Oral History Program Brenda Marsteller Kowalewski Interviewed by Kandice Harris 7 May 2025 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Brenda Marsteller Kowalewski Interviewed by Kandice Harris 5 May 2025 Copyright © 2026 by Weber State University, Stewart Library Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The Weber State University Oral History Project began conducting interviews with key Weber State University faculty, administrators, staff and students, in Fall 2007. The program focuses primarily on obtaining a historical record of the school along with important developments since the school gained university status in 1990. The interviews explore the process of achieving university status, as well as major issues including accreditation, diversity, faculty governance, changes in leadership, curricular developments, etc. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Kowalewski, Brenda Marsteller, an oral history by Kandice Harris, 5 May 2025, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Brenda Marsteller Kowalewski, conducted on May 7, 2025, in the Stewart Library by Kandice Harris. Brenda discusses growing up in Maryland, her early career, and her time at Weber State University as a professor of sociology, director of the Center for Community Engaged Learning, and vice provost of High Impact Educational Experiences & Faculty Excellence. Lorrie Rands, the video technician, is also present during this interview. Note: Active listening, transitions in dialogue (such as “um,” “so,” “you know,” etc.), and false starts in conversations are not included in transcription for ease of reading. All additions to transcript noted with brackets. KH: Today is May 7, 2025. We are with Brenda Marsteller Kowalewski. Kandice Harris is conducting the interview, and Lorrie Rands is the video technician. Just to get started, when and where were you born? BMK: Well, okay, I actually grew up in Maryland, but I was born in York, Pennsylvania, because I lived just two miles below the Pennsylvania line, that MarylandPennsylvania line. York Hospital in Pennsylvania was the closest hospital for us, so I was actually born in York, Pennsylvania, even though I grew up in Maryland the entire time. I probably grew up in Pennsylvania as much as I grew up in Maryland, because we were just two miles below the line, and I was born May 31, 1968. KH: Would you talk a little bit about growing up and some of your background? BMK: Absolutely. I loved my childhood; I have to admit. I grew up in a little town called Freeland in Maryland. Very rural kind of community, kind of a farming community. 1 My dad was a plumber, my mom actually, she stayed at home and raised four of us. I’m the fourth child, and the last of four children. We had a garden. I mean, a big couple of gardens, right? Harvested everything, put it in the freezer. My dad raised some cows. Not like a big farm, you know, just enough cows for the family to eat and put in the freezer and whatnot. I worked outside, had to weed the garden and pick rocks out of the field, and all of the things growing up that I just was like, you know, kind of crazy. But it was a fantastic childhood, because all of my cousins lived like right there. My grandparents lived literally next door. My other aunt and uncle and cousins lived next to them. Two houses down on the other side was another aunt and uncle and set of cousins. I mean, we were all just right there. We kind of called it Marsteller Hill, and we kind of all just lived there. That was the property that my dad farmed as a kid, because his parents, they lived like… I'm gonna say just beyond the maple tree, because that's how we talked about it. You can still see that big maple tree from my parents’ house, and they lived down this valley beyond the maple tree. My grandfather owned all of that land. Then he sold off the back acres and only kept the front acres that were closer to the road, and that's where everyone built their houses. So, I grew up with family everywhere. I grew up with a set of grandparents right next door who were like my second set of parents. When I climbed through the barbed wire fence and cut my leg, you know, I ran to granny. That's who patched me up and butterflied it, and out I went to go play again. We played in the pastures, ‘cause it was just pastures, and these big walnut trees were down 2 on the bottom. We built all these forts down by this spring that was in the pasture. It was great. We'd lay moss down as our carpet. I know this sounds crazy, but— KH: It sounds amazing. BMK: —It was an awesome childhood. It was absolutely awesome. When our moms were calling us for dinner, they all had a different whistle that they could whistle, right? My mom didn't even have to put fingers in her mouth to whistle with her tongue. She could just curl her tongue and whistle, and we knew who was whistling, who was calling for dinner. We'd have to come up out of the pasture, and it took us a minute, ‘cause we were kind of far away, but you could hear it, and you knew. That's the kind of childhood that I had. It was awesome. Totally loved it. Then, of course, I did all my stuff through school, and had these teachers that saw things in me that I didn't see. First generation college student, like man, we were working class all the way. My mom raised us, and she took care of other kids, and then eventually worked in a greenhouse; after my sister got a job at that greenhouse, then my mom got a job at that same greenhouse. My dad was a plumber and then did this farming stuff in the evening and in the morning. Nobody went to college. I had these teachers, even as early as elementary school, that were seeing things in me that I wasn't recognizing, my family wasn't recognizing. But my mom did always tell me, “You can be anything you want. You can be anything you put your mind to, period. Whatever you want to put your mind [to], you can do it.” She didn't know what those things were, right? Sky was the limit. 3 Go off to high school. High school for us was seventh through 12th grade. Like, you were all in one school. It was pretty small, like my graduating class maybe had 200 students, maybe. So, went to Hereford High School, and they had a great ag [agriculture] program, not that I was part of it. But in any case, had teachers in high school that really encouraged me to go to college. I played field hockey, basketball, and lacrosse, played these three sports year-round, and they encouraged me to go college. I was like talking to my parents, and my two older sisters went to college, but not because that was something that was expected. My brother is the oldest. He did not go to college. He picked up a trade, electrician. When my oldest sister said she wanted to go to college, because her boyfriend was going to college, my parents were like, “Why? Why? Why are you doing that? You don't need to go to college. Girls don't go to college.” But she paved the way. My sister went. She opened the door. So, when my next sister, who's just 16 months older than me, she went to college—all of them stayed in Maryland—that really opened the door. My coaches were saying to me, “You should be playing in college. You should be going to college.” Teachers were telling me I should be going to college. So, I'm having this conversation with my parents, and I'm getting recruited by Hofstra University on Long Island. My parents were like, “What? No,” and, “Why would you go so far away?” and all of the things. I totally wanted to go reinvent myself, so I went to New York, went to school at Hofstra University, played field hockey and lacrosse. Loved it, amazing, Division I. I was Academic All-American. Not an All-American athlete, an 4 Academic All-American athlete, okay, just so you know. But had a phenomenal time in college, and my parents came up and watched almost every game. KH: That's awesome. BMK: It was every home game, anyway. It was a good four-hour drive, four-and-a-halfhour drive for them. They came up on the weekends, they sometimes stayed in my dorm room ‘cause we didn't have the money for them to stay elsewhere, slept in my bed, in a little twin bed. My parents slept in a little twin bed. I slept on the floor. It was great. It was awesome. Then they would take my teammates out to Jim's Deli for breakfast before the game. It was great. When we played at Towson University, which was really close to where I grew up, the whole team would come to my parents' house, and my mom would cook a bunch of pasta