Inclusion/Exclusion

Inclusion/Exclusion

A justice and math weblog

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  • Testimonios: Dr. Carrie Diaz Eaton

    Testimonios: Dr. Carrie Diaz Eaton

    Early Life

    I grew up straddling worlds. I was born and raised in Warwick, RI, a couple miles from Providence. My mom was also born in Warwick, RI, but my dad was born about 3700 miles away in Lima, Peru.

    Dr. Carrie Diaz Eaton; Illustration created by Ana Valle.

    My dad, Hugo Evaristo Díaz Mendizábal, was the second oldest of nine children. He would tell a story about one day when they had no money to buy food and his mom went to the butcher. She placed a stack of butcher paper on the scale and demanded that she was owed that much meat over the years of buying from the butcher’s store—and it worked. This story is indicative of the strong Mendizábal women, and also of the reasons that my father immigrated to the U.S. in 1960. As the second oldest, he and his older brother were the first two children to immigrate to the United States after his dad, a surveyor, immigrated and then promised them jobs with him. At fifteen years old, after completing his cartography certification at the Instituto Geográphica Nacional and speaking little English, he arrived in California—to a broken promise and no job.

    My mom came from a working-class, New England Protestant family. My grandfather worked his way up to a foreman in a machine shop, and my grandmother was a homemaker. They built the house they lived in—living in the basement until the first floor was complete and so forth. They both survived the Depression, which forever left an impression on their lives. My grandfather enrolled in the Civilian Conservation Corps, a federal work program initiated by Roosevelt. They had an urban homesteader garden before it was trendy and when it was necessary. My grandmother could make dinner out of any scraps and passed her knowledge of pie making and preserve making to me.

    My dad’s employment prospects brought him eventually to the east coast. It was in Rhode Island in 1966 when he met my mom, on an invitation from his Filipino coworker to dinner at his wife’s house. My mom, Becky Ober, was the wife’s younger sister. In 1967, my mom graduated high school, married my dad, and was pregnant with their first child.

    Becky Ober and Hugo Diaz dating.

    I think I was aware of how unlikely my parents’ (and my aunt’s) marriage was. I was raised in my mother’s church, but my dad went to a Spanish-speaking Catholic church in Providence. But naively, I never linked these to race or ethnicity. It wasn’t until years later, as I was watching Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? with Sidney Poitier when I understood the world in 1967. It wasn’t until 1967 that the Supreme Court overturned the “miscegenation laws’’ prohibiting interracial marriage, as unconstitutional.

    My parents raised my older sister, Alisa, in Rhode Island for only a short time before moving to southern California, to where the rest of my father’s family had now immigrated. It was in California where my older brother, Devon, was born. My dad was able to find work during the day, live in UCLA family housing, and attend night school in the evening, working on his degree in computer science. By this time, he realized that maps were going digital or perhaps more broadly foresaw the future of computing—nearly all of his siblings pursued degrees in math and computer science after coming to the U.S.

    Living in Los Angeles in the late 1960s as a Latinx family was a very different experience than what I was raised with by the time my parents had me. When Alisa was enrolled in school, due to her dark complexion, she was automatically placed in a Spanish-speaking classroom. In this age of assimilation, she had been raised as English-speaking only, leaving her crying when she got home from her first day of school. My dad recalls that he would have to carry a copy of his class schedule in his pocket because on his way to night-class he would be routinely pulled over by cops who wouldn’t believe he was on his way to class. They lived in California only a few years before returning east.

    I was raised in a different America—one nearly 15 years later, on the other side of the United States from my Latinx familia. One where my dad finally finished his computer science degree after 18 years of night-school and transferring colleges. One where my mom also went back to college to transform from a 1980s secretary to a school-based speech-language pathologist. One where I was raised in an English-speaking home but took Spanish-classes to be more connected to my Latinx roots. One where I proudly brought my dad’s Peruvian trinkets to class for show and tell. One where this Latinx family had now achieved something akin to the American Dream (as long as you don’t count the years of school debt, the clash of family backgrounds, and the lack of wealth-building). One where many of my Peruvian aunts and uncles had been successfully educated and employed in the burgeoning computer science industry.

    Finding Mathematics

    In an article I co-authored with my mathematician cousin, Marizza Bailey, called “Revealing Luz’’, I wrote about my journey both towards and away from mathematics. [1] “Revealing Luz’’ was about my great aunt, Tía Luz, who my dad knew growing up in Peru. She was a math teacher and inspired many school children and family members. The greatest gift she gave me was that my dad grew up knowing that the women in his family had the potential to be incredible mathematicians and educators. As I balanced this line of being Latinx-identified, but separated from most of them on the opposite coast, most of my connection to my mathematical and computational successes as well as my Latinx heritage was through my dad. My dad often spent our time together working on math workbooks while my younger sister, Naomi, was in dance class. My older siblings would show me math flashcards as a baby, however, one could argue an even earlier influence—I am a part of mi tía and she is a part of me, and math is a part of both of us. This is a concept Rochelle Gutiérrez brings back to us from Mayan philosophy called In Lak’ech in which we see ourselves in others. [2] The version Dr. Gutiérrez introduces in “Living Mathematx” is more an acknowledgement of a broader community interconnectedness and perhaps less literal than what I mean. No matter the reason, my identity as a mathematician is thoroughly wrapped up in my identity as a Peruvian-American.

    My dad, ever the influence on my mathematical opportunities, chose a town to move to when he relocated to Boston that had an excellent math program. I captained a math team at a public school with a multi-year winning record in Massachusetts and New England. I was also part of the American Regions Mathematics League Massachusetts A team that won in 1998. I would guess others considered me very successful in mathematics, but I always thought of myself as a modest performer among the best. I clearly loved calculating, but had no interest in studying proof-based mathematics in college. All of my siblings solved this by pursuing degrees in civil engineering, but I wanted to go save the oceans and the rainforest. I did not understand what math could offer me other than a job teaching (which I have to say I loved doing, as by this point I had been tutoring math for years. But I did not love this as much as saving the planet!). My rebellious choice as a headstrong teenager was to reject math, and also reject the thought of applying to any college without a zoology program. My second rebellion was to reject the idea of an Ivy League education—in part because I was turned off by the pomp and circumstance, but also because I did not understand that the price tag was just a suggestion. I was worried about the cost and didn’t want my dad to spend the money. At that time, I didn’t realize places like MIT have substantial money for financial aid.

    I found my way back to math because I found my way into a community of mathematicians. In retrospect, I had always been looking for my community. Throughout all of my schooling, I felt I never quite fit in and had longed to be in college. When the University of Maine offered me a full scholarship, I found that community and underwent something akin to a metamorphosis. I became involved with various “diversity’’ groups and found the Latinx and Spanish clubs welcoming of my white face and school-learned Spanish. I credit UMaine, under Dr. Angel Laredo’s leadership as Dean of Students, with the intentional development and support of these communities—from its new inclusivity programming to its student leadership programs. I will always remember at our first Latinx festival and dance at UMaine, Dean Laredo gave an opening talk and said that it was las ganas (the desire), that drove us to be the best. I also found community in the mathematics department, in the math club, and in my small math classes—unlike my large biology lectures. Within these communities, I found my voice as a leader, and then I found my way back to mathematics. For many, finding math is the difficult part, but for me, it was finding my way back to math since it was a part of me from the beginning, or as we said in “Revealing Luz,” finding something that was “always-already-there.”

    Balancing Identities

    During the summers in college, I worked for a temp agency in Boston. I was placed at MIT in Cambridge and for two summers, worked in the basement of Building 11 as a copy assistant. I had wonderful and funny coworkers and enjoyed it immensely. We were responsible for all of the copying and computer rental time for the math department, and I found myself longingly flipping through past Putnam exams and math course textbooks. There is an odd sort of message looking back on this now—that the Latina in Building 11 was only good enough to make the photocopies. My dad, perhaps seeing this longing and realizing that I was leaning to switch to mathematics, called the MIT admissions office and made an interview appointment for transfer. What my dad did not see was the ragged students copying their thesis who hadn’t showered in many days, the campus reports of suicide, and the fact that I felt more at home among the copy staff than the faculty. I also felt more at home among my newly found University of Maine community and family, and I did not want to leave them. Ultimately worried about how I was going to afford tuition and in the midst of developing a community at UMaine, I declined MIT’s offer to transfer.

    At the beginning of my third year, a few changes began to solidify my new path. I was invited to join a research group and graduate topology course by a professor, Dr. Bob Franzosa. I started dating my best friend, Scott Eaton, and by my senior year, we married. The math department hired a mathematical biologist, Dr. Sharon Crook, who combined both my interests into a single discipline. Finally, the department introduced an interdisciplinary master’s in mathematics. Dr. Crook offered me the opportunity to stay as a graduate research assistant in computational neuroscience, which conveniently solved my new two-body problem. It also gave me the opportunity to move in with my grandparents to help as they aged, despite the long commute. Sadly, in the first semester of my master’s program, my grandfather passed away, but we were grateful to be there for my grandmother.

    While at UMaine, I continued to take biology courses and became particularly interested in a specific area of mathematical biology called evolutionary theory. At the time, my cousin Marizza was a PhD student in Galois theory. This gave me some confidence to pursue a PhD in order to stay in Maine as a full-time faculty member. This was a difficult leap because, in order to get a PhD in mathematics, I would have to leave Maine. Fortunately, my husband and I were accepted into all of our graduate programs, with generous assistantships and fellowships. We picked the University of Tennessee because it was relatively close, affordable, and offered the same level of interdisciplinarity I currently enjoyed while training in a rather unique area of study.

    Balancing family, identity, and a PhD in math was not an easy road. As I once described it, it continued to be like the TV show Ninja Warrior—trying to navigate both the planned obstacles while dodging all the surprise ones. I had no idea really about how I was supposed to study for my first prelim at the end of the summer. Even though I excelled in class, I felt like I barely passed the prelim. The final exam for my second prelim class was held on the “Day without Immigrants.” [3] I was distracted the whole time thinking about how I felt I could not boycott my exam that day in solidarity. What gave me joy in these hard times was my work mentoring graduate students. I had begun calling for a teaching assistant support program after completing my exams. My proposal to the department was approved, and the next fall I began co-directing the math department’s first TA teaching development and mentoring program.

    Two weeks before my orals to advance to candidacy and eight and a half months pregnant, my car was hit broadside by a tractor-trailer. I had to be induced and had my son, Gabriel, on July 25th. Then the childcare facility I had reserved space in closed without notice, and I could only find care two days a week. When my son was two and a half weeks old, I was back at the university teaching the TA development class. I called my parents to come help until daycare could start and a fellow graduate student, Erin Bodine, would watch Gabriel while I was in class. When he was not quite two months old, I passed my oral exams, wading through the fog of sleepless nights as a new mom. I was nursing him when I turned down the opportunity to attend an evening awards banquet—where, I later found out, I had been awarded the University’s Chancellor Award for graduate teaching.

    Diaz siblings with papá in the middle. L to: Devon, Naomi, Hugo, Alisa, and Carrie.

    Nearly five years into my PhD, my husband received a job offer for an instructor position back in Maine. By this time my parents had divorced, remarried, and retired to Maine, and my husband’s family also lived in Maine. Much to the surprise of my advisor, I decided to take a leave from my PhD ABD (all but dissertation) to be closer to family support. We moved back in with my grandmother, who by then was no longer grieving, but needed more assistance at home. I nearly quit my entire PhD as I realized I was pregnant with my daughter, Yudani. It had always been good enough to stay here with my family and teach at a local college. However, part of this dream scattered when I realized that the adjunct pay I was earning and my husband’s instructor position were not going to be enough to make ends meet. I also felt a sense of regret at the thought of never finishing the last chapter of my dissertation. So, with some babysitting provided by my retired parents, I finished as much as I could on my dissertation independently before my daughter was born, and went on the job market for a full-time position. As a math biologist in the 2000s, I was lucky to have many interviews in Maine, and I accepted an Assistant Professor position at a small environmental college, Unity College—teaching math to save the environment. It was that position, contingent on finishing my PhD before my first contract review—and the encouragement of my peers—that gave me the last push I needed to finish off the final chapter, which in retrospect was my most independent and intellectually creative work.

