Monday, August 19th 2013
(Click here for the introduction to the Research Realities series, and here for part I)
Back when we were first scoping out locations for our integrated research and education project, my collaborator had mentioned that some colleagues she knew had good luck working with libraries, and that they were sometimes easier to work with than schools. I decided to contact one of the libraries local to the school where I’d wanted to work to see if we might do an after school or weekend science program. I was directed to work with one particular administrator, and we set a meeting for later that week.
I came in, and we hit it off. The administrator seemed thrilled with the idea of the educational program, and we had a great conversation where she provided feedback on what would be most effective with this age group in terms of timing and content. I was careful to make sure I frontloaded our interest in research and that we would want to see if any of the education participants also wanted to be research participants – if so, we would want to collect saliva. The administrator breezed through this and showed me around the library, pointing out various rooms we could use and resources to which we would have access.
We hashed out a plan for when the events would occur, and made a plan for a follow up meeting after this administrator talked with the director of the library. I already had Human Subjects approval and would only need a change of research location amendment, so was eager to get started. I had an army of undergrads who had waited patiently through a semester of Human Subjects paperwork and back and forth with the school that eventually turned us down. I did not want to lose all these students because they waited too long to actually get to do anything.
Everything looked like it was going to be fine, and I was about to submit the amendment, when I got a very odd email from the administrator. This person had talked to the director, and the director said no, so the project was not going to happen. And that was it. Again, no number of emails or phone calls or requests to talk to the director myself had any effect. I kept thinking, “But my project is so awesome, and I’m so engaging! Why aren’t they giving me the chance to win them over?”
It seemed as though a door had been cracked open, only to be closed again, with a dresser pushed up against it on the other side to really make the point.
What devastated me about this second door was not the amount of time I’d invested – it had only been a few short weeks of effort. What hurt was that I was beginning to feel like I was letting my team down: my collaborators and the students I mentor. I was the face of the project, and apparently it wasn’t a very winning face. It was hard to not take the second defeat personally.
I don’t think there are always lessons in failures, but I do think that through these first two experiences I was learning that I had to be knocking on a lot of doors at the same time for one to really open. And as a junior professor, I didn’t have the bandwidth to be doing all that work myself, but I also didn’t have a senior grad student or postdoc to whom I could pass it. I was stuck with a funded yet homeless project and a team of undergrads stuck twiddling their thumbs.
Discussion questions:
- What are other ways to build relationships with gatekeepers that might save time or allow for more opportunities to meet more of them?
- Are there ways to distribute workload among a fairly new team of researchers?
Thursday, August 1st 2013
Well folks, it appears all is well at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and the Nature Research Center (go here and here for the backstory). How could I have gotten it so very wrong?
I’m so glad Drs. Koster and Lowman were kind enough to get back to me, one month after their promised response about the museum restructuring and Dr. Lowman’s new ambassador position. To be honest, their letters are predictable and largely missing any useful answers about the restructuring of the museum or Dr. Lowman’s new position. Dr. Lowman’s letter does say she will continue to mentor her “former direct reports” and that she will do her new job with “optimism and enthusiasm as always.”
Dr. Lowman’s letter says her job is 40% leadership activities, 25% research and academic partnerships coordination, 25% global initiatives, and 10% civic engagement. The global initiatives component explicitly involves assistance of women in science in developing countries.
Dr. Koster’s letter explains the reason for restructuring (and therefore removing Dr. Lowman as director of the NRC) as twofold: first, that the two names for the museum are awkward, and second, the different organizational structure of the employees in the two units. Dr. Koster’s letter also claims the reason for not following up with the New & Observer story, or either of my blog posts, is that the museum has been busy with a “comprehensive situation analysis.”
Other voices on the transition
Since I’ve shared the contents of the letters signed by Drs. Koster and Lowman, I think it’s now time to share some other email I received in the wake of the first posts I wrote on this story. “Safe Place to Comment,” or museanonymous@gmail.com, has sent several quotes along to me, scrubbed of metadata to preserve the anonymity of the commenters. Here is part of their email to me:
“Our goal is to shed light on the negative direction our new leadership appears to be taking. Many of us have invested our best years with this organization. Witnessing this needless destruction by an outsider a year after we were the toast of the town does disrespectful disservice to all who contributed to the NRC and the larger museum.
“With truth, we hope, will come justice.
“Many here wonder why you have taken such an interest in our battle, although we understand that you share our love and respect for Dr Lowman. Her reassignment is a blow to all women in the institution, not just those she recruited directly. Be assured that we are grateful to you, more than you may even know.
“The MuseAnonymous Project”
And a few of the quotes they forwarded:
“Everyone’s on eggshells. We were promised his white paper by Memorial Day weekend and then he shakes up the NRC without it. If he can do this to Meg, none of us are safe.”
“Why no one will talk publicly: We’re small and have a lot of new and longtime employees. I mean two ends of the spectrum. New employees want to stick around for five years to vest in their state retirement plans. Longtime employees want to keep their jobs. It’s tough for a 60-year-old curator to find a new job anywhere these days.”
“I think he was brought in by the Republicans to kill the museum. The secretary was interviewed and believes oil is renewable. The new guy shut down [the] last place in a year. I guess the GOP saw that and thought he’d be good with us.” (a few news stories that may put this quote in context: here and here)
If you want to share your thoughts anonymously and safely with the MuseAnonymous Project, please email museanonymous@gmail.com. While I’ll be happy to follow up with MuseAnonymous if they choose to contact me again, I am done chasing after letters from Drs. Koster and Lowman that are unlikely to even have been written by them.