the night before the game, and everybody would be hanging out, and then they'd come to that game the next day, too. Any case, my parents were really supportive, as you can tell. They supported me all through college, and when I said to them, “I have these professors who want me to go to grad school.” My dad was like, “I'm not paying for that.” I'm like, “You're not paying for undergrad either, Dad, so I wouldn't ask you to pay for grad.” My mom just kind of shook her head, and she said, “[Sighs] Can't you just come home, get married, and have babies like everyone else?” 5 I said, “Apparently not.” I mean, you know. They're very proud of me and all of the things, but it just, there was a disconnect, right? This trajectory that I was on, just very different from what they were doing. Any case, I go to grad school. Put some applications up, had a couple of offers, ended up going to the University of Maryland at College Park, and got my master's and PhD in sociology. Studied sociology the whole time, undergrad and grad. People’ve just always been incredibly fascinating to me. Ever since I was young, vacationing in Ocean City, Maryland. That was our spot. We camped all the time. As you can tell, I bounce all over the place in my stories. KH: That's great. BMK: All over the place. LR: It’s all good. BMK: I go two steps forward and three steps back in time. LR: No worries. BMK: Okay, good. So, any case, people have always been fascinating to me. We used to vacation in Ocean City, Maryland. Like, every summer we would go, we would camp, and spend a week at the beach. You could actually camp down there, and then you had to haul your stuff to the beach every day. They had this boardwalk, and we would go in the evening to the boardwalk, and my dad and I had a tendency to be real people watchers. Just sitting on the bench, eating an ice cream or a crab cake sandwich or something, and you're just watching people go. I would just, I don't know, stories about their lives, just start to connect, or I 6 would watch the way that body language, and the way that people were interacting with each other. I was just always fascinated. I think this probably led me to study sociology in college. I just found it absolutely fascinating to kind of figure out who I was and how I was situated within the world and within the structure of things. Sociology gave me sort of the place and the space to kind of figure that out, and social class was just a real key element for me, because here I am this working-class kid, and I'm going to college, and my two sisters went to college, but they stayed in Maryland, and they went for very different reasons. My one sister, I told you, her boyfriend went, so she decided to go. My other sister was totally going for the party scene. I mean, period. That was it. She'll tell you that that was exactly why she went to college. So, for me, I was like, what is happening? Why am I so different than my family members? What role did I play in that family? Sociology just kind of gave me the space to start to figure out these structures, and how these structures have created opportunities and shut some opportunities down, or put me on a path that kind of guided me in a particular way. So, it was fascinating. Sounds a little narcissistic, but I was trying to figure out who I was. I told you I went to college to reinvent myself, right? I was like, “Oh my gosh.” I was class president in high school, and everybody had these expectations, and they all just kind of put me in a box, and they knew exactly who I was, and what I was gonna do, and all of these things, right? Played three sports, and the homecoming queen thing—it was a popularity contest. It wasn't anything other 7 than that, right? It's very strange. Any case, you know, all of that stuff, and I was like, “No, I'm going to college. I am reinventing myself.” I found out I'm pretty much the same person I have always been, right? ‘Cause I was rooted in these fantastic morals and values and family, and I was grounded. So, I tried to reinvent myself, but, you know, reaffirmed who I am and what I care about. Any case, I digress. I'm all over the place. You asked me one question, and— KH: No, no. LR: No, that's good. KH: I love those answers. LR: They're amazing. BMK: —I have just given you all kinds of things. KH: That is perfect. LR: Can we—? I'm kind of worried. I want make sure that this is recording sound. KH: Okay. [Recording stops] [Recording resumes] LR: Do you mind if I ask a quick question? KH: Go for it. LR: So, you talk about your sisters paving the way for you. Is there anyone younger than you in your family? BMK: I'm the last of four kids. 8 LR: Okay, so you’re the baby. BMK: I'm the baby of the family. LR: My question is, if your sisters hadn't have gone to college, what are the odds that you would have gone? BMK: Yeah, that's a really good question. I think I had so many people encouraging me to go that I probably would have ended up there, but it would have been a harder row to hoe, right? There would have a lot more convincing that had to happen with my parents. And Hofstra University, private institution, right? Expensive to go there. I'm coming from a working-class family. We did not have college savings. That was not even on the radar. So, it was really like, how to go to college? That was a big deal, trying to figure that out. I had these scholarships. I had some athletic scholarships, I had some leadership scholarships, I had some academic scholarships. Like, they put a package together. [Leans closer] We're talking, like—what year did I graduate from high school? 1986. So, we are not talking women's athletics getting these amazing scholarship packages, right? I mean, we're putting all these little scholarships together just to get me to go to college. Had financial aid, was a work-study student. I pretty much had all—any of the savings that I had in my bank account I used to pay the down payment for the first tuition deposit at the institution. So, trying to figure out how to get to college was a big deal anyway, financially. My best friend growing up, oh my gosh, Kelly, Kelly Kermer. Her parents, her dad worked in higher ed. She showed me a whole different life too. That's 9 why I also think I would have gone to college. Because her family, they just had a different way of life. They just had a different set of expectations. It wasn't if Kelly was going to college, it was when and where. She was an only child, and they kind of adopted me as another child in their family. Like, we were connected at the hip, right? So, they kind of had an expectation that I would go to college as well. These other influential factors in my life probably would have propelled me there, but how to pay for it was a hurdle. In fact, it was Kelly's dad, Mr. Bob— that's what I called him, Mr. Bob. Mr. Bob and Ms. Pat Kermer. Mr. Bob sat down with my folks, and he worked through financial aid with them. He worked though like, how do we do all of this? Because it was way more expensive than we could afford. I did have student loans. Ended up paying those off after grad school. ‘Cause I had no loans for grad school, but I definitely had loans for college. LR: Awesome. Well, thank you. BMK: Yeah, absolutely. KH: You kind of mentioned all of these, but just to get it all down in writing, what degrees do you have? BMK: Okay, so I have a bachelor's degree in sociology from Hofstra University, have a master's degree in sociology from University of Maryland at College Park, which is also where I got my PhD. KH: Okay, great. So, what point did you meet John? BMK: Oh, oh, this is a great story. KH: Oh good. 10 BMK: Yeah, my spouse, John. I met John when I went to grad school. So, funny, John grew up in upstate New York; I grew up in Maryland. He went to the University of Maryland College Park for his undergrad; I went to New York for my undergrad. So, we swapped states. Did not know each other at this point. I come back to Maryland, go to the University of Maryland College Park, right, to do the master's and PhD, and I'm living in this three-bedroom apartment. One of my roommates, Beth, excellent friends with John, and he would call all the time. This is my first year of grad school, so what is this, 1990? Yes, it's 1990. First year of grad school, he would call the apartment all the time to talk to Beth. Beth was always at her boyfriend's, and I was home studying, ‘cause I was the nerd, right? I'd pick up the phone, and I was like, “Who is this