    Moving home meant my family had more support, and it turned out to be fortuitous timing. My dad was diagnosed with a muscle degeneration disease. My mom was in a severe motorcycle accident just a few weeks before my final dissertation defense and nearly died. She was air-lifted to the hospital I lived only a few miles from, and I was there to support her and her husband as the decision was made to amputate her leg. I went to a conference only a week later, having organized sessions. I have a vivid memory of my advisor asking me if I was ready for my defense, and trying to tell him about my mom while crying on the escalator. My house in those times was a host for all of my family who came to visit my mom in the hospital. In the end, I passed all those exams and all the trials and defenses. It would be years later that I would find out I was the first Latina to graduate with a mathematics PhD from the University of Tennessee. It was an accomplishment of both grit and luck, but not particularly graceful.

    Sometimes I feel conflict about the decisions I made on my path. I frequently rejected “superior’’ choices of institutional name to stay closer to my values in both family and mathematics. However, I do not think I sacrificed any education—maybe connections and access, now that I see the view from Bates, the elite small private college where I currently teach. Perhaps if I did not center family, I would not have faced the roadblocks of being a mother in academia or burdened a significant care-taking role for my parents and grandparents when they needed me. But I know also that if I had made different choices, I would not have been the same person, embraced by my communities, and given the opportunity to lead. I cannot imagine who I would have become had I not made my decisions based on the values that I held dear. I have found this true also for the students I have taught along the way, which have always held the same hidden potential, no matter where they have attended school. My advice for those on the path of self-discovery is to be true to yourself. My advice for everyone else is to look beyond the labels of worthiness that mathematicians use to judge others.

    Interdisciplinarity Means Working Together

    Although I describe my upbringing as fundamentally different than my siblings, I was also largely naive and shielded. I still had struggles navigating the differences between my mother’s and father’s side. We interacted a lot with the Latinx community through my father’s church, as my father would often help with translation needs. I have a vivid memory of having a newly arrived refugee come to the house with his daughter. I played with the daughter, while my dad helped the father. Later I asked him about the father because I had heard him crying with my dad. His wife had been shot at the border. Years later, in my suburban English class, I would write about this experience. My teacher scoffed that I most certainly had to be exaggerating. These many differences between worlds also played a huge role in my parents’ divorce. My dad could never shake the feeling that he was always trying to prove he was more than the Latino boy that got my teenage mother pregnant.

    Carrie, Scott, Yudani, and Gabriel in 2018.

    There were many worlds my family upbringing straddled—Catholic and Protestant, conservative and liberal, white and Brown, English and Spanish. I only added to these diverse experiences when I moved between mathematics and biology and became a northerner in Tennessee. In addition, I had to navigate these multiple worlds as a mother, as an underrepresented minority in STEM, as a woman, and as a queer individual. These many intersections, worlds, and bridges, created a confluence of experiences by which I became a leader as a boundary spanner. I was used to translating experiences between worlds. I understood the values and axioms that made these worlds operate, and I was consistently looking for common ground between frameworks and ways of seeing the worlds. I was used to thinking about language as reflecting culture and history. Other researchers in Chicana studies and education call this Nepantla—the space between these spaces which allows us to think differently and open new spaces of being. [4] Therefore, interdisciplinary research for me is an outlet by which I can use the sum of my knowledge and experience, but also I have found my type of boundary spanning is needed to move research and education forward.

    Now I am almost used to moving between disciplines and moving between or embracing multiple identities. This perspective has been particularly important as I have started to work in building an interdisciplinary and inclusive STEM education. How do we talk to biology students about mathematical concepts? What does math feel like to others when it is spoken without first understanding their own cultures and conceptualizations of mathematics? It turns out that biology students already know a lot about math and modeling, they just understand it differently—the engineering examples of calculus speak a different language than what biology students understand. Community co-evolution has also become an important and reoccurring theme. My research in evolutionary theory led me to study plant-pollinator networks—species that work together to build diverse and resilient communities. That final chapter of my dissertation that was almost never written because I left Tennessee ABD was about how mutualistic communities co-evolve together, the structure of those networks, and why they are both diverse and resilient. [5] I want the STEM disciplines to build a diverse, resilient community together.

    Networks for Change

    Re-conceptualizing my research strengths as synthesizing frameworks and as about cultivating diverse, resilient, co-evolving community networks has given a coherency to my research program that others’ used to label “too-broad’’ or “scattered.’’ In retrospect, I always naturally gravitated to forming community support networks in my early leadership days at UMaine and with the TA support program at UT even when that work seemed separate from my research.

    As soon as the ink was dry on my PhD, I wrote my first grant, to support a network called QUBES (Quantitative Undergraduate Biology Education and Synthesis). We had a dream that we would help others find high-quality curriculum materials in math and biology by collaborating broadly with professional societies across disciplinary boundaries and by providing a robust cyberinfrastructure. [6,7] Seven years and about $4 million later, we have moved far beyond our original dreams. I have also been involved in a number of other networks, all with the goal of bringing groups together to collaborate, and more recently with an emphasis on equity and social justice.

    I have also been avidly involved with institutional governance and professional societies, which I enjoy. I am not sure how I started, but I have always tried to be a reliable and hard worker and say no when I cannot deliver, and so my name seems to continue to be recommended. I have served as Chair of the Education Subgroup of the Society for Mathematical Biology. I also served on the Board of BioSIGMAA, the Special Interest Group of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) devoted to undergraduate education in mathematical and computational biology. I am currently the Chair for the MAA’s Committee on Minority Participation in Mathematics. I have served on the Editorial Board of Letters in Mathematics and currently serve on the Editorial Boards of CourseSource and Problems, Resources, and Issues in Mathematics Undergraduate Studies. In 2020, I was awarded the Society for Mathematical Biology’s John Jungck Prize for Excellence in Education.

    Concluding Remarks

    In all of my experiences, my biggest joys have come from raising a wonderful family and from supporting others to be successful on their own terms. I remember being told as a new person in a new institution, that the ideas I had were not going to work. Even though I have seen many ideas rise and fail, I myself have seeded improbable ideas that radically succeeded. Instead of crushing potential, my goal is to always bring out the strengths of the people I work with. The next generation of mathematicians and biologists seems to be more insightful and creative than I have been, and I actively work against the institutionalized ideas that older means wiser, that collaboration means a lack of self-sufficiency, and that niceness fixes systemic inequality. There is still work to do, but I believe we can do it together.

    Advice

    I conclude with some advice that I have learned through experience in my life and career. I share it with the hope that it helps readers who are exploring mathematics as a career as well as those who have already found their way to mathematics and have embraced it.

    • I think math is a part of us and we are a part of math, but some of us find ourselves on a lifelong entangled path with it. Follow both your heart and your brain. My brain made me pick math over biology as a primary discipline, but my heart brought me to the work I do today.
    • Find your support system at school and outside of school, and use it. Figure out what keeps your brain and your heart motivated and use that to keep you going through challenges.
    • My advice for those on the path of self-discovery is to be true to yourself. My advice for everyone else is to look beyond the labels of worthiness that mathematicians use to judge others.
    • Actively work against the institutionalized ideas that older means wiser, that collaboration means a lack of self-sufficiency, and that niceness fixes systemic inequality. It is easy to be lulled into assimilation, so reflect often.
    • Working together, we can build diverse and resilient communities.

    [1] Revealing Luz: Illuminating Our Identities Through Duoethnography, Eaton, Carrie Diaz and Bailey, Luz Marizza, Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, 8, 2,(2018).
    [2] Living Mathematx: Towards a Vision for the Future, Gutiérrez, Rochelle, Philosophy of Mathematics Education Journal, 32 (2017).
    [3] On May 1st 2006 various protests and strikes occurred around the United States to demonstrate the importance of immigration to the United States.
    [4] Embracing Nepantla: Rethinking “knowledge’’ and its use in mathematics teaching, Gutiérrez, Rochelle, REDIMAT, 1, [1], (2012). and Making Faces, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color, Aunt Lute Books, (1990).
    [5] Diaz Eaton, C. E. (2013). Modeling the Genetic Consequences of Mutualism on Communities (PhD dissertation).
    [6] Quantitative Undergraduate Biology Education and Synthesis (QUBES): The Power of Biology X Math X Community (qubeshub.org).
    [7] Donovan, Sam, et al. “QUBES: a community focused on supporting teaching and learning in quantitative biology.” Letters in Biomathematics 2.1 (2015): 46–55.


    Previous Testimonios:

    • Dr. James A. M. Álvarez
    • Dr. Federico Ardila Mantilla
    • Dr. Selenne Bañuelos
    • Dr. Erika Tatiana Camacho
    • Dr. Anastasia Chavez
    • Dr. Minerva Cordero
    • Dr. Ricardo Cortez
    • Dr. Jesús A. De Loera Herrera
    • Dr. Jessica M. Deshler

    Brian P Katz (BK)

    June 14, 2022
    Testimonios
  • Testimonios: Dr. Jessica M. Deshler

    Testimonios: Dr. Jessica M. Deshler

    Family and Identity

    My mother, Clara, was the third of four siblings and the first in her family to go to college. She enrolled at the University of Albuquerque (no longer in existence) right after high school, earned her associate’s degree in nursing and began working immediately. My father was from Texas, worked for the National Weather Service, and had been working for a short while in New Mexico. Soon after they married, they relocated to Northern Texas in the middle of ‘tornado alley’ where there was much work for the National Weather Service to do. The first few years there included my birth, a terrible tornado that leveled most of our city and a motorcycle accident that left my father with a traumatic brain injury. After his accident and subsequent rehabilitation, he was unable to go back to work, and moved in with his parents while my mother and I returned to New Mexico. I spent my childhood traveling back and forth between the two states to visit both sides of my family.

    Dr. Jessica Deshler; Illustration created by Ana Valle.

    Most people don’t realize I’m Hispanic when they meet me—I am white passing, I don’t speak with an accent, my maiden name is Scottish and my married name is German. My father was white, and though I identify with my mother’s side of the family, I pass as white and am therefore not the target of direct racism and acknowledge the privilege that this has afforded me during my life. Despite the privilege that comes with fair skin, it can also bring struggles of not quite fitting in or feeling like you can’t quite claim your heritage because of how you look. Being mixed-race and white passing is a frustrating state to live in, but I like to believe it has helped equip me with tools to understand and interrogate issues of identity and culture.

    Education and Falling in Love with Mathematics

    Growing up in Albuquerque I spent a lot of time with my grandparents and the rest of my mother’s large family, who taught me how to speak Spanish. My mother worked hard as a nurse and instilled in me a strong work ethic that I maintain to this day. She was involved in my schooling: from helping with homework to being an active member of the PTA [1] throughout my education. School was always important to her, and she ensured I took it seriously and excelled. In middle school, I had an opportunity to take a class once a week from a visiting instructor. This course introduced a small group of students to some mathematical ideas we had not seen before (I specifically remember learning about functions and how we could label variables with whatever name or symbol we wanted. It was mesmerizing!). This was the first time I recall ever learning something about mathematics that was just fun.

    Me with my Grandparents, Tranquilino and Adelicia Martinez, who were also my Godparents on the day of my baptism in 1977, Albuquerque, NM.

