you next week. The visible Voices Podcast amplifies voices both known and unknown, discussing topics of healthcare equity and current trends. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review us on Apple podcasts. It helps other people find the show. You can listen on whatever platform you subscribe to podcasts. Our team includes Stacey Gitlin and Dr. Giuliano Di Portu. If you're interested in sponsoring an episode, please contact me resa@thevisiblevoicespodcast.com. I'm based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and I'm on Twitter @ResaELewiss. Thank you so much for listening and as always, to be continued