dude with a really nice voice?” John has a really nice voice. KH: He does. BMK: Now, I was dating the guy upstairs at the time, and he turned out to be a jerk, by the way. KH: They often do. BMK: He was a total jerk. That's a whole nother story. Any case, I'm talking to John on this phone, ‘cause Beth is never home. She had been saying to John, “You have to meet my new roommate. You have meet her. You guys would get along so well.” He's like, “I've been down this path twice before with you already, and this was bad. I don't think I'm up for a third time.” Well, as it turns out, we kind of connected on the phone, and then, yeah, we started seeing each other pretty 11 darn quick. It was probably, I don’t know, beginning of October. [Whispers] He remembers these stuffs better than I do. It’s really bad. [Stops whispering] It was probably beginning of October we started dating, and we were married by ‘92, 1992. October of ‘92, so two years later. But I had this conversation with him at one point, because it's still my first year of grad school, it's like in the springtime, and I am like, “Okay, time out. You are making me feel things I was not planning. You're not in my plans. I'm getting a PhD. So, I need to understand. What's going on here? Like, how invested are you? Because I need know how much to invest in this, because you're not in my plans.” He was sort of like, “What is happening?” I'm like, “Yeah, I’m pretty straightforward.” He's like, “Yeah, I'm invested.” I'm like, “Okay then, fine, we can continue. It's fine.” This is how it went, and it's been good, because we've been together since ‘92. KH: Oh, wow. LR: [With Kandice] That's awesome. BMK: How many years is that already? LR: Let's see. KH: Thirty-three. LR: It's 33, yeah. BMK: Yeah. 12 LR: I’m like, how long have I been out of high school? That's the year I graduated from high school. BMK: It is? LR: 1992, so. BMK: All right. There it is. LR: Sorry. BMK: No worries. No worries at all. I love it. These connections are good. So, yeah, that's when John entered the picture. KH: Okay, great. Once you finished with your PhD, what was your plan? What opportunities did you have? BMK: Well, when I was in college, I really didn't know what I wanted to do. I'm gonna back up to there for a minute, because I really didn't know what I wanted to do. I just knew I liked these sociology classes. I'm in my junior year of college, and they're like, “What's your major gonna be?” I'm like, “I have to choose a major? I don't know. I have loved everything I have been doing.” So, I was looking in the classified sections of the New York Times to find my major. LR: Interesting. BMK: [Laughs and nods] It was an interesting attempt, right? ‘Cause I'm like, “Well, what kind of jobs do they need? What kind of people?” I'm in the classified sections. I am here to tell you sociologist was not in the classified. Not in the classified. But there I am. So, I just decided I was gonna do it; I was gonna major 13 in sociology. I had these fantastic [professors]—Doctor Albertson, Doctor Silverman—just totally encouraging me, so I was like, “Yep, I'm in.” They told me, “You're gonna go to grad school.” That's what they told me. I'm like a junior, looking for a major in the classifieds, and I've got these two professors saying, “You're gonna go to grad school.” I'm like, “You guys are crazy. I don't know what you're smoking, but you're nuts.” Well, as it turns out, they mentored me to go to grad school in sociology, and I said to them at the time, “What am I gonna do with this?” ‘Cause my parents really want to know what I'm gonna do. Like, I'm a working-class kid, and they wanna know how this is gonna translate into something that is gonna pay me money. They said, “Well, you're going to go to grad school, and you're gonna figure it out in grad school. But one of the things that you can do is you can be a professor, like us.” I was like, “Yeah, no, no. I'm not smart enough for that.” They're like, “Oh, no no, you are, and you can do that. You could also work in lots of places where you're crunching numbers. You're really good with data, so you could work in places that you are doing research with and for other organizations, and maybe government organizations. There are lots of opportunities. You could work on the nonprofit sector.” They're telling me these things, and I'm like, “I don't really know what any of this stuff means.” 14 I'm a working-class kid. I was writing on my papers in my first year Doctor Albertson. D-O-C-T-O R, Doctor Albertson. He had to pull me aside and be like, “Actually, that's a medical doctor. That's not us; we just use D-R period.” Like, I just didn't know. I had no idea, right? In any case, by the time I had gotten to grad school, I already had a couple of seeds planted in my brain about what my possibilities were. Because I was situated right outside of Washington, D.C., fabulous, I had all kinds of opportunities to work for government agencies where I kind of got to try out this, you know, being a data head and doing some of this research. So, that was great, but it also taught me. It gave me the opportunity to kind of test it out. I did a lot of data cleaning for Walter Reed Army Medical. Oh my gosh, I didn't want to be a data cleaner. I wasn't interested, right? It was a great, fun experience with the people that I worked with, but that work, it was just so rote. It was just so much the same. I was like, “No, no, this is not something that I want to do.” I worked with The National Institute for Health, and I did all kinds of fun kinds of projects there, and they were research projects. It informed, actually, my master's thesis that I did on… goodness gracious, children with special needs and the supplemental pay that you get from the government, and if that's adequate for meeting the needs of the families that are receiving that. We have all these data at our fingertips, right? So, all secondary data analysis and whatnot, but it was all right there, and it was all at my fingertips. It was 15 interesting, it was fun; it was not feeding my soul. What was feeding my soul was the instructor-level work that I was doing. I started as a teaching assistant for a stats class my first couple of years in grad school, and it was the teaching. I had to teach five stat labs a week. The preparation for those labs, and then being in front of students, and then working with students and helping them understand these concepts that were truly eluding some of them. I was like, “Whoo, okay, let's work on this,” and I could usually meet them where they were to help them figure it out. I might have to say it five different ways, or give them five different analogies or five different examples, but we would eventually get there, and that made me tick. I was like, “Oh, I like this. This is good. I feel like I'm helping people.” Maybe it was the instant gratification of seeing the light bulb go off, or seeing them succeed on the next exam where they had failed the previous one, or whatever it is. Maybe that was what was making me tick; I'm not really sure. But that connection with students was really the thing that I was most excited about. This idea that Doctor Albertson and Doctor Silverman had planted in my brain about potentially being a professor, it was all coming together in these teaching opportunities that I had. I became an instructor after I got the master's degree. I was able to have my own classes, and that was really cool because that's when I actually started playing around with service-learning as a pedagogy. I was a grad instructor at the time, and a couple of my colleagues and I discovered this new pedagogy, service-learning, started playing with it, and said, “Oh my gosh. This is exactly—it's like the application of knowledge. It's the 16 application of sociology. Students go out into non-profit organizations. They are applying what they're learning in our classroom. They're coming back with realworld, tangible examples of these abstract concepts. Cultural capital? Oh my gosh, they're getting it! This is awesome! This is the thing! We gotta do this thing!” Then we started writing about it a little bit, and studying it, and gathering some data. Then we started putting syllabi sets together for other sociologists across the country and published them through the American Sociological Association. We did I think three sets of those syllabi sets for years, right? Even as we were assistant and associate professors, we were still being asked