    I continued to join science clubs and enjoy mathematics and science courses throughout middle and high school. During my freshman year I was placed into a mathematics course with an amazing teacher, Mr. Martin Paco, who I was lucky to have for more classes later. He showed us, mainly through his goofiness, how much he cared about us learning the content. He walked around during exams answering questions, while also writing hints on flash cards and taping them to his back so we could see them as he walked around. He cared more about us learning than he did about how well we performed. I had one of his classes before lunch one year and recall many days that I skipped lunch because some concept or skill we were learning eluded me and I spent my lunch hour struggling through the mathematics in his classroom with classmates and with his help. The frustration was real, but so was the satisfaction of acquiring the skill or understanding the concept. When I took an Advanced Placement (AP) Calculus course from him later in school, he used to hold study groups at his home with his family. His wife prepared food, his kids were running around, and he helped us study for the AP exam. This has always been one of my most memorable high school experiences and arguably, he is the teacher that set me on a course of mathematical exploration throughout my life. The support he gave me worked and I became the first female student from my high school to score a perfect 5 on the Calculus AB AP exam.

    I was a sophomore in high school when I realized how much I loved the struggle of mathematics, and the seemingly clear ‘answer’ at the end of a problem. I understand now the great complexity of mathematics, but in my early years I was attracted to what felt like the binary nature of getting a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer to a problem. Despite this love of mathematics, I was encouraged to consider pursuing an engineering program in college. I even spent a semester during high school doing a student internship with a graduate student in civil engineering. It seemed that engineering would be a lucrative career and that appealed to others. Luckily for me, I’m stubborn and the work of that particular student was joyless enough to convince me that mathematics was the right path for me. I also knew that going to a college out of state was not an option for financial reasons. I ended up enrolling in the school my family wanted me to attend—New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (New Mexico Tech). At New Mexico Tech, about an hour south of Albuquerque in Socorro, New Mexico, I took as many mathematics courses as I could. While I felt comfortable in most of my mathematics courses, some were very difficult, and some of the professors were intimidating (even if they weren’t trying to be). To this day, there are professors from my undergraduate institution that make me stop in my tracks when I see them at conferences. I learned a lot from my professors, much of it during office hours and tutoring sessions, not just in the classroom. As a senior I had to choose a sequence of courses to take and I chose courses on differential equations. I fell in love with differential equations during that year and continued to study them in graduate school.

    Me with my mother Clara Garcia, ca. 1987.

    I finished the requirements for my bachelor’s degree in mathematics a semester early because I took some general education courses in the summers. Since I was finishing degree requirements early, my university informed me that my scholarship would end in that final semester so I would graduate in three and one-half years. While this was an achievement to be proud of, it left me unsure of my next step. I was graduating college in December and hadn’t made plans. During the previous year, though, my department needed undergraduates to lead calculus labs and tutor in the learning center. I was hired as an undergraduate Teaching Assistant (TA) and taught a calculus lab for freshman. I absolutely fell in love with teaching that year and began to think about a future in academia. I had never had any interest in teaching in the public school system, but teaching calculus was amazing (though I’m sure I actually taught very little in that lab). I decided I would pursue graduate school and hoped my experience as a TA would help me get into a program and funded as a Graduate Teaching Assistant. I had decided to get both a master’s degree and a PhD from a single institution with a notion that I could get to know the faculty while working on the master’s before agreeing to work with an advisor on PhD research. The department where I earned my bachelor’s degree did not have a PhD program at that time, so I knew I would have to go elsewhere. I also knew that staying close to home was still the frugal option and so enrolled at the University of New Mexico in my home city for graduate school.

    I started graduate school in January and was greatly prepared for courses in differential equations, but greatly unprepared for courses in other fields. I was also unprepared for the drastic difference in expected workload between undergraduate and graduate courses. I don’t recall if my undergraduate professors ever tried to talk to me about graduate school and the expected workload and performance, but certainly my family couldn’t prepare me for it. They did support me, though. My first semester was rough, I joined a cohort of students who were halfway through their first year, I didn’t have an orientation because they didn’t do that for the Spring semester, and I had no exposure to numerical analysis at the undergraduate level, but was enrolled in a graduate level numerical analysis course. I ended up dropping below full-time status that semester as I dropped the numerical analysis course I knew I would not pass. However, I used the following summer to study and prepare myself for the next fall and became diligent in my study hours and in figuring out how to be a graduate student and do well in courses.

    What I learned throughout all of my years in school was that nobody would know what was best for me as well I would.That nobody could know my experiences and my background just by looking at me.

    Work-life Balance and Moving Slowly

    I started my graduate program directly out of my undergraduate program, and two years later when I was completing my master’s degree, I decided to get married and start a family. I knew I wanted to have (lots of) children. I was not willing to wait until I was out of school because I knew that would take years. I had heard stories from faculty members who waited until they were in a tenure-track job, then waited until they earned tenure, then promotion,… and then it was too late to start a family, or it was difficult to do so. I had always wanted a large family. I made a decision early on that my family would be my focus and school would have to work around that. This was the beginning of putting my family and personal needs above my research and academic needs, or at least at the same level.

    I was initially drawn to applied mathematics, and my first exposure to research was in this field, working with mathematics and engineering faculty members on research we conducted in a fluids lab on campus. We studied a particular type of fluid flow through experimental set-ups and numerical simulations. We did this for a year or so, then this project provided a tremendous opportunity in the form of a summer internship running the numerical simulations at a national laboratory using their software and computing facilities. While this was a great chance to get to know what industry research is like, it was also a chance for me to realize that working in a cubicle on a computer all day was not the environment where I would thrive. After the internship, and some more time spent collecting data in the lab, my advisor left my department for a position at another school. He had two doctoral students at the time—a single man with no strong ties to the city and me. At this time, I was already married with a couple of kids. The other student went with our advisor to his new institution and continued to work with him while I stayed in my hometown and floundered a bit. I stopped working in the program full time, I stayed home with my kids for a couple of semesters while I figured out if a PhD was really what I wanted. Eventually, I decided to meet with the graduate program director to determine my options. I probably should have done this sooner, but didn’t know that this person was a resource for me.

    At the time my advisor left, I was pregnant. While I knew that starting a family would slow down my degree progress, I also knew it was the right decision for me. The opinion that graduate school was the right time for starting a family was not shared by everyone around me. The graduate program director made it very clear to me during that meeting that he did not believe I should be pursuing a PhD while having children. (I wrote an article about this experience that many people seemed to be able to relate to. [2]) This interaction fueled me forward to completing my degree through choosing a different advisor and new research project. This time, I decided I wanted to know more about teaching and learning. A faculty member in my department, Dr. Kristin Umland, had just changed her research area from mathematics to mathematics education and she agreed to supervise me to write my dissertation.

    I firmly believe I completed my degree just to spite faculty members who shared the opinion that I shouldn’t be there, that the dissertation should be all consuming and the only thing on which I should spend time and energy. I’ve carried the drive I needed to complete the degree into my role as a faculty member. Not only do I still focus on family and integrate both my personal and professional lives as much as possible (my kids have been to LOTS of conferences in lots of cool places, and even lived overseas for a year so I could work there), but I also use my position to act as a role model for students. Graduate students still struggle sometimes with deciding whether they can have families while in school. I try to support them as best I can, and I am now more able to do so since I oversee the graduate program and all graduate students in my department. I am particularly focused on supporting women in mathematics and whatever choices they might make about their personal lives, in whatever ways I can. I ended up choosing a dissertation advisor during the end of my time in my PhD program who could relate to my personal circumstances. She had children slightly older than mine, and our research sessions sometimes included her children keeping my children entertained so we could work. I will be forever grateful for the work she did with me when we were both relatively new to mathematics education, and the work she did after I graduated as an advocate for me and for mathematics education. In my case, in particular, a faculty member in my (former) graduate department decided (after my graduation) that he did not believe mathematics faculty members should supervise dissertations in mathematics education and attempted to have my degree withdrawn by the university. Luckily for me, my advisor fought on my behalf and only relayed the story to me after it had been resolved.

    Me with my grandfather, Tranquilino Martinez, at my PhD graduation in 2008.

    Besides having children, I had other family commitments that occasionally took me away from research. My husband had to have a major operation while I was in school so I had to take a semester of medical leave to care for him. I also struggled academically sometimes. I already mentioned having to drop a course I wasn’t ready for, but I also didn’t pass all of my preliminary exams the first time I took them. These are only a few of the setbacks I encountered while in my program. I use them as examples of how real life can cause you to need to adjust your expectations. For me, these slowed down my success, but they did not stop it. Through all of these experiences I realized I needed to make decisions that were best for me, not for others, and that nobody would know what that was except for me. After receiving my degree, I took a faculty position nearly 2,000 miles from home. That part of my journey is a common one that students considering academia need to be ready for—you go where the jobs are. In my case, the job was great, but it was very far from family. I anticipate relocating closer to home when the time feels right, but for now I will stay where I am for my children’s sake.

    Research and Service

    I have been fortunate to be able to pursue research in fields that inspire me. In particular, my experiences in graduate school have led me to believe that positive experiences in teaching and mentoring while in graduate school have a lasting impact on the future careers of mathematics graduate students. Together, my advisor and I navigated our way through the muddy waters of doing research in a field in which nobody else in our department worked and it turned out to be the best decision—it led me to my career in research in undergraduate mathematics education (RUME). I study the teaching and learning of mathematics at the college level.

    I primarily study graduate students and their experiences. I love to work with them as they progress through their graduate programs and gain teaching experience and examine how their teaching practices and philosophies change over time. Professional development of this group, the next generation of mathematics faculty members, has become increasingly important as our students and our teaching environments change over time and I’ve been fortunate to be part of a group of people across the country studying this population and finding ways to support them and their students. I study how graduate students progress in their teaching philosophies and teaching practices as they participate in various teaching and mentoring experiences.

    My kids in 2015 at the Liberty Bridge in Budapest, Hungary.

    I am increasingly interested in the professional world of mathematics and the structural barriers it contains that work against the success of underrepresented mathematicians, including women mathematicians. I’ve studied programs that support women faculty members in mathematics, curriculum that provides opportunities for women in classrooms to have agency in their learning environments and programs we’ve built to support underrepresented students in calculus. I helped implement an Emerging Scholars Program (modeled off the work of Uri Treisman [3]) in our calculus sequence and have spent the last few years examining which aspects of the program help build community among our underrepresented calculus students and support their persistence in STEM. My current institution, West Virginia University (WVU), is a predominantly white institution (PWI) located in Appalachia and is a drastically different cultural environment than those of the Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) that I attended as a student. Similar to how being white passing has required me to acquire a different set of skills, so has working in a PWI that has a very low percentage of underrepresented students. Developing programs to support marginalized students in this environment requires thinking differently about recruitment, logistics, and implementation. I’ve been fortunate to be able to bring funding to the university from professional societies and federal agencies to support some of this work.

    Most of my research has been collaborative, which is fairly common in education work. I enjoy working with other researchers in mathematics education, but also those who study academic development, social sciences, education in other science disciplines and those who study the K–12 system. Collaborative work is an amazing way to learn about the world around you and to learn from others. I have been lucky to find ways to integrate my research areas into my service, teaching and administrative work. I currently serve as the Graduate Program Director and Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) coordinator in my department, overseeing the advising and progress of approximately 50 full-time graduate students, the development of the graduate program and the professional growth of approximately 30 GTAs. I see myself as a role model, advocate and resource for women in mathematics. Besides serving on department committees, I have served as a faculty associate for the WVU Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, as a Provost’s Fellow in the Office of Graduate Education and on my university’s Council for Women’s Concerns. However, one of my greatest professional achievements has to be when I was selected as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar to spend a year providing professional development to mathematics doctoral students in Hungary. I have recently been promoted to Full Professor within my department.I am only the third woman to achieve this rank in my department’s history, and the first Hispanic faculty member to do so. I see my job as one of making the process better for those who come after me, and for opening doors and creating spaces of safety and equity for those who are not always welcomed into mathematics.

    Personal Advice

    My kids in Berlin, Germany in front of the Brandenburg Gate, March 2016 during the Berlin Seminar (annual European Fulbright event).