Wednesday, July 24th 2013
Last fall was a waste. At least, that’s how it felt on the late November day I received an email from the school principal essentially kicking me out of her school. The Day of the Email was, of course, the day after I received Human Subjects Board approval to begin to conduct my integrated research and education program with her students.
I thought I had done everything right, and I had gone above and beyond the kind of relationship building I had done in past sites. Still, my research project was over.
Making the Right Moves
That summer, I had met with a superintendent of the school district and the school’s principal. The superintendent was interested, the principal not. She was very uncomfortable with the idea that on top of an afterschool science program, I’d want to occasionally measure the kids’ growth, learn about their social support networks, and collect saliva or urine. I discussed running focus groups with parents and teachers to find out from them what they’d want in a program before starting, so it was motivated by their interests and desires for their children. She was unmoved. She gave me permission to attend Back to School night to recruit parents and teachers, but nothing more. I was convinced that I could win this principal over, so I agreed to this tight restriction. I was sure it would just be a matter of time and we would come to like each other.
I understood why this principal’s ire was directed at me. I respected it. Anywhere there is a research university, there is often a strained relationship between the school systems and the researchers. Some researchers (or instructors – this happens with teaching and service courses too) swoop into a school, run a project for a semester, and then leave. Others make a giant mess of things. This occurs less and less often these days as there are tighter restrictions and higher standards for school-based research, and the majority of researchers have always been ethical, thoughtful, and kind. But the past history – and often the racism and classism embedded in those memories – still stings. Young kids are always a sensitive population, so I knew going in there would be more resistance, and perhaps more hoops through which to jump.
Yet somehow I thought my winning personality and all my efforts to reach parents and teachers would be enough to turn over many years of disappointing relations.
So, I met with parents in a conference room at a local library. I got a babysitter to watch the kids and bought a sandwich platter and candy. We sat around a small, poorly-lit table, and these parents told me their number one goal was to get their kids to college, and no, their kids didn’t have a choice about it. They cared about their children’s enrichment deeply, and wanted their kids to be exposed to all kinds of science, but their strongest feelings were that they wanted to give their kids whatever they needed to prepare their children for college and a good-paying job.
I met with the teachers in their classroom. The teachers expressed frustration with a mandated state curriculum that didn’t leave time for science. They were limited in what they were able to teach, not out of a lack of ability or interest but a lack of time and resources. Even the fact that the classroom was made of individual desks rather than tables limited what they were able to do. The only science-related material specifically mandated by the state curriculum was that they teach laboratory safety, which amounted to teaching the kids that they should wear goggles. They had no time to help kids explore their interests, and it devastated them that they had so little time to cover science because of the huge emphasis on reading and math testing.
At the PTA meeting I attended that fall, I met a widow whose husband had been an anthropologist. She wanted her daughter to know what her daddy had done, because he died when she was only a few years old. She teared up at the thought of my coming in and teaching some anthropology. I did too.
I met the principal. I tried, probably too hard, to get her to like me. I tried to show her my interests in her kids were good and that the contribution I wanted to make to her school was an important one. She held me at arm’s length the whole meeting, allowing people to interrupt us, smiling a long-suffering smile when I tried to crack jokes. I still managed to leave the meeting thinking I had made headway, that things were better at the end of the meeting than when they started.
I met kids who talked endlessly of static electricity, kids who wanted to know why Pluto wasn’t a planet any more, kids who wanted to blow things up and kids who wanted to study leaves. And I became emotionally invested in some delightful children and families, and imagined getting to know them over a multi-year project that would begin at the school but last into their teen years.
Agency And Willpower Are Only Part Of The Recipe
And then that email. I wrote back, sure I had misunderstood the principal. She didn’t respond. I wrote again. Nothing. Finally I called her, and called her, until she answered.
“Did you mean in your email that you no longer want my program at your school?”
“Well, we just won’t have room.” The email had said something to that effect, though I had toured the school multiple times and knew that there was plenty of space. It was a school.
“So you are saying this relationship is over. That my program will not happen at your school.”
“Yes, that is what I’m saying.”
I paused. The grant proposals I had written (one had even been successful), the Human Subjects proposals (the phone calls, the emails, the pre-review, the review), the recruiting of undergraduate assistants, the focus groups and relationship building, these things took an entire semester. An entire semester, pre-tenure, that I had had off from teaching and needed to use as efficiently as possible. All for nothing.
“Okay then,” I said. “Have a good day.” What more could I say? I couldn’t fight it. I knew all along that this principal didn’t trust me and wasn’t going to trust me. But I put all my faith in being able to turn her, and pushed forward anyway. I believed my own agency and effort would be able to overcome a hostile institutional gatekeeper.
That was my first lesson. Agency only gets you partway towards your goal, and like the rest of academia, research does not operate in a fair, meritocratic environment. Further, historical context matters – and it should. Yes, the gatekeeper was hostile, and maybe not the most pleasant person. We’re never going to be friends. But the hostile behavior came from a place of wanting to protect her students, in an environment that was itself oppressive and potentially exploitative to her and her students.
You can “Lean In” all you want, but the other side has to want it like you do. They have to “Lean In” too.
That said, there was a lot more to do before I was going to let this project die. I’ll share the story of site attempt #2 in my next post.
Discussion Questions
- What would have been other ways to build relationships with a hostile gatekeeper? When does it make sense to cut your losses instead?
- What kinds of ethical issues do you face when dealing with sensitive populations? How can you become educated about these issues, and demonstrate that expertise to gatekeepers?
- What is the historical context of your potential site? What are the town-gown relations, if any? What are the cultural differences that you need to be aware of? Who are good local contacts to help you navigate all this?