by the American Sociological Association to put these syllabi sets together for this pedagogy that became a cornerstone of my career. So, started in grad school. Those kinds of experiences though, I mean, that to me, teaching was just the thing. It kind of just lit this fire within me, and that was it. I wanted to ooze sociology in the classroom. I just wanted everybody to have the experience that I had. I just wanted them all to just latch on and lap this up and love it the way that I did. You know what I mean? KH: Yeah. BMK: So, I think that's how I knew. KH: Okay. You've kind of mentioned two of your professors that were mentors. Were there any other mentors throughout your college education that stand out? BMK: Oh, yeah, Lynn Mulkey was also really impressive. She was a female sociologist in my undergrad. She did not encourage me the way that Doctor Silverman and 17 Albertson had, and they were both male professors. But her example, right? Female professor, sociologist. I was like, “Doable. I can do that. It's a thing.” Then, when I get to grad school, Mady Segal, Doctor Mady Segal, she was my professor that I was the stats teaching assistant for. She was amazing. Like, just kind of took me under her wing, taught me the ropes. She was an excellent, excellent teacher. Not much of a researcher. Excellent teacher. I saw that, and she gave me all kinds of teaching tips, and a key to her office, and I could use her office whenever. I house sat for her and her husband, David. They were both faculty members in the department. That was kind of where it started. Then Reeve Vanneman, oh, Doctor Reeve Vaneman, he was an outstanding mentor in grad school. He got a group of us together, there were four grad students and Reeve, and we became a research group. We were looking and researching the gender wage gap, and kind of looked at the impact, macrolevel kinds of impacts, like occupational sex segregation and its impact on the wage gap. Turns out that only explained a small portion of it; it was mostly discrimination. But, you know, we had to figure out whether or not these larger macro things were actually impacting the wage gap. Any case, he put this team together, so Joan Hermsen, Dave Cotter, JoAnn DeFiore, Reeve Vanneman, and myself, the five of us, were a research team. We were doing this research, gosh, throughout grad school. Even as we were assistant professors, even as we all scattered all over the place, and Reeve was our anchor at University of Maryland, and we scattered all over the country in these assistant professor positions, we still were doing research together. My 18 first set of publications, most of them, are really gender wage gap and occupational sex segregation kinds of research with that research team. It turns out that basically everybody else landed in places where they had a teaching load that was like a 2:2 or a 3:3. Mine was a 4:4. Actually, we were on the quarter system when I first got here, so I was teaching five-credit-hour classes, and it was like three in the fall, three in the winter, three in the spring. It was a lot. I just said to them, I was like, “You guys, I cannot keep up with the research group. I just can't. I gotta pare down. It's too heavy for my teaching load.” They totally got it, no problem. They continued to publish together. JoAnn and I both had really heavy teaching loads, but Joan, Dave, and Reeve continued to publish together. That's when my research agenda kind of shifted a little bit. I had to weave teaching and scholarship together here at Weber; I can talk about that another time. So, Reeve was a huge mentor. Critical for my success here at Weber. We're not publish or perish here, but definitely you've got to keep your scholarship up. You've got to publish. That got me on that trajectory and got me going in grad school and taught me how to do that as a professional, you know, at the university as a professor. So, yeah, he was huge. I'd say Lynn Hamilton was also really good. She, a little wacky, I think I like that about her, totally. But she really gave me some inspiration to be different. You don't have to be part of the cookie cutter, [makes air quotes] “professor.” She was a little whacky, right? I mean, in a good way. It helped me kind of think 19 outside the box and feel free to be more me, more true to who I am, authentically, as a professor. KH: Okay, great. You kind of mentioned when starting college, it was a little difficult finding funding. Were there any other obstacles that you faced during your college education? BMK: As a student athlete, time was a thing. We drove to all of these games in vans, and these were five-ish, six-ish hours away sometimes. So, book lights in the van to get homework done. I'd say no, mostly probably finances were really my biggest challenge, but I was a work-study student too, so I worked over the PFC, the physical fitness center—that's what we called it, the PFC. I worked there. I had to check IDs as students came in and out. It was a fantastic job. I got to do so much homework while I was [working], you know what I mean? So much. It was awesome. So, no, I would say it was mostly financial. KH: Okay. When did you start working at Weber State? BMK: 1995. July of 1995 was when my contract officially started. I arrived here… oh my gosh. We were on the quarter system. The quarter system started in September. I think we arrived here—it might have been Labor Day weekend. It might have been the end of August, but I think it might have been Labor Day weekend. You know those yellow sunflowers that grow all in the fall? They're all over Antelope Island and they're all over the place, right? I remember they were in bloom, because I was so sad. We moved into an apartment that I called “Storage with a Kitchen,” affectionately, because it was just like, you know, boxes. We slept on the floor, and we had a kitchen. 20 My mom and dad helped us move across the country, and I tell you, they're incredibly supportive, my parents. Helped us move across the country, and I just, you now, I left this lovely little home, I'm leaving my family, they were so far away, I'm in Storage with a Kitchen. My mom went for a walk and picked these flowers and put them on the kitchen table, and suddenly, it felt like home. It was this neat little thing. What was your question? When did I arrive? KH: What brought you to Weber? You answered my last question, so what brought you to Weber? BMK: It was the job, right? I'm fresh out of grad school. Actually, I hadn't even defended my dissertation yet. It is summer of ’95; I still needed to defend my dissertation. The offer was made to me by Dean Sadler. Dean Richard Sadler, he hired me. $27,500, and I would get a $1,000 bump once I finished that dissertation, once I defended it. So, $28,500 is what I was making when I started, because I defended my dissertation in August. I arrived, and yeah, didn't make a whole lot of money, but I said to John when I was interviewing—I had a couple of places, right? Creighton University was one of them, in Nebraska. I don't know if you remember. Okay, so any case, it's in Nebraska, and Weber State. These were the two real contenders for me. These are the two, real places. I remember the interview at Weber State, I'm calling John, and I am saying, “Well, do you wanna go where we're gonna make more money, or do you wanna go where I think we're gonna be happy?” He said, “Those should be the same place.” 21 I said, “Well, they’re not.” He said, “Well, we gotta go for happiness.” I said, “Then, if Weber makes an offer, we gotta to go to Weber State.” Like, that's just it, that's the bottom line. I connected with the people here immediately. It was just interesting. I don't know, there was just some sense of community here, and it was also very different. Like, I'm not part of the Latter-day Saints culture, and it was very prevalent here. I was like, “Oh, this is fascinating. I get to learn a whole new culture.” In fact, when we moved into our apartment, Storage with a Kitchen, knock at the door. Here's this woman standing outside. She's got some preserves of some sort. She says, “Hi, I'm not a Molly Mormon or anything, but I'm your next door neighbor, and I just wanted to welcome you to the neighborhood. I live in the apartment right over there, and I wanted to give you these preserves.” I said, “Oh, well hi, Molly. My name is Brenda.” I'm shaking her hand and she's like, “No no no no, no no, I'm not a Molly Mormon. I’m a—” She's speaking a foreign language to me. I am like, I have no idea what is happening right now. But it spurred a research project. So, then I started to understand, what is this Molly Mormon stereotype? The more I learned about it, I started to understand there's some similarities to the Jewish-American Princess stereotype, which was prevalent at Hofstra University. Then I started, and I wrote and gave a presentation on the parallels between Molly Mormon and JewishAmerican Princess. Fascinating! 