    As noted, I have four children who are always the ‘WHY’ for anything I’m doing. They are why I work hard, why I play hard, the reason I take care of business. It has been a joy watching them grow up and become their own people. They call West Virginia home, and have had a vastly different childhood than I did, but I hope they grow up believing it was a good one. When I was on sabbatical as a Fulbright Scholar in Hungary, my kids not only spent a year living abroad but had the chance to travel, as travel within Europe is inexpensive. We have visited places we had only read about in books previously. The pictures of my kids show them in amazing places around the world. These opportunities only happened because I didn’t give up when I hit obstacles, and I have realized that if I never try (to get research published, to get projects funded, to apply to programs like Fulbright), then I will never succeed at them. I no longer wait for ‘sure bets’, I pursue what I want and know that eventually, some of it will happen. I seek out people who are doing the work I want to do, and having the experiences I want to have, and get advice. Do the same. You don’t have to do this alone. Find people to be your support network. Don’t give up, seek out mentors, ask for help, and find your own path, in your own time.


    [1] PTA is the acronym for Parent-Teacher Association.
    [2] J. Deshler (2017). Mixing Babies and Graduate School, MAA Focus, Vol. 37, No.1. digitaleditions.walsworthprintgroup.com/publication/?m=7656&i=392392&p=0&ver=html5
    [3] Uri Treisman is a University Distinguished Teaching Professor, professor of mathematics, and professor of public affairs at The University of Texas at Austin. He is known for starting the Emerging Scholars Program, which works to ensure that all students, regardless of their life circumstances, have access to an excellent education. This program has been replicated in universities throughout the United States.


    Previous Testimonios:

    • Dr. James A. M. Álvarez
    • Dr. Federico Ardila Mantilla
    • Dr. Selenne Bañuelos
    • Dr. Erika Tatiana Camacho
    • Dr. Anastasia Chavez
    • Dr. Minerva Cordero
    • Dr. Ricardo Cortez
    • Dr. Jesús A. De Loera Herrera

    Brian P Katz (BK)

    May 14, 2022
    Testimonios
  • The women of University of Minnesota Duluth speak: Kari Olson’s story

    The women of University of Minnesota Duluth speak: Kari Olson’s story

    Editor’s note: A colleague of mine recently read the essay of the Undergraduate First Place Winner of the AWM/MfA 2022 Student Essay Contest, which describes the upward trajectory of Tracy Bibelnieks’ mathematical career, but upon further research learned of her resignation in April 2021 and Kristine Snyder’s earlier in 2018, both at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). This story has been reported upon in detail here and here last year, but to our knowledge has barely registered in the mathematical world, even a year later. In giving voice here to the women of UMD, we hope that this serves as a warning and a rebuke to the mathematical community, for our complicity and ignorance. This is Part 2; read Part 1.

    I started my undergrad at the University of Minnesota Duluth in 2017. I loved learning (still do), and got involved in everything I could during my time at UMD. Music, research, teaching, advocacy work, on-campus jobs…you name it, I did it. In the spring of 2018, I took Calculus II with Dr. Tracy Bibelnieks. She was one of the very few female professors I had, and she was excellent. Her lectures included worksheets/active learning opportunities, and she was always happy to answer my seemingly never-ending questions during office hours. I did well in Calc II and started my junior year at full speed. I was focused on research, classes, and teaching — mostly in the department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Meanwhile, UMD’s EOAA was investigating the department of Mathematics and Statistics, largely because of complaints brought forward by women faculty, staff, and students. In 2019, a summary of the findings was released to the math department. In March of 2020, the findings were released publicly. You can read them here. They went mostly unnoticed by the larger university community. 

    I didn’t know about the findings until Dr. Bibelnieks resigned in March of 2021. I was in her data analytics course at the time. It was my favorite class, and Dr. Bibelnieks designed the curriculum herself. Our teams learned to code and analyze/visualize data by working to generate insights with real data.

    I was extremely upset when I learned Dr. Bibelnieks resigned. I was furious when I learned why. 

    Despite the EOAA’s findings and further reports of harm, sexism, and discrimination from women in the math department, as of spring 2021, Dr. Bibelnieks (and other women in the department) still found the environment was “hostile and offensive to a reasonable woman.” Dr. Bibelnieks and other women continually reported that they were harmed — professionally and personally, by this environment. Like any university, students are UMD’s most important stakeholders. I knew that we would not tolerate the continued harm to women in our math department, so I decided to organize and mobilize students’ voices. I formed an organization titled Students for Equity and Accountability in STEM (SEA STEM). Over 100 UMD students got involved in our movement — during the phase of the COVID-19 pandemic when very few classes were held in person. We hung posters all over UMD and Duluth, held organizing meetings, drafted demands for administration, and had countless meetings with faculty/administration groups. The student association and student body president got involved and passed resolutions echoing our demands. Local media picked up the story almost immediately. Dr. Bibelnieks, Dr. Snyder, and I were interviewed by all of the local media outlets. You can read our demands here. 

    Founding SEA STEM was an amazing and awful experience. For months, SEA STEM was the last thing I thought of before I fell asleep and the first thing I thought of when I woke up. I poured hundreds of hours into this organization. Students, staff, and faculty members reached out to me asking for help and advice. Many of them asked for advice about how to handle gut-wrenching, truly awful, dangerous situations, many of which stemmed from sexism, homophobia, racism, and other forms of hatred and discrimination. Many more reached out solely because they knew I would listen and believe their stories. The fact that people so desperately reached out to me — an undergraduate student with no official title or power — was very telling. Untenured female professors were especially hesitant to speak up. Suddenly, everybody knew how UMD handled the situation in the math department. It made them both angry and afraid. 

    All of the media interviews featuring SEA STEM, Dr. Bibelnieks, and Dr. Snyder happened over the course of one week. By the time the last news outlet called me, I felt completely overwhelmed. I was angry with myself for allowing my emotions to weigh so heavily. I wasn’t naive about the toxic effects of the patriarchy. I’d experienced plenty of sexism myself, at UMD and elsewhere. I knew what I was getting into when I started SEA STEM. I had an incredible support system and experienced seasons of life which were much more personally difficult. Why was I having such a hard time? 

    Later that week, a postdoc working at UMD — a friend whom I looked up to and often turned to for advice — told me that I “probably had the most power now”, as an undergraduate student leader, than I ever would for the rest of my career.

    Students speaking out against their university does not bode well for enrollment dollars. UMD didn’t care about the brilliant, successful, good, and kind women faculty members who were role models for me. They cared about their reputation and bottom line. Of course, I knew this. But I hadn’t considered the implications for my own future. Dr. Bibelnieks and other female faculty members were successful women in STEM — women I hoped to be like one day. Yet I, an undergraduate student (who really didn’t know what she was doing!) was advocating on their behalf. Dr. Bibelnieks and Dr. Snyder are incredibly resilient women, yet their experiences at UMD were so terrible that their lives were profoundly harmed. At that moment, I realized my future was not as bright as I’d previously believed.

    UMD’s administration did not meet a single one of SEA STEM’s demands. I graduated and moved back to my hometown. A few months later, the head of the math department stepped down. I had a B.S. in biochemistry and a B.A. in chemistry from UMD and honestly didn’t want them. I knew that I was tremendously privileged to have obtained my degrees, but they felt tainted. My worry deepened about the implications of my activism on my career. I wanted to pursue medicine, but the thought of admissions committees digging into my record of holding UMD’s administration accountable made me tentative to spend the thousands of dollars required to even apply. I was so angered and disappointed by the way UMD handled the situation in the math department. Of course, some universities handle situations such as these even more poorly than UMD. But still, other universities handle them better. My parents were public school teachers, and I’m a believer in public education at all levels. I expected more from a school receiving so much state and federal funding. Thinking of my experience at UMD made me incredibly anxious. I was very unsure about what to do next, so I decided to stick with my original post-grad plan and get my Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) certificate. 

    The summer after graduation, I focused on what made me happy. I reconnected with parts of my life that were put on hold during undergrad. I spent lots of time on the farm I grew up on, and even more time with my friends. I got to live with my little sister again. Being around her helped remind me that I was still only 22 years old, with a full future ahead. Dr. Bibelnieks, despite grappling with the effects of UMD’s toxic culture on her own career and personal life, helped me navigate life post UMD. I feel truly lucky to call her my friend. I was slowly coming around to the idea of using my degrees to re-enter the world of higher education. 

    Now, I work as an EMT on the Mayo Clinic ambulance service in Duluth. I love caring for my patients and neighbors, so I’m applying to medical school this month. Though my fears and doubts stemming from my undergraduate experience are still present — I’m excited to continue my education. University policies and procedures surrounding discrimination, reporting, and protection of minorities are of utmost importance to me. If I’m admitted to medical school(s), I’ll certainly be searching for any clues I can find about how these issues are really handled. Of course, I don’t expect perfection — but I do expect that EOAA findings aren’t hidden and ignored. 

    Occasionally, I’m the EMT in charge of responding to a 911 call at UMD’s campus. It feels much easier to be there while wearing my uniform and caring for my patient. When I see UMD’s students and staff, I’m reminded of why I founded SEA STEM: there are so many good people at UMD. They deserve a place to learn, work, and live that is safe for all. I hope that by sharing my story and elevating Dr. Bibelnieks’ and Dr. Snyder’s stories, we can help prevent others from experiencing harm at UMD. 

    Wong Tian An

    May 10, 2022
    Gender, University of Minnesota Duluth
    Kari Olson
  • The women of the University of Minnesota Duluth speak: Kristine Snyder’s story

    The women of the University of Minnesota Duluth speak: Kristine Snyder’s story

    Editor’s note: A colleague of mine recently read the essay of the Undergraduate First Place Winner of the AWM/MfA 2022 Student Essay Contest, which describes the upward trajectory of Tracy Bibelnieks’ mathematical career, but upon further research learned of her resignation in April 2021 and Kristine Snyder’s earlier in 2018, both at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). This story has been reported upon in detail here and here last year, but to our knowledge has barely registered in the mathematical world, even a year later. In giving voice here to the women of UMD, we hope that this serves as a warning and a rebuke to the mathematical community, for our complicity and ignorance. This is Part 1; read Part 2 and Part 3.

    The first time someone causes harm, that can be unintentional, but when an investigation finds that person’s behavior harmful, and they choose not to examine and change that harmful behavior, any further harm that their behavior causes is intentional because they chose not to change. Furthermore, while it might be painful for those who cause harm to face it, telling the truth about an environment that has been shown to be harmful does not harm those who create it, but not warning other people about said harmful environment when it has proven to be one, that inaction itself often leads to further harm.

    Part 1: What happened?

    “I couldn’t have lived without the science, but I wouldn’t live through this again.” Prof. Nancy Hopkins in Picture a Scientist

    My name is Dr. Kristine Falk Snyder. I was a third generation University of Minnesota Duluth professor in the Mathematics and Statistics Department from 2015 to 2018, where I held a tenure-track position. In 2018, I left the department, largely due to consistent patterns of sexism and misogyny, ending 70 years of my family educating there. I started cautiously talking about these issues in an exit interview I initiated before I left, but, because the whistleblower policy at the university distinctly did not provide sufficient protection for current employees, after I left, I also sent an email to administrators in August of 2018 outlining the university policies and Title IX and what I had experienced and observed in the department in the way of gender bias and discrimination, stating that I wanted to allow them to fix the situation quietly so as not to risk having more funding pulled by UMN, which I had seen occur during my previous almost 4 decades of having an insider’s view of the funding situation. My goal was always to stop the harm, to stop any woman from continuing to experience what I did, to assure equal access and treatment across gender for students, staff, and faculty, keeping the big funding picture in mind because I had seen how pulling funding had affected students negatively. (Equal treatment across race does not and absolutely should occur in the department, college, and university, but I am white, and, though I certainly saw racism cause harm there, I am far less qualified to talk about the full extent to which it exists and the harm it causes. Other voices should be listened to above mine around those issues.)

    Reports from other female faculty triggered an investigation started in February of 2019 that ended in September of 2019 and found the department “hostile and offensive to a reasonable woman,” but, though this environment was created by a subset of individuals and not all men in the department, the report given to the department did not name the names of the men who caused and continue to cause harm. The administration brought in a department head from outside the university to attempt to fix things, but continued reports from female faculty and students have shown that behavior has not changed, and seems to instead have gotten worse. The findings were released inside the department in September of 2019, but the public report on the findings of the investigation was not released outside the department until March 17, 2020, right as quarantine started. This release date was also immediately after the end of the year-long statute of limitations for a hostile work environment in MN relative to when the investigation started and therefore when the last incident that could be included in that investigation would have occurred. While trainings were offered that addressed the behavior outlined in the report, to my knowledge no required additional trainings were offered for the department beyond what was necessary for all university employees, and problematic behavior ranging from apathy, to antipathy and defensiveness, to claiming to identify as female for the day were demonstrated by various members of the department.

    When I shared this document with someone trained in mediation and law around these issues for unrelated purposes, they were appalled that the public release had no avenue described for change, no consequences for those who caused the environment, and that intent was described at all.

    While some of the behaviors exhibited are outlined in this letter that my older brother wrote on my behalf, I will list some of them here. Women were and are talked over by men in the department, in both department meetings and beyond. Women’s voices are often ignored altogether, or women are told they do not know what they’re talking about. My husband asked me why I’d all but stopped talking some 5-6 months after starting this job; it was because I’d been talked over and ignored and dismissed so often that silence had become my survival strategy. In telling someone who deals with it for a living that story, he responded by saying “That’s what oppression does.” Men’s successes are celebrated, but women’s are often ignored, to the point that one woman’s tenure was not celebrated to protect the feelings of the men who had voted against her for being too “strong-minded” and who had questioned her legitimate publications. Women have been given more administrative tasks. Women are consistently treated as less capable, less smart, less skilled, less worthy, even when the evidence shows otherwise, both female students and faculty, all at an institution with the policy statement: “Making assumptions that men or women are better suited for a particular kind of job is prohibited.” Women were outright told their research leaves were for “a break” rather than research, whereas men’s were assumed to be for exactly what they were intended for. I was actually told by the then-department head when I left that I was “never really there,” when I had been rooted in Duluth for over a decade before he even moved there. Those are a few examples of thousands of microaggressions that I and other women experienced while there. Virtually every day there was something nasty or dismissive or condescending or gaslighting from one of the male professors, and, even on the rare day you might be lucky enough to get through without one, you would have to be on guard because they happened so often. As anyone who understands basic calculus knows, integrating over two dimensions adds up very quickly, and in this case, harm was integrated over time and the number of people who cause harm. Anyone who understands basic neuroscience knows that repeated smaller magnitude harms often cause more damage than one large one.

    Kristine Snyder holding a pen, grading papers with a cat on her lap

    In March of 2021, over 2.5 years after my email, 2 years after the investigation started and over 1.5 years after the report came out, Prof. Tracy Bibelnieks resigned, citing the same behavior, the same problems of misogyny and sexism, the same harm. Her resignation letter was the first time students, non Math/Stats faculty, and deans outside of Swenson School of Science and Engineering were made fully aware of the investigative findings, and the students stood up for their professors, papering the university and city with posters, asking what was happening in the department that it continued to lose professors, in a way the university could no longer try to shove these problems under the rug. The subsequent interviews given by students, Tracy, and myself outlined the issues, and we did our best to protect the term faculty (what UMD calls adjunct faculty), who on the whole do not actively contribute to this hostile environment but whose jobs are continually most at risk. The university administration stated their response in terms of minimal trainings (those that offered education on what was non-harmful behavior but indicated problematic dynamics and apathy in the department), long overdue actions that affected term vs. tenured faculty but not issues around gender, and overall long-term changes in the school and university policies, not the department, while giving no actual evidence for any change in the department’s environment. Most recently, the department has engaged in what the university has called “restorative justice” that members of the department have found more harmful than helpful, which does not seem to include some of the fundamental tenets of restorative justice, but does allow the worst actors to hold forth with at times downright disturbing beliefs. (An email outlining how restorative justice actually is usually administered in situations like these was sent to the appropriate parties in 2020, but this circle does not include that structure or those elements.) 

    While the department has been informed that the environment is hostile, has been given the opportunity to change, there has been no data indicating change, with the same men doing the same and sometimes worse harmful things and claiming that the harm does not matter as much or at all because it is unintentional, despite the fact it has been 2.5 years since the original report showing these men’s behavior is harmful came out, despite the fact trainings have been offered about what is and is not harmful, despite the fact that once they were informed what was harmful, these men have knowingly, intentionally harmed women by engaging in the same behaviors. The men who have caused and continue to cause the most harm have also claimed that women publicly talking about the report or posting about it harms them, when it is nothing more than sharing the truth of what happened after years of hiding that truth and no measurable change has led to continued harm.

    Part 2: Who is it?

    “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”  – James Baldwin

    One of the fundamental barriers to fixing the problems at UMD and one that runs counter to the ideas behind restorative justice is that people in power at multiple levels have acted in ways that suggest they are more focused on hiding the issue than on working together to fix it, which I find ironic, given that my intent in not speaking up publically right away was to give them the chance to focus all their energy on change, rather than image management. No men have been officially named by the university, and women have been given circuitous, unclear, and inconsistent answers around whether we can name the names of the men who committed the actions in the report. There are reports that describe the behavior of specific people, multiple individuals in the department who did harmful things, and it has never really been discussed by the administration or the department. Instead, this information is an additional burden on the women who experienced and continue to experience harm.

    Very little positive change and even less justice starts from a place of secrets, dishonesty, and obfuscation.

    This brings up one of the reasons I did not sue. The biggest, as I’ve stated before, is that I didn’t want more funding to get yanked from UMD by UMN because of another lawsuit, which hurts the students, who I am working to center here at all times, most. Do not forget that I had well over three decades of evidence of this pattern of funding reduction and consequent student harm when I left. I was unusually informed as a third-generation UMD professor. However, another reason I did not sue is because I would never sign a behavior-based NDA because they hide people’s damaging patterns rather than fixing them, thus virtually ensuring continued harm. Remember, this was all occurring as Weinstein’s history was coming to light, and I had plenty of evidence to support this conclusion.

    If we ever want to make progress, we need to be able to be open and honest about the behaviors exhibited; who exhibited, who allowed, and who intervened with those behaviors; what harm was caused and is still being caused; and what has and has not changed.

    I still am not certain I can name who is in the report, but I do know I legally can share my observations and experiences. I will leave you to draw your own evidence-based conclusions about whether it is more likely that there are even more men who cause harm in the department outlined in the report than the ones I describe or that the union and intersection of that group and the one I describe are the same. The men who I saw and continue to see (with the exception of those who are no longer part of the department) cause the most harm are the male full tenured professors, along with their protegés, and the two most recent department chairs who are also Math/Stats profs. The only current male full professor who I have never seen actively cause harm is Marshall Hampton. The department chair hired from outside the university added to this by acting on behalf of and identifying with those who were/are harmful rather than those harmed. It took him 17 months, almost a year and half after his arrival, to even talk to the women harmed about their experiences. His behavior was analogous to someone with reckless driving habits ignoring and forgiving them in others because it means he does not have to see or face or change them in himself. The blame for this chair’s behavior is not entirely on him; it is partially on the administration. It is clear he was not qualified in experience or temperament to make the changes the department required, nor were he and the dean allowed or empowered with the ability by the upper administration to make the changes that actually would have led to reduced harm.

    There is plenty of accountability to go around in terms of what has and has not happened for the last 4 years. That doesn’t make any one of the parties mentioned not responsible; it just makes it easier for each of them to pass blame and responsibility for making the necessary changes that would actually eliminate harm and to close ranks and blame the whistleblowers instead.

    We all saw how that pattern also led to continued but preventable harm with the opioid epidemic; passing the buck when a group of people all owe a quarter or a dime or a nickel does not pay off a debt.

    “One doesn’t have to operate with great malice to do great harm. The absence of empathy and understanding are sufficient. In fact, a man convinced of his virtue even in the midst of his vice is the worst kind of man.” – Charles M. Blow

    These men I have mentioned do not focus on behavior or harm but continually center themselves and see themselves as victims, an inaccurate assessment that is allowed to exist because they hold power, an attitude they reinforce in each other, one we are not allowed to correct or refute by revealing what is in the report, and this inaccurate belief continues to cost everyone around them. They are not victims, any more than people who continue to drive recklessly in ways that harmed people and a report has been written about it proving that it happened, are victims. They are the people who originally caused harm, and, because the administration has not individually called them in or out or assigned/allowed repercussions or done anything that changed their harmful behavior or moved them to somewhere they can cause less harm, women continue to be harmed. From all I’ve learned since this happened, best practices in cases like these in terms of actually changing the environment are to release a detailed report to the public about what was found and address the harm immediately in a way that does not further harm those who have already experienced it.

    These men may not have initially intended this harm, but the fundamental point is that the harm to female faculty, to female students, to the university has not stopped because these men’s behavior has not changed, at least not for the better, since the report came out, has not changed even as they have been informed what is harmful. That’s like committing “involuntary” manslaughter, which is a crime because effect matters more than intent, over and over and over again because you’re unwilling to stop reckless behavior after having been informed of it.

    Is a crime really involuntary the second time you commit it after you’ve been found guilty of it once and continued the behaviors that caused it? The third time? The fourth?

    They have neither acknowledged nor apologized for the harm they caused, which means there is no guarantee of it not happening again (the evidence actually shows the opposite, that the harm has very much continued.) They’re so dug in to the idea that they did not cause harm, even though that’s what the investigation found, that they are continuing to cause it because they’re focusing on their identities rather than their behavior and its effects. If you want another analogy other than a car accident, it’s like a surgical team that botched a surgery, for whom accumulated perhaps unintentional mistakes led to permanent harm in a patient, continuing to practice, continuing to make those unintentional but absolutely harmful mistakes after they’ve already been identified as harmful, with no repercussions, and then getting angry that the people harmed by their mistakes are talking about it to prevent that harm happening to someone else. Maybe they didn’t mean to do it, but they still caused harm. And, more importantly, once the evidence showed they had caused harm, their behavior didn’t change, and that harm continued.

    The original harm may not have been intentional, but continuing the same behavior after it was shown to be harmful, IS intentional, chosen harm.

    I want to acknowledge outright the other harm that is caused by the report’s attribution of harm to the entire department without naming the individuals responsible. There are many good men and women in that department, and some absolutely exceptional term faculty. They don’t deserve to be tainted by this or have their jobs put at risk. This is like a group project where everyone gets assigned the same grade, but the people getting the least credit (the term faculty) are doing most of the heavy lifting, and yet, because the people with the most power (the men mentioned earlier) did a horrible job, whatever they intended, the whole group got a failing grade. Then those with power refused to do the makeup project because they didn’t want to accept their failure, while the teacher (the administration) just does not do anything when nothing gets better, and those doing the work still have to carry that failing grade they never deserved. 

    And yes, people have different sensitivity levels, or, more accurately here, awareness and analytical skill levels, often because they developed those skills to survive because of the way the world treats them. I know men, including more than one in this department, with the kind of awareness levels where the evidence indicates they may well not have survived were they women. Further, what’s been shown to be effective with ending harm due to discrimination and bias is zero tolerance. That means you want the most sensitive equipment you can find so you can identify every instance and absolutely eliminate it, and that means hiring and keeping people with high levels of awareness and good analytical skills and believing them, not ignoring them and forcing them out to avoid having to face the problems. But the fact is that you do not have to be that sensitive to be aware that the department has problems. Seven tenure-track/recently tenured faculty in this department have chosen to resign since 2018, six of whom are women and/or people of color. This department cannibalizes its young, especially those least privileged, and, like any group that sacrifices its future for the past, it will not survive if it does not change.

    Part 3: What is the broader view?