22 LR: Wow. KH: That sounds fascinating. BMK: It is fascinating! Minority religions, women are used as a scapegoat, period. That's just it. It takes the pressure off of the minority men, right? They've got a scapegoat. It's fascinating. Neither of these are positive stereotypes. JewishAmerican Princess, JAP, has all kinds of connotations attached to it. Molly Mormon? Why did my new neighbor say, “I'm not a Molly Mormon, but I wanted to come over here and welcome you to the neighborhood”? Because there's no positive connotation, right? Fascinating. So yes, what brought me to Weber was the people, and the opportunities. It was kind of like a new start in the department, because they were hiring three full-time sociologists and a part-time, like an instructor level position, all at one time. There was so much turnover in the department [that] there was opportunity for us to put our fingerprints on it. That was a really neat opportunity, and I connected. I connected with the people. KH: You kind of mentioned a little bit, but what was Weber State like when you started? BMK: Oh, totally different. Tiny, it felt, right? People were still getting over—and maybe we still are—the Harrison High thing, but they were still getting over that, because Weber had just become a university. I didn't know that. It was Weber State University to me, right? But it was maybe, what, five years before that it had become a university? I think it was 1990, right? KH: 1991. 23 BMK: 1991, I was close. So, ‘91— [points to Kandice] asked the university historian, right on. It's the way it works. I just thought, you know, it's a university. I didn't have this perception of it as a college, as a little old college that's an extension of high school, which is the chip that people had on their shoulders here for a long time, right? I just came in thinking, “No, it's a university.” I just treated it like a university. It’s a university, period. So, my expectations were it was going to function like a university; I didn’t have all this other baggage. Everyone we hired since then treated it just like a university, which I really think helped propel Weber State and helped it grow into what it is today, which is pretty awesome if you ask me. So, smaller, smaller community, fewer women professors. In fact, Dean Sadler came into my office and sat down and said, “So, I understand you're pregnant.” This was with my first child. She was born in 1998. I'm thinking, “Who the heck told him I was pregnant?” But okay, “Yes.” He said, “Now, during your interview, you asked me, how work-and-family friendly is Weber State University? Well, I'm gonna show you how work-andfamily friendly we are. I'm gonna say that in the quarter that your baby is born, you're not gonna teach any classes." I said, “Okay. That would be great, thank you. This is the maternity leave policy?” “Well, we don't have a maternity leave policy.” We didn't have one at Weber State. It was all negotiated. Deans and faculty. 24 KH: That's insane! BMK: Insane! KH: Oh my gosh. BMK: That's what I'm talking about. Weber was different, right? It was very different. So, that was great. She was born at the very beginning of spring term, and I didn't start teaching again until fall term. It was awesome, then my mother-in-law came and lived with us for six months, so she wasn't in child care for a year. It was all great. Second child. Dean Sadler comes to my office. “Now, I know you're having a second child.” “Yes, yes I am.” “I know what we did with the first child.” “Yes, it was very generous. I was very, very grateful. Thank you very much.” “I need you to bank classes this time.” “What does that mean, Dean Sadler?” “Well, you're still gonna be responsible for the four classes that you're supposed to teach. Any time that you’re taking off, you need to make up those classes. So, if you want to teach some now, do some overload now, and then do some overload after, great, but I can't be as generous as I was with the first baby.” So, I taught overload classes while pregnant. I felt better in the second pregnancy than I did in the first, so thank goodness for that. But you're still 25 teaching a four, and I'm trying to teach two overload classes on top of it, while pregnant. Then, I have this baby, have a little time, can't really remember how much time, was not a whole lot of time, a couple of weeks. Then I had to teach overload classes. KH: Oh my gosh. BMK: Yeah, with a newborn and a three-year-old? It was nuts. No maternity leave policy. Well, I'm going through this. My colleague Marjukka Ollilainen is watching this, she too is pregnant, and she is like, “No. We need a maternity leave policy. This is not okay. This is gonna kill us.” She spearheaded that whole thing, and that's when the maternity leave policy started at Weber State, and it's credit to Marjukka, absolutely positively. LR: That wasn't until after 2001 that we got a maternity leave policy? BMK: Correct. KH: That's insane! BMK: Yes, that is correct. It's wild! LR: Yes, it is. BMK: It's kind of wild. So, Weber was different. We still had Buildings 1, 2, 3, and 4, you know? It looked totally different. It truly feels and looks like a university now; it looked like a college then. I just didn't know any different, so I just called it a university. It was a university, right? Yeah, definitely different. I also think I was kind of breaking a lot of rules, maybe without knowing it. I was coming from the east coast. KH: Now you gotta tell us what rules you broke [laughs]. 26 BMK: Well, I mean, okay. The Vagina Monologs were done on campus. Tracy Callahan. She too was breaking rules. The Signpost came to interview me about being a sociologist and having seen The Vagina Monologs, you know, whatever. I'm using vagina just right and left, no problem, it's just flowing, and it's in the paper. My department chair, Rosemary Conover, huge mentor, by the way, to me. I've got to talk about Rosemary. Man, I would not have succeeded at Weber the way in which I did without Rosemary Conover. She comes to me, and she's like, “Wow, Brenda, you sure used vagina a lot in your interview.” I'm like, “Yes, yes I did. It's called The Vagina Monologs.” I mean, like, you know? [Laughs] I just, it didn't occur to me. Oh, we had a really thriving LGBTQ community on campus. KH: Really? BMK: Oh, absolutely. I got invited to all of their dances, and I'm taking my kids. We had drag shows, and it was like, celebrated. I mean, we weren't putting a lid on it. It was fascinating. It was… welcomed? Is welcomed the right word? It just didn't appear to me that it was different, right? To me, it was just like, “Oh yeah, this is just normal here,” so I, of course, was just embracing. This was great. Apparently, that was a little odd. I'm thinking about other rules, like when I had my first child, Michaela, we were going through semester conversion at the time. I was on the university curriculum committee; semester conversion was the university curriculum committee’s challenge. So, we read every piece of curriculum at the university, and yeah, we were converting it from quarters to semesters. I gave birth to 27 Michaela in the spring of ’98. Even though I wasn't teaching classes, I was still on that curriculum committee, and I was still doing the semester conversion work. I would bring that baby, and I nursed her right in those meetings. I was breaking rules, apparently. I didn’t really realize it, but I kind of didn't care either, even if I was. Because quite frankly, if you need me here and you want me here, you need to accept the fact that this is the phase and stage I am in my life, and she's coming with. You know? I'm happy to contribute; I’m happy to do the work. I was very discreet. Bob Higgins was faculty senate chair at the time, and he said to me, he was like, “Brenda, I really appreciated the fact that you lived your life and still did the work at Weber State. Like, good on you. I feel like you were breaking some barriers.” I was like, “Well, I wasn't trying to break barriers; I