    “Something I’ve learned through this process. There is very little gain in speaking your truth to the public, other than the potential for greater change. Going public with my truth was the decision I made when my calls for help were being swept under the rug. It was when I exhausted every possible outlet for change and nothing happened. It takes immense bravery and resiliency to speak your truth to friends, acquaintances and strangers. You lose friends, you receive angry calls and texts, you don’t sleep, you are torn apart by strangers, you see mean comments about you, you are constantly imbued in the trauma, etc. There is quite literally nothing fun or rewarding in the process until you see real change occur – which unfortunately doesn’t happen for everyone.” – Rosie Cruz

    I did eventually go public, first in a LinkedIn post in September of 2020, when no change had occurred a year after the report was released, and then with the media when Tracy Bibelnieks resigned in April of 2021, and I did it for the same reason I do everything around issues of discrimination and bias: to tell the truth and to do my best to ensure those after me never have to go through what I did, to therefore minimize harm and increase equality. I did it because I learned the hard way that sunshine really is the best disinfectant. I did it because I am one of the only people who left who still cares about UMD and its students because I grew up there, because I know it can be better than this. The department and administration were given years to change their behavior before I did anything public, years of me painfully watching other women be harmed the same way I was.

    As much as it hurt me to experience the harm myself, it was so much worse to watch others continue to be harmed when it could have been prevented.

    The administration had ample time and resources to investigate. I also gave individuals the benefit of time to acknowledge and change their behavior. The harm continued unabated even after being found credible by a formal EOAA investigation. It was after those three years, after Tracy was forced out by the continued harmful behavior, that I decided it was time the larger community knew that harm was occurring and no changes had taken place. It was time that others could make informed decisions about whether to involve themselves in an environment such as that, one not only hostile but uninvested in changing that hostility. Despite my history, I never would have gone to UMD had I known how toxic the department is, and I wanted to avoid the harm that happened to me happening to other women because they were kept ignorant. Everyone has the right to make an informed decision, but they cannot do that when the truth is hidden.

    And the truth is that the hostility in the department is just as much a part of the male full professors’ legacy as is their research; it is just not a part of their legacy they want anyone to know or talk about.

    As for intentional vs. unintentional harm with regard to this situation, if you are not even aware enough to know that you’re causing harm, you’re more likely to cause it. Therefore, if diminishing overall harm is your goal but you’ve been shown to be doing so unintentionally, learning to recognize what causes harm and how to avoid doing that is how you get there. That means listening to the whole truth, and absorbing all the data, not hiding it or hiding from it. You do not find out you have typhoid fever and keep cooking for people, getting more and more and more people sick. This reaction of denial and dismissal has led to continued harm. Now, if diminishing overall harm is not your goal, then that has profound implications for the safety of others in your presence that may suggest the need for you to, until that changes, not live in community.

    Dr Kristine Snyder, sitting on a mat on a grassy area legs outstretched, barefoot

    The female faculty may have spoken up most about this toxic environment, but they are not the only ones who have noticed or been harmed by it. They are just the only ones who have gone public and therefore received backlash. One of my male students called the department a “good ol’ boys’ club.” Female students to this day go out of their way to avoid taking classes from certain male professors, basically a passive way of the department not being Title IX compliant. There have been numerous complaints, some taken to Title IX and some not, from female students who have been treated differently, graded differently, and given different or fewer opportunities due to gender. At least one male professor is no longer allowed to advise female students due to continual evidence of bias. Because this is occurring in a Math/Stats department, which teaches classes required for all STEM and many other degrees, it affects all students in Swenson College of Science and Engineering (SCSE) and many beyond it, not just those in the department, and it also affects other faculty and staff outside the department. Further, because nothing effective has been done in this department, even after it was found hostile, female faculty and staff have been hesitant or outright refused to report problems with gender discrimination and sexual harassment elsewhere in SCSE because the evidence shows nothing will happen but denial, ineffectual trainings, and victim-blaming. Various trainings have found the department’s dynamics particularly problematic and their attitudes apathetic.

    The behavior in the department is not merely a reflection of society’s biases; it is an amplification of them due to the personalities, beliefs, and behavior of the combination of people in power. Whether these biases against women are expressed aggressively or benevolently does not matter because both harm women.

    What matters is that the behavior causes harm that has effects and implications far beyond just the individual department and that it has to end.

    When it comes to what I do around these issues, I am continually doing my best to put the greater good, especially for the next generation, first, even ahead of myself. That’s why my older brother had to tell me I couldn’t help anyone if I was dead for me to leave UMD. That’s why I told my husband the one thing that would make me stay is my students begging me to. And it is heartbreaking to look at the student reviews from my final semester where that happened, too late for anything to change. I have lost my job, a chunk of my family, my hometown, and my health over this situation. But if the next generation of women has a safer place to be in STEM,  you had better believe I think what it’s cost me is worth it. I have sunk costs that I can prevent other women having to pay, but not if things at UMD and in the wider mathematical and academic community don’t change. I will continue to act in such a way as to protect students and women and others who may have less power from people who cause harm, even when those people continually deny the harm they cause, even after it’s shown in an investigation, and then look to accuse me of hurting them for telling the truth about what happened and call that justice. An equal opportunity environment, especially one in STEM, does not sacrifice women’s opportunities or health for men’s views of themselves when those views do not match the data. And a true community cannot be built around people who continually put their own disproven images of who they think they are ahead of the greater good, the evidence, and the whole truth.

    I also believe things can change for the better, and that if people really want to fix this, they will identify those who actively cause harm, those who have done nothing to stop or prevent it, and those who have spoken up, and pull those who are problematic out individually, not together, for private training. (This is not new advice; the administration received it over a year ago, plenty of time in which to change policies to allow this to occur, rather than changing those policies to not even formally investigate situations like this anymore.) I’m not saying fire them. I’m saying they need to be temporarily moved until they are no longer harmful, kind of like removing pipes that are leaching toxins into the water and lining them to assure they can no longer do so.

    I believe in redemption, in people’s ability to change for the better, but I have yet to see it happen without humility, education, and empathy.

    If these men can change their behavior enough to stop causing harm, they can come back. I’m guessing someone will argue that UMD will lose too much institutional knowledge if you move everyone problematic, given their positions. I promise, you can remove the hostility with great margins (using the surgery example) without losing much institutional knowledge, the most important of which lies in people like the longtime term faculty and the administrative staff anyway. It would behoove the university to bring in a new graduate director and a truly aware permanent department head. Information around the graduate program and certain types of research will be the only information lost by removing problematic people, but the fact is that the undergraduate and graduate programs badly need an overhaul so that they are individually sustainable, and research opportunities need to be guaranteed to be equal across race and gender. That can only be done by bringing in someone not entrenched in the current hostile environment who has the awareness, guts, and fortitude to do what is right, even when it is not what is easy. 

    I am going to bring up the other elephant in the room: tenure. I am not anti-tenure. I believe in tenure for academics who put the greater good ahead of themselves, who use the freedom tenure provides to better the world, rather than to better themselves or those like them at the expense of those less privileged. Tenure was created to protect scholars from administrators who would abuse their power to remove said scholars if they did research that challenged the powerful. Tenure was not designed for nor should it ever be used to protect academics who use the job security it provides to harm or shut out others, especially those less privileged than themselves, who use it to amass rather than distribute power. Right now, tenure in the Math/Stats department is leading to continued harm because the most problematic, the most harmful, the most privileged people in the department have its protection, and that allows them to continue to harm those who are less powerful. Tenure prevents the administration from imposing repercussions sufficient to change their harmful behavior. If there is one thing my time in academia has taught me, it is that tenure is not inherently bad, but any tool, even one designed to protect, can be used to harm when wielded by those who would choose to use it that way. It has led me to wonder if there should be moral/ethical requirements for granting tenure in addition to academic requirements.

    Part 4: What do we do now?

    “Forgiving and being reconciled to our enemies or our loved ones are not about pretending that things are other than they are. It is not about patting one another on the back and turning a blind eye to the wrong. True reconciliation exposes the awfulness, the abuse, the hurt, the truth. It could even sometimes make things worse. It is a risky undertaking but in the end it is worthwhile, because in the end only an honest confrontation with reality can bring real healing. Superficial reconciliation can bring only superficial healing.” – Desmond Tutu 

    As for me, the only apology I really want at this point consists of accountability and behavioral change, for UMD to be somewhere my nieces could safely go, somewhere they would be treated equally to my nephews, for the university and union policies to change accordingly, not for those policies to change to make certain types of harm non-investigable, as has been the case recently. Nobody can give me back my time, my energy, or my health, but they can make sure nobody else loses theirs. There needs to be true accountability for and apologies from the individuals who are contributing to the hostility. There needs to be concrete evidence of behavioral change in those individuals. Accountability can be painful because it makes us face the parts of ourselves and the things that we do that we’d rather not see or acknowledge, but it is not harmful long-term, as are the actions men continue to take if they’re not held accountable, like the harm that happens when men who have not done anything harmful assume or are treated as if they have. Accountability is just a temporarily painful prerequisite to allow for permanent positive growth. It is necessary for peace and justice and should not be confused with public shaming. It may need to be public to have an effect on behavior, but that doesn’t make it shaming, just acknowledgment that harm occurred rather than hiding it.

    It’s not the initial unintentional harm that is the biggest problem; it is the absolutely intentional years-long choice to continue to be harmful and allow harm to occur rather than to change.

    This is not what I wanted, not what I wanted to happen and not who I wanted to be. I never wanted to be a whistleblower, a woman who became a poster child for sexism in STEM, a cautionary tale. I wanted to be a multidisciplinary professor (I have 5 degrees in 4 fields, 3 fields if you group pure and applied math together.) I wanted to do the same thing every good Minnesotan does: learn as much as I could and take what I’d learned and give back to my community. I wanted to quietly do good work. I wanted to teach the students who grew up in my home state and city. I wanted to continue the kind of research that earned me an NSF postdoctoral fellowship, that has allowed me to work with some of the best researchers, athletes, and scholars in the world, in my hometown. I wanted to hold my girls’ neuroscience camp every summer so that girls like I used to be would get to see real science before high school or college. I wanted to be the mentor who got and kept women in STEM, the one I had already been for over a decade, to be like the woman who first reached me. I wanted to run the trails at Hartley until my legs were splattered with mud. I wanted to swim in Lake Superior even on days it was so cold it knocked the breath from my lungs. I wanted to ski Lester Park when it was -20˚ F. I wanted to really get to know the cousin who was kept from me as a child. I wanted to watch my lifelong friends’ kids grow up in person, not over social media. I will never have those things. I will probably never go home, and if I do, I will never see my hometown the same way. Those things were stolen from me and, more importantly, the whole next generation of girls by men who create a “hostile and offensive” workplace, something that it is considered illegal to create or allow in the state of Minnesota and unethical by millions of people. And even worse, because these men are choosing to continue these same harmful behaviors, they continue to prevent girls like the one I used to be from getting the equal education the law guarantees and women like the one I am now from having a safe, non-hostile workplace. 

    No, this is not what I wanted, but it is what happened, and it is who the world needed me to be, and I am not often nowadays one to take the easy way out when I see other people getting hurt. When I did public interviews in April, it was the first time many people knew why I had really left Duluth. I’d stayed really quiet to allow UMD time to change, sometimes at the expense of my own relationships. One of my Duluth connections who is Quaker, sent me this Dorothy Hutchinson quote upon finding out what had happened: “A Quaker social concern arises as a revelation to an individual that there is a painful discrepancy between existing social conditions and what God wills for society and that this discrepancy is not being adequately dealt with. The next step is the determination of the individual to do something about it -not because s/he is particularly well-fitted to tackle the problem, but simply because no one else seems to be doing it.’ We call this integrity.” Despite a consistent presence at Quaker meetings due to shared fundamental values, I’m not a huge believer in God in the way many think of that entity because I have seen too many people use a higher power to justify harmful behaviors not supported by the evidence. But I am absolutely a believer in justice and integrity and that the only way to achieve the former is to have the latter. In the last four years, I have challenged people’s certainties and identities. I have made people angry. I have made people upset. I have made mistakes I regret, things I have done my best to make up for. But I have also tried to be as honest as I possibly can be (except when backed into lies of omission by the university), and I have and will continue to do my utmost to put the greater good, especially for the next generation, especially for people who are afterthoughts rather than centered in society, first. If enough others have the courage to do the same, I have confidence that eventually things will change for the better.