was just trying to balance work and family at the movement.” But I think I was breaking some rules. KH: With there being so few female faculty members at Weber State, what was that like? BMK: Well, I mean, they existed. It wasn't like they didn't exist, right? They existed. The female faculty members in my college weren't having children. There was one, Marcy Everest, who was in political science, but she came with a child. Then there was Julie Arbuckle up in psychology, who became a professor after her children were raised and grown and out of the house. I was kind of the first in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences to have this baby while being a professor, right? An assistant professor at that. So, the role models existed, but not in the same way. Like, they didn't have the same experience. They weren't 28 having the same experience that I was having. Yes, there were definitely female faculty members. They weren't having babies. I know this transcript is gonna be public, but I will say, I had male colleagues say things to me like, completely inappropriate. I came into work one day, I think it was on a Saturday, and I was pregnant. I was like, “Man, I am wearing the loosest thing I can possibly wear.” He's like, “Yeah, this outfit just isn't doing it for me.” I was like, “Wow. It’s not supposed to.” [Laughs] Yeah, so I had weird things like that that I don't know that other female faculty members had to deal with. Had another male colleague make a comment about getting my figure back. “If you keep eating like that, I'm not sure you're going to get that figure back.” I was just like, “I am pregnant. I can eat whatever the [mouths “hell”] I want to eat.” Right? Come on, are you kidding me? So, weird. Like, to me, I felt like I had stepped back in time moving to Utah, because I was moving from the East Coast in this very metropolitan area, Washington, D.C., Baltimore area, and I'm moving here, and I’m like, “Huh, okay, right. This still exists. Right. Got it.” You know? LR: May I? KH: Go ahead, yeah. LR: I'm thinking of the timeline. BMK: Oh, I am so sorry. 29 LR: That's where this question is coming from, ‘cause I'm curious. With family back on the East Coast, your husband from New York, what was your feelings when 9/11 happened, and what was the environment on campus during that time? BMK: Okay. 9/11, it shook everybody, right? Kind of shook me to the core. His family was upstate New York, Rochester, so I knew they weren't in immediate danger, right? Who I was worried about was my roommate from college, Linda Russo. Still very [holds up crossed fingers], best friend today, right? She worked downtown, Securities and Exchange Commission, downtown New York. I was trying to get a hold of her frantically, and couldn't. When I did finally get in touch with her, and it was a couple of days later when we actually connected on the phone, she was a mess. After the first airplane hit the first tower, they went outside on the streets. They actually saw the second one. Yeah, so she was an absolute wreck. I mean, she was just a mess. So, I was really concerned about her. I was concerned about the folks I knew that were in the city. Most everybody else is on Long Island, so they weren't immediately in that immediate space. In any case, that was my first concern. But I do remember this day. John had seen this on the morning, he had heard the news, and I was like, “Am I taking Michaela to preschool? Am I doing this? What am I doing? Like, what is happening? What should I be doing?” Will’s my second child, and he was a baby, and my mother-in-law was there taking care of him as well. Also incredibly supportive, my in-laws. People have issues with their in-law's; I love my mother-in-law. Fantastic. So, in any case, I'm 30 dropping Michaela off to preschool. I come to campus. I wheel in on an AV cart a television, ‘cause that's what we had to do in those days, right? KH: Right, I do remember those. BMK: Yes. Kind of wheel that in, and this was what we watched pretty much every class, and this is what we were trying to unpack and process. We kind of ended up processing for weeks, and there was so much symbolism. The American flag was everywhere. We were wrapping ourselves in this American flag, right? We started to unpack that in class and talk about what does this flag symbolize, and what has it meant over time? We talked about everything from terrorist attack to the symbolism of the flag. We were just trying to process it. Quite frankly, I didn't know what I was doing. I was trying to processes it. I was worried about people I love. I was worried about my kids. I just wanted to go home on that day after classes. I was like, “I just need to go get my kids and my spouse. We just need be together.” It was this really nesting sort of like, “I gotta be with my family” sort of thing. I individually, personally, was struggling, and trying to help students process who were also struggling, who didn't necessarily even have connections to New York. Once I found out my college roommate's experience and whatnot, I brought that into class, and it sort of made it more real for students. You know? It was fascinating. So, campus, yeah, it was… I was definitely in my own little cocoon, in my little world, but I did feel like there was a solemnness that sort of descended on campus. 31 KH: Changing tracks a little bit, what was the typical quarter and semester like for you as a professor? BMK: Oh, goodness. A lot of teaching [laughs]. A lot of preparation, and a lot of service. I did a ton of committee work. This is where Rosemary Conover comes into play, here. She was chair of the department. She hired me. She and Richard Sadler, Dean Sadler. They hired me, and Rosemary mentored me in terms of like, how are you going to succeed at Weber State? You have to be an excellent teacher— and you need to work on your teaching, like figure that out—and you need to do service on campus. I'm gonna put you on a departmental-level committee, I'm gonna put you in a college-level committee, I'm gonna put you on a universitylevel committee, semester conversion committee. KH: Whee! BMK: Right? But honestly, because of this very strategic approach that she took to my career, she set me up for my trajectory, right? I mean, I've kind of had three legs to my career. I've been a professor, full-time, 10 years. The next 10 years, I was half-time professor, half-time this co-founding director of the Center for Community Engaged Learning. Then the next 10 years in administration, right? I mean, roughly 10, 10, 10. She set me up for that. That advice of, you know, you need to understand your local department, you need understand your college, and you need to connect with people there, and you to understand the university as a whole. That semester conversion on that university curriculum committee totally opened my eyes to how this university runs and how it is connected. Now, not all 32 the pieces and parts, but certainly the academic side, right? I made connections across the institution. When you go through something like semester conversion, you bond. I had colleagues in every college that were just, I don't know, they were like my department colleagues, right? They were that close. That, I think, totally set me up to be able to think about how did I want to move through Weber State University? I didn't see my opportunities as limited to the college or to the department or to just teaching. I think service-learning also opened me up to lots of other things, because we now call it community-engaged learning, but when the pedagogy was first being utilized, it was called servicelearning. That gave me an external focus at the institution as well. I had all these community partners that I had developed relationships with. My typical day wasn't just like, prep for class, go to class, teach it, and be done. I was in class, I was in committee meetings, I was in the community doing site visits where students were out doing their service-learning projects, and then I also had to have some time to write. Typically, summers had to become the research time, because the semesters were so full, or the quarters were so full. I always laugh, because I'm like, it usually takes me about a good five hours to get a lecture together, and it's gone in 50 minutes. You know? Like, man, the ratio here. What is happening? When you're a mom with young kids and they're having trouble sleeping and that's your time to prep your lecture? I'm laying on the floor with a flashlight in the kids' bedroom trying to get them to go to sleep, trying to prep my stuff, you know? I mean, my days weren't typical at all. 33 When the kid was sick, and the kid was in the classroom with me because they were sick, ‘cause they couldn't be a preschool, they would sometimes be on my hip. Again, probably breaking other rules, right? But my colleagues in my department, so amazing. They would come in, they'd take Michaela off my hip, let me finish teaching, ‘cause they had an office hour and they would take her. I didn't even ask ‘em. They would just come in, “Let me take her for a bit,” and off they go. Rob Reynolds did that, Marjukka did that, Hoyeng did that. I mean, just amazing. Just amazing. So, my days, there were no two days that were the same. Ever. Quarters and semesters. KH: Do you feel like the other departments on campus, the other colleges, were as much of a community as your department seemed to be? BMK: Well, I mean, no. I have no idea. To be perfectly honest with you, I have no idea. I just know that that community that I was living in felt really good. Oh, I have to talk about New Faculty Retreats at some point, but in any case, you also meet people at New Faculty Retreat, right? The best thing that Weber State does for new faculty is they take them on this retreat, and you connect with people across. No, not everyone was having the same experience that I was, and did not feel as supported as I did. KH: Did they have the New Faculty Retreat when you started? BMK: Oh, yes. Kathleen Lukken was at that new faculty retreat. Why do I remember that? Because I roomed with Kathleen Lukken. She was handing out little, like, Stim-U Dent toothpicks that were mint flavored, and they were in this little packet 34 that looked like a matchbook. Why I remember these? I do not know. But Kathleen was also a very good mentor. Yeah, also a very good mentor. Any case, yes, new faculty retreat. I think it was fairly new, but it was happening in 1995. We were at the Homestead up in Heber. KH: Oh, wow, okay. LR: Oh, okay. Before it burned down. BMK: No, no. LR: [Speaking at the same time] No, no, that's the Hermitage. BMK: Yes. LR: Sorry. BMK: I was gonna say, the Homestead’s still there, and we still take new faculty to homestead. We took them to the Zermatt across the street up in Heber for a while, but we're back to the Homestead. Now, in this role that I'm currently in as vice provost—well, that I'm leaving as vice provost—I have had the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning in my portfolio, so New Faculty Retreat has been something that I have been influencing in this role for the last nine years. That has felt really good to be able to give that back, because I got so much from it. Yeah, those connections and that community. KH: Would you talk a little bit about what the faculty retreat is like? BMK: The New Faculty Retreat? KH: What it was like when you started, and what it’s like now? BMK: The thing that's constant from when I started to now, it still feels like you're drinking from a fire hose. It's just so much information. We have tried so many 35 different ways to mitigate that, to change it. We can't. You're just a new faculty member. Your eyes are huge. You're trying to take it all in. There's just so much information coming at you. Doesn't matter, it's drinking from a fire hose. That's the constant, and the homestead, or the Zermatt, also a constant. That feeling of welcome and sense of belonging, and you can thrive here at Weber State University, regardless of where you're coming from, anywhere in the world, anywhere in the U.S., you can thrive here. Yes, there is a dominant culture, but it's okay if you're not part of it, ‘cause you can thrive here, right? Which is part of the reason why we try to serve local beer. The local wine is terrible, so I try not to even do that, to be perfectly honest. But seriously, we try to help people understand that you can live a life that you have lived wherever else you have lived it. You can still do that here. Those are constant threads that have come all the way through. What's different? The pedagogy is just different. Technology has changed so much, right? This last New Faculty Retreat, we're having sessions where we're talking about AI in the classroom. That was not happening in 1995. The technology were overheads. I mean, right? It was just a different form of technology, just not as sophisticated, not as interactive, not as engaging, if you will. The types of teaching techniques certainly have changed over time, and maybe the focus. When I was going in 1995, I think they were trying to give us an orientation to Weber State writ large. Over time, we've really tried to focus in on, what do faculty need day one? What do they need to feel prepared day one? Then you 36 can learn Weber State writ large throughout the course of the year, and we'll help you. We'll build some scaffolding to help you, but really, we want to focus on you as an excellent teacher. Of course, you've got to balance the research, but we're really trying to make sure they're prepped and ready to go for day one. So, I think that the focus changed a little bit. Still a lot of fun. Still karaoke. Karaoke didn't exist in 1995; it does now. But there were all kinds of just fun gatherings and activities for us to do to make us kind of connect with one another, and we still do all of that. KH: Okay, so after 10 years of teaching, you said that you helped co-found CCEL [said as “C cell”]—sorry, the Center for Community Engaged Learning. BMK: Yes. KH: Which I know wasn't its original name. BMK: No. No, it was not. KH: Will you talk about the process for creating the department, and then kind of the history? BMK: Yes. I will try to do this more quickly, ‘cause I'm looking at the time. I'm so sorry you guys. KH: No, I love it. I've loved everything. I haven't even noticed that an hour’s passed. LR: No, we haven't noticed that. BMK: Okay. You’re fine? LR: I do need to step out for a minute though. BMK: Good, I'll take a drink. LR: But we can leave this going, and you can keep going. 37 KH: Okay. BMK: Okay. So, this center, you're right, it did not start as CCEL. Mike Vaughan was provost at the time. Jim Hutchins was assistant or associate provost, at the time. Let's see, yes, Kathryn MacKay and myself had already received a couple of Hemingway Grants. You're familiar with the Hemingway Grants. One of the grants was to pull a group of faculty together to talk about this pedagogy, servicelearning. This is very early; I want to say that was maybe ‘97? Maybe. Maybe ‘96. We pulled a group of faculty together to talk about this pedagogy. In fact, I remember Kathryn coming into my office, and she's like, “Brenda, there's this new pedagogy. It's called service-learning. You totally—we have got to talk it. It just fits with sociology.” I said, “Yeah, I know. I use it.” She's like, “No, no no no, this is brand new. You don't know. Let me tell you about it.” I said, “Yeah, no, Kathryn, I know. I do it.” She's like, “No, no no, Brenda, Brenda.” I mean, you can imagine this conversation, how this unfolded. I reached over, I pulled off a syllabi set that we had created for sociologists, and I handed it to Kathryn. She's like, “What's this?” I'm like, “It's a syllabi set for service-learning. Yeah, I'm a co-author. We do this.” She was like, “Oh, you do know! You get it!” and that was all it took. Then we started really thinking about, you know, well what steps would we need to take to make this broader? What would we do? I had already connected 38 with Carrie Peterson, who was in student affairs, and she was over what was called the VIP program. Volunteers… Oh my gosh. VIP. Volunteer... KH: Sorry, I can't help you with this one. BMK: Oh my gosh. Volunteer something Program. Volunteer in service program? But there's an S in there. Any case, VIP program. It was about volunteering. I had already connected with her, and the woman who predated her, and I'm forgetting her name, to help me find community partners. So, I was already doing this in my classes when Kathryn pops into my office, and she says, “Hey, maybe we write for a Hemingway Grant, we get a little bit of money to feed some faculty and pull them together to talk about this.” That's what we ended up doing. The Utah Campus Compact was also coming into existence at that same time, I want to say maybe 1996, which was also an organization that was helping to get service-learning