    In terms of what I want the wider mathematical and academic community to do with regard to UMD, I want them to take action in whatever way their influence allows to ensure a change in this hostile environment and limit the chances of it occurring elsewhere.

    I want them to do the actions outlined in this letter. I want them to share the public report widely. I want them to encourage women, people of color, and supportive allies of all backgrounds not to work with or take classes from any of the full male professors until there is solid proof that this environment has changed. I would ask that no state or federal funding, no taxpayer money, go toward people who contribute to this hostile environment; there are plenty of qualified, equitable faculty in STEM who deserve funding, including those who study these very problems. I would like there to be asterisks next to the names of the men who contribute to this hostile environment anywhere they are listed or honored unless they apologize and there is sufficient evidence the hostility they create has ended before they retire because it is part of their actual legacy unless/until they choose to change that. I would like some sort of guarantee of broader support from the wider mathematical community of the term and other non-harmful faculty at UMD. I would like policies in SIAM, AMS, MAA, and AWM that allow for censure or suspension of men who exhibit this behavior and then do not change. I would like outside pressure on the UMD union to rework their policies to assure it is a union for term faculty, women, and people of color and not just tenured white men, in addition to the inside pressure from women there. I would like there to be discussions about and policies that determine what level of discriminatory and other bias-based harm it would take for tenure to be suspended or revoked, not necessarily by the university, but by a truly diverse group of faculty trained to determine whether/when it is necessary. I want people to be aware that, given the funding/hiring patterns over the last 40-50 years, there are many departments with bimodal age/power distributions where this kind of damaging, misogynist environment can arise. UMD is a single sample of a real subgroup. I would encourage people to read the policies at their own universities to find and fix the loopholes that exist and allow for discrimination there and assure investigations around these issues are designed to protect those harmed, not retraumatize them. I would encourage people to recognize that group dynamics and capacity for empathy matter in hiring, especially when hiring people with the potential to get tenure.

    I would encourage people not to have the typical “That could never happen here/I would never do that” response, but rather the “How do these kinds of things happen here/What problematic behaviors do I have?” response about their own institutions and behaviors.

    Above all, I would ask people to make their default be to believe women, people of color, and especially women of color, when they point out bias and discrimination and to understand that not changing in a way that perpetuates harm is as bad for the world as changing in a way that creates it. I would like them to understand that, in a society like ours that is traditionally sexist and racist, bias exists until it is countered, and those on the wrong side of it learn to recognize it as a survival strategy, that a Bayesian approach as well as that which minimizes overall harm is to believe the less privileged on issues of bias until they are disproven. I was not listened to or believed by multiple people I tried to talk to about my experiences for the three years I was at UMD, including those I absolutely should have been able to trust to believe me, and my reality of being ignored and disbelieved was one reason why I felt I had to leave to be heard, for anything to change. On the other side, I had a student who went through weeks of racist treatment before they told me because they understandably were not sure a white woman would believe them. So believe the women and people of color who speak up the first time they say something about bias because it costs that individual to speak up, but it benefits everyone from their underrepresented group and society overall when their words are heard and believed and lead to positive change. 

    Part 5: An Example to Follow

    “It takes courage to speak up against complacency and injustice while others remain silent. But that’s what leadership is.” -Rosabeth Moss Kanter

    The narrative from the department and UMD is denial and diminishment of what occurred and to just throw up their hands and say, what else do you want me to do? As it happens, I have an example of both the core values and the practices that need to be followed for things to change. My experience in my Ph.D. program at University of Colorado Applied Math was not like mine at UMD, but it was not pleasant or discrimination-free either, with me outright being told if I got something it was only because I was female within my first week, working largely on my own or with other women because the majority of male students treated female students as less smart or capable than them, and being asked constantly how to make things better for women but not able to speak up about anything due to precarious funding, funding that somehow disappeared after I said something deemed “defensive.” I had officially reported my experiences in 2019 when I told a friend who was on the faculty in a different area something that they felt triggered CU’s new-to-me mandatory reporting policy. Then, when I ran into one of my professors from Applied Math almost a year ago, one who had been consistently honest and attentive, it took me some time to muster up the trust and courage to email him, tell him briefly what had happened at UMD, and also that, I would not go to that Ph.D. program if I could do it over again because of the behavior of male professors and students meant that it had ultimately cost me more than it gave me. 

    Instead of denial or the “I’m sorry you experienced that” non-apology I have gotten from other people and other places, I got a pleasant surprise. He believed what I experienced and wished it could have been better and is working to make sure that does not ever happen again. He is now department chair and has been focused on changing the faculty and culture to be truly diverse and inclusive. I knew some things were changing, as I had seen more females and people of color hired as professors, including one of the women who had been in the graduate program with me. I will not lie; one of the reasons I trusted him enough to email him, but also why I was concerned was unfairly overloading someone already dealing with oppression by emailing him, is because he is Black. I won’t say I know what it is like to be Black in Boulder because I never will, but I have heard and believed experiences from my friends of color and seen things with my own eyes that show the city’s progressive self-identity is all-too-often not even skin deep. I trusted him to accept and believe subtle sexism because I know he has experienced many types of racism and because he was genuinely good to and honest with me during my time in graduate school. There is nobody actually still in the direct line from the Math/Stats faculty on up at UMD whose behavior has indicated that I can or should trust them the same way.

    Here is what triggered his actions and what he has done. He received a document anonymously recording experiences of women in the department back in 2018 from one of the female faculty. Instead of denying it occurred or arguing about what was intentional, he believed the reports, was upset that people in his department were experiencing this, and communicated with his Divisional Dean and the OIEC (Office of Institutional Equity and Compliance) at CU. They already knew about the document and were currently observing the situation. (Note: a problem with all offices like this, whatever they are named, is that they publicly state the importance of DEI, but are also responsible for legally protecting the university. These two are often at odds, and this puts those who work there in a nearly impossible position, and makes it difficult for those reporting to ever really trust their intentions.) Instead of observing, he took action, knowing that the health and future of the department depended on it. He made sure to listen to his young faculty, that the department was somewhere they could feel empowered to speak up and be heard. They are the future of the department, and he is focused on putting that future first. He has made hiring diverse faculty a focus and has not had a hard time with it, saying that they are often the most qualified. These faculty have a focus on diversifying the field, in the kind of research they do, who they do it with, and the manner in which they do it. He has pushed the administration for more hires, coming very close to hiring a senior female professor, but not being able to due to delays above him. He is still trying for a more senior hire from an underrepresented group so that new young diverse faculty can have effective in-house mentoring. He has focused on recruiting more diverse students and working to assure those who are underrepresented the kind of guaranteed funding that does not put them at risk. He has assured funding for programs like the Association for Women in Mathematics and other associations for traditionally underrepresented groups. A far cry from the few in my incoming cohort, of whom I was the only one to stay to get a Ph.D. at CU, or the zero the year before, he has achieved half female students multiple times and not had any struggle retaining them. I am sure it is not perfect, but what matters is acting immediately to end harm, listening to those who speak up about it, and making continued, measurable forward progress.

    If a department is really to change discriminatory patterns, the person at the top needs to realize that the future of the department depends on that change, to continually take action to fight for DEI themselves, and, above all, to listen to and empower the faculty, tenured or not, and students to do so without fear of repercussions.

    If people from underrepresented groups are punished for speaking up, if nothing changes when they do, if they are shown that they cannot trust those in charge, those who can will leave, and those who cannot will suffer in silence. If not addressed, this leads to a slow death of the community, but if addressed and fixed, it can lead to shared purpose, revitalization, and hope.

    Wong Tian An

    May 2, 2022
    Gender, University of Minnesota Duluth
    Kristine Snyder, University of Minnesota Duluth
  • Testimonios: Dr. Jesús A. De Loera Herrera

    Testimonios: Dr. Jesús A. De Loera Herrera

    This is my story. I present it through my answers to three questions: Where did I come from?, Where am I today?, and Where am I going now?

    Where Did I Come From?

    Dr. Jesús A. De Loera Herrera; Illustration created by Ana Valle.

    I was born and raised in Mexico City, the huge city of twenty million stories and passions. I come from a middle-class Mexican family. My nuclear family was a bit unusual because my parents separated when I was young, so I was mostly raised by my mother Antonia Herrera Tejada and my grandmother Margarita Tejada de Herrera. My sister Judith is just three years younger than me. The four of us, and a bunch of dogs, formed my household.

    I grew up on the edge of colonia [1] Narvarte and went to elementary school at the adjacent, rough neighborhood of Buenos Aires. Because of this I faced some difficult experiences: my lunch was stolen, I was beaten on a couple of occasions by gangs, and the police harassed young people like me. These experiences made me aware of poverty, violence, and social injustice. Maybe because of the harsh reality I was living, books were my true friends: I could read and read all day long, or at least until my mother ordered me to go outside.

    My father Jesús De Loera López was a remarkable man. He was a poor farmer with no more than a junior high education, who went from being a bracero [2] during the 1940s to becoming a congressman and a gubernatorial candidate in Mexico. Sadly, my relationship with my father was broken. I was proud of his accomplishments, how he pulled himself up from nothing, and I wanted to emulate him, but we spent such little time together that he gave me nothing to hold onto.

    My family and me.

    My mother is an even more remarkable person to me! With little more than a secretarial degree and divorced from my father, she raised two children. She supported us, believed in all of our dreams, no matter how stupid or insane they were, and she sacrificed everything for us. She and my grandmother gave me lots of love, guidance, and a calm environment to grow.

    My family and me.

    I went to public schools in Mexico City. From very early on, I was always a diligent student, because I loved school, I was excited to learn, especially history. The principal of my elementary school had been a historian and he took a liking to me. He gave me books and encouragement. My mom really promoted learning as a way to improve oneself. At great expense and effort, my mom would take my sister and me to the pyramids and excellent museums around the country, which I loved.

    When you work in math, people often treat you as gifted, but I do not think of myself in that way. I am actually quite slow to understand things, but I firmly believe that anyone that really loves something enough to try to be good at it, will become good at it. The very first time I remember loving mathematics was in middle school. My teacher asked us to carry a daily mathematics diary where we would complete our homework. When grading these, she gave prizes to clear, well-organized answers with explicit reasoning. I remember spending so much time making sure my answers were neat. I loved the introduction to basic axiomatic geometry proofs, using similar triangles and parallel lines. It was so much fun to give a solid argument! To know the truth!

    After a successful national exam I was admitted to a high school associated to the National University of Mexico (UNAM). Preparatoria 6 is in the bohemian neighborhood of Coyoacán, very close to the house of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera and Trotsky’s last home. Me and my friends took advantage of the intellectual and artistic atmosphere of the area. I fell in love with astronomy and I helped to build telescopes at the Sociedad Astronómica de México, I wrote poetry and read the work of philosophers from Plato to Nietszche, and I learned to speak proficient French. I was blessed with a very rich intellectual atmosphere among my classmates too, who were also “coming of age’’ as thinkers and creators. Many of my classmates are now academics.

    In high school my fascination with mathematics grew and I first became aware that I was fairly competent when I won third place in a high school mathematics competition. I loved scholarly and theoretical pursuits, but labs were not as exciting to me, so when it came time to decide for a college major I decided to study mathematics. Admission in UNAM was done by scores and grades: since I had the highest scores, I could have chosen medicine or law as my major, but I chose math because I loved it. Many people told me I was crazy not to choose a more conventional career.

    My high school friends.

    In retrospect, it was indeed an impulsive decision, purely based on a feeling. I had no idea what a mathematician did, no idea of what professional math really was about when I chose that career. Today, I can say with certainty that mathematics as a career is an excellent choice, with plenty of job choices and financial rewards too, but back then I did not stop to think about money and what I wanted in a job. All I knew was nothing gave me so much pleasure as mathematics did. Fortunately my teachers gave me reassurances and my mother never once doubted my choice.

    In 1984, I went to college at the Facultad de Ciencias of UNAM. This is a huge university, with more than 100,000 students in one campus. It offered me unlimited opportunities, but you had to push hard to be noticed. It was very hard. As a freshman, for the first time in my life, I felt really academically under-prepared. All of my classmates were so much smarter than me. Being the first to go to college from my father’s side of the family, I certainly felt like an impostor. But I persisted. How did I become resilient? It is hard to say, I feel it is mostly an inner fight. The Aztecs said, “un gran guerrero no es quien logra dominar a sus enemigos, sino aquel que puede dominarse a si mismo.’’ [3]

    During my university studies, I found that math was even more beautiful than I ever imagined! I truly loved the subject, and I could work until late hours of the night thinking about and enjoying the challenges from class, even when it was hard work. I quickly learned that mathematics is not a spectator sport! You learn math by doing math. Just like in music or sports, practice makes perfect.

    I was lucky to have brilliant classmates that made creating mathematics even more fun and exciting, like playing a soccer match! We would argue about theorems and proofs or about life and politics, until late into the night. In yet another lucky life event, I connected to four mathematicians who trained me and believed in me: In analytic geometry class I met Javier Bracho, an elegant geometer topologist who promoted imagination and colorful results. Later Francisco Larrión, an algebraist who took me under his mentorship and taught me to write mathematics and be rigorous. Victor Neumann, one of the founding fathers and elders of discrete mathematics in Mexico took me under his wing. I was his teaching assistant for graph theory and combinatorics and I discovered I enjoy teaching. Victor introduced me to Gilberto Calvillo, the first real applied mathematician I ever met, who at the time worked at the Bank of Mexico. He taught me about operations research and mathematical economics and I discovered that math is crucial to solving real concrete problems. Math became a power tool for analysis and decision-making, not just a beautiful creation. The artistic side of mathematics mingles really well with its applicable power.

    My college mentors.

    The reality is, I am the mathematician I am today because these men were true mentors: they gave me a lot of their time, constructive criticism, and encouragement. I recognize today the value of being a mentor and a supporter of young talent. My 1989 senior thesis was in combinatorial topology and group theory. I gave a modern proof of the classification of planar Cayley graphs of finite groups, first presented by Matschke in 1899. That was the first time I heard about polyhedra, my favorite mathematical objects. In two dimensions, these are high school polygons. Cubes, crystals, and pyramids are examples in three dimensions.

    In perhaps the luckiest event in my entire life, I met a truly brilliant and lovely physics student Ingrid Brust-Mascher, who was not only the top student in her class, but was to become my best friend and later my wife. Taking a risk, Ingrid and I left Mexico together in Fall 1989. In 1990 we got married, and attended graduate school at Cornell University in New York together. Ingrid was an applied physics PhD student, while I worked on my PhD in applied mathematics with a minor in operations research. Ithaca was a drastic change from Mexico City, but a welcome change for us as newlyweds. The life in the outdoors and true winters was a lovely new experience after the hectic life of the big city.

    With Ingrid in 1990

    I did not know it at the time, but the late 1980s brought a remarkable group of mathematicians to Cornell. The Center for Applied Mathematics (CAM) was comprised of a diverse collection of researchers and graduate students whose work covered all areas of research. The director, John Guckenheimer, promoted new ideas and creativity. Lou Billera, who had made great contributions to mathematical optimization, game theory, and algebraic combinatorics gave me wise guidance. Mike Stillman, co-inventor of the computer algebra system Macaulay and one of the pioneers in making algebraic geometry computational, also influenced my way of thinking about mathematics. At the time of my arrival to Cornell several prominent Russian mathematicians, including Andrei Zelevinsky, Misha Kapranov, Sasha Barvinok, had visiting positions in Ithaca. The atmosphere was stimulating and engaging. In my first year I found the best PhD advisor I could dream of, Bernd Sturmfels, then a young rising star in the field of computational and applied algebraic geometry. Since then he has created a whole movement around computation in algebraic geometry (computing with systems of polynomials equations and inequalities). Bernd was my most important teacher. He believed in me and became a good friend. Once more a key mentor helped me improve and grow.

    With Ingrid in 1995

    In those days I saw polyhedra appear everywhere, in applied mathematics, e.g., optimization and probability, and even in the context of pure math (algebraic geometry and topology). Polyhedra became the emphasis of my PhD dissertation and in fact my entire career. In my PhD work, I solved an open question of Gelfand, Kapranov, and Zelevinsky by finding an example of a non-regular triangulation of the Cartesian product of two simplices. I proudly used a computer-based proof. I also wrote a couple of papers on algebraic algorithms for manipulating systems of polynomials. To this day, this topic continues to fascinate me. I received my PhD April 25th, 1995. That same year in June, our first son Antonio was born. By the end of August, we drove across the country to take jobs at the University of Minnesota, two fresh PhDs with a young baby.

    My job was at the Geometry Center. There, with the emphasis on computers and geometry, my research style matured. While at Minnesota, Victor Reiner helped me to explore our common interest on geometric combinatorics. Our second son Andrés was born in Minneapolis, at a hospital by the Mississippi river.

    With Bernd Sturmfels in 1996

    After Minnesota, my second job was at the Computer Science Department in ETH-Zürich Switzerland. I was hosted by the research group of Emo Welzl and Juergen Richter-Gebert, both great friends who had a deep influence on me. The research atmosphere was creative and joyful. Those were happy times for me and my small new family. It was exciting to work on various problems in convex and discrete geometry and computational geometry while, on the weekends, I could escape with my children to the Swiss Alps.

    With family in 1999

    While in Zürich I worked on the problem of finding optimal triangulations and subdivisions of polyhedra. I developed practical algorithms to find triangulations with the fewest number of simplices. For example, I discovered that the minimum triangulation of the regular dodecahedron has 23 tetrahedra. In 1999, I moved to the University of California, Davis to take on a tenure-track faculty position.

    Where Am I Today?

    As I write this recollection of my life I have already completed 20 years in the faculty! It has been a long personal and intellectual journey.

    My work in combinatorics and discrete geometry, started as a PhD student, continues. My first book, written with my great friends Joerg Rambau and Francisco Santos, Triangulations: Structures for Algorithms and Applications, was published in 2010. It is a thorough reference on triangulations of polyhedra. By now, my scholarly work touches on several other topics.

    I have made noteworthy contributions to the problems of computing volumes and integrals over polyhedral regions, and counting lattice points. These three computational problems have many applications, from pure math (algebraic geometry and representation theory) to applied combinatorics, probability and statistics (one is the analysis of contingency tables, see Figure 8.1). The software project LattE was started under my direction and initiative, with the purpose of carrying out those computations. LattE is used by many mathematicians and it helped to introduce dozens of students to research.

    In the past ten years, my desire to work on more applications and computations has led me to apply algebra and geometry in the area of combinatorial optimization. This is the part of applied mathematics related to making optimal choices. A famous example of such problems is the traveling salesman problem: Given n cities that must be visited only once, and the costs cij of flying from city i to city j, the goal is to find the best order to visit all of the given cities in order to minimize the total cost of the trip. I am proud to have been one of the leaders of a new approach to the theory of combinatorial optimization. In this new point of view, we use tools from algebra, topology, and geometry, that were previously considered too pure and unrelated to applications, to prove unexpected computational or structural results. For instance, a long-standing geometric question I care about asks to bound the diameter in the graph of a polyhedron, that is, the maximum length of a shortest path between a pair of vertices in its graph (see Figure 8.1). This is relevant to understanding the performance of the simplex algorithm, one of the most influential computer algorithms in history. My second book, coauthored with Raymond Hemmecke and Matthias Köppe, is titled Algebraic and Geometric Ideas in the Theory of Discrete Optimization. This book is the first compilation of results from this geometric perspective.

    Figure 8.1. (L) Two triangulations of a polytope. (C) Counting statistical tables. (R) A path of the simplex method.

    I have also written many papers on convexity, such as my papers about variations of Carathéodory, Helly and Tverberg type theorems. I like theorems with colors! Tverberg’s theorem is one of my favorites: Suppose a1,…,an are points in Rd. If the number of points, is sufficiently large, namely n>(d+1)(m–1), then they can always be colored into m color classes A1,…,Am in such a way that the m convex hulls convA1,…,convAm have a point in common.

    All of these years of work I have been blessed with appreciation and recognition. For my contributions to discrete geometry, optimization, algebraic algorithms, and mathematical software, I was elected a fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2014 and as a fellow of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2019. Through mathematics I had unique experiences, including traveling all over the world to conferences, discussing my work with some of the brightest minds, and being invited by the Obama White House to speak at the State Department.

    Still, the most lasting reward is all of the students I have mentored. I have now worked with over 60 undergraduates on projects. It is rewarding to see them grow. Some of them are now professors themselves. My 14 former PhD students have gone on to make me very proud. I even had the pleasure of meeting some of my “academic grandchildren.’’ Of course, seeing my own biological children grow and prosper is also a great source of my life’s joy!

    Where Am I Going Now?

    I still have hope that I can create more mathematics in my remaining years and I am keeping up with new advances. Today, computers are essential to the discovery of results, even in pure mathematics, but I see new opportunities as we enter a new era of computational mathematics. First, new methods, that rely on formal logic, make mathematical assertions automatically verifiable with higher certainty. It is not only the computer carrying on calculations, but also the logical components of the proof itself, including all the background theories. A second major shift is how data science and artificial intelligence are driving new mathematical questions. Finally computers and technology (e.g., online courses, Zoom) continue to change mathematics education and collaboration. I will focus my energy to think about such research.

    The people I have met are the true rewards of my career.

    If you have read this far you now know my story and it should be fairly obvious that my journey was only possible because I found people willing to support me. I did not arrive here all by myself. I would like to dedicate time to make mathematics accessible to everyone, especially young Latinx people who can later take my place in the circle of mathematical creation. The most important contribution I will ever make is the people I helped along their journey.

    The people I have met are the true rewards of my career.

    The rising Latinx population indicates it is in everyone’s best economic interest to make sure Latinxs can have access to mathematics and science. As I write this testimonio, the world is engulfed in a pandemic, that has uncovered the deficiencies and the inequality that exists in our society. Thus, fighting for equity and inclusion in STEM is one of my most important duties.

    The people I have met are the true rewards of my career.

    Parting Words

    Dear young reader, if you have fallen in love with math, I urge you never to give up in your passion. Let that love guide your education to become the mathematician you dream to be. Do not give up in the hard moments of disappointment. Rest, but do not desist, persist! Always remember that an expert is someone who has failed enough times to understand how to avoid pitfalls. There are teachers and other students who are willing to help. There is nothing wrong with asking for help and guidance. Seek the mentorship and company of people that will support you and care for your dreams. Then, one day, you will become the expert, the teacher, the mentor. Take that place proudly and be generous and humble. Remember where you came from. Your journey was only possible because of others that came before you.

    I wish you a healthy, balanced, and wise life. One where you have the time to think deeply about the world and others.


    [1] A colonia is a residential quarter within a city.
    [2] A bracero is a migrant farm worker.
    [3] This quote translates to: “a great warrior is not the one who manages to dominate his enemies, but the one who can dominate himself.”


    Previous Testimonios:

    • Dr. James A. M. Álvarez
    • Dr. Federico Ardila Mantilla
    • Dr. Selenne Bañuelos
    • Dr. Erika Tatiana Camacho
    • Dr. Anastasia Chavez
    • Dr. Minerva Cordero
    • Dr. Ricardo Cortez

    Brian P Katz (BK)

    April 15, 2022
    Uncategorized
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