off the ground across the state, and Kathryn and I were involved in that. So, we started getting faculty together with one grant to talk about this pedagogy and how would you use it. The next grant, we got the community partners together—maybe it was vice versa—and we got those partners together to figure out, well, what are their needs, and what would they want? What do they need? You know, how did this work, and whatnot? That was really the beginnings. Kathryn put a shingle on a closet and called it something, a servicelearning office, the Office of Service-Learning. She paid with her own money the monthly phone charge, and called it the Office of Service-Learning, and got Steve 39 Mullins to be an AmeriCorps member to answer that phone that never rang, just so you know. I would say that was probably the first office on campus. KH: Around what year would this have been? BMK: CIC, Community Involvement Center, was 2006, so this was probably 2004 or 5ish, maybe? I mean, it only existed for a very brief period of time. Then Mike Vaughn is provost, Jim Hutchins is assistant provost, I guess, and Mike says, “I want to formalize this center on campus. I want to call it Community-Based and Experiential Learning.” He put out a call, I applied for the position, and I got it. He said, “Create a center.” It was called CBEL [said as “C bell”], center for—no, it was Community-Based and Experiential Learning. That's what it was called, Community-Based and Experiential Learning. That name only existed for a year, because the CIC, Community Involvement Center, was created right after that. Let me tell you, CBEL, Community-Based and Experiential Learning, I was this director of CBEL reporting directly to Jim Hutchins in the provost office. Carrie Peterson was this Director of VIP, Volunteer something Program. Oh my gosh, why that's gone in my brain, I don't know. She's in student affairs. I reach out to Carrie when I am in the CBEL position and say, “Let's work together. Let's figure this out.” We decided we were gonna create a one-stop shop that was both in academic affairs and student affairs that could report up to both, but it would be a one-stop shop so that it didn't confuse our community partners. Because to have two entities in two different places, and you've got external partners, then where do they go to get these services and these connections? We created this one- 40 stop shop, and students really don't care. They just wanna go to a place and find a volunteer opportunity or something, right? What I was really trying to develop was for faculty to have a place to go. We said, “Let's create this one-stop shop.” So, in the year that it was called CBEL, we developed the CIC, Community Involvement Center. What we did was we ran focus groups—a focus group with students, a focus group with community partners, a focus group with faculty and staff—and talked with them about what their needs were, and what they wanted out of this center if we created something, and what should we call it, and all of the things. We created this Community Involvement Center, so by end of year one, CBEL changed to CIC. That's when I really feel like the center was really formalized and really was happening. I had a work-study student, Cindy Johnson, in my sociology office, in my CBEL year, who sat with a laptop on a short file cabinet. That was her desk, ‘cause that's what we had. [For] CBEL, Cindy was creating this whole database of community partners and a database with faculty who were interested in this work. By the time Carrie and I got our acts together to create the CIC, we had some stuff from Cindy's work, and me meeting with all these partners, and we had some stuff from Carrie's work, and she was working with students doing volunteer stuff in the co-curricular realm. We put a one-stop-shop together that would be both serving curricular and co-curricular, so we decided we were codirectors of that CIC. She reported up to Student Affairs through Nancy Collinwood, who then reported to… oh man, union director. I can see him. KH: I don't know his name. 41 BMK: Oh, and I know it. Any case, then he reported to Jan Winniford, vice president for Student Affairs. I will come up with his name. I reported to Jim Hutchins, who reported to the provost, but Jim left and Ryan Thomas came into the picture when it was the CIC, so Ryan Thomas was the assistant provost. Any case, we had this thing, and then Ann Millner, as president, said to me a couple of years in, “When are you gonna change the name of that center?” I said, “Why?” You know, what are we thinking? She's like, “Well, I mean, I don't know. It just doesn't seem to really capture everything that you guys are doing.” We go through a process again, focus groups, hit the different stakeholders. What do you think? What would you call this? What do want? What do you need? They decided that Community Involvement Center did not work for them. They wanted Center for Community Engaged Learning, because all stakeholders were represented in that, so your community partners, community. Engagement needed to be there because, remember, I was for involvement, CIC, I was for involvement? Involvement—this was from the students—involvement, it’s like you're just involved with someone. But when you're engaged to someone, then you're really—you mean it. I was like, “Interesting. Okay.” So, engaged. Faculty and staff were like, “We're educators, it's all about the learning. For us, it's all about the learning.” So, it made sense, community engaged learning. It was very consistent with what was happening at the national level anyway, in the national movement. We changed to Center for CommunityEngaged Learning. It was very consistent with the Carnegie Classification for 42 Community Engagement that was also happening that we eventually applied for and received, 2008 for the first time. It was all kind of lining up and kind of worked out. I’ve totally forgotten what your question was. LR: But you answered it. KH: [Speaking at the same time] No, you've been answering it. What was the process for creating it and a little bit about the history? Is there anything else about CCEL that you want to share? BMK: It was really created with a whole lot of people, a lot of input. Yes, I would say, Carrie Peterson and I as co-founders of that and trying to create that one-stop shop. But really, it was also a lot of faculty members that Kathryn and I had already been working with, with this service-learning, for years. We had already been working, and these faculty members were helping us to shape and mold that center, what its function would really be. That just, I don't know, I think that gives it its academic flavor. Because before that, the Volunteer Involvement Program— KH: There we go! BMK: There's the I, the VIP, Volunteer Involvement Program. That's probably where CIC came from, Community Involvement Program. The Volunteer Involvement Program, totally co-curricular, and totally focused on volunteerism. That is one form of engagement with the community, but it's only that, it's one form. As we were building this Center for Community Engaged Learning, we figured out, you know, it's direct service. This volunteering and direct service is really only one 43 pathway. It's only one form of connecting with the community, and being a good steward in the community, and creating reciprocal relationships between that community partner and the university. You can do that through direct service. These community partners become co-educators of your students, right? They're teaching with you, truly, so they're giving, but they're also getting whatever services the students are providing. Reading to your Head Start kids, or mentoring the Youth Impact kids, or whatever. So, that direct service, really important, but we expanded. The faculty, the national movement. We also knew that community-based research was another way that we could partner with the community. We were working with and for non-profit organizations, and they had the research question. We provided some expertise and some people power with student power to help them address that research question. Lots of times, I did a lot of work with nonprofits that we were doing like, program evaluation kinds of things, because they needed their programs evaluated to write these grants in order to get the funding to keep those programs going. It helps to have a PhD affirming that you need this program. It's kind of one of those things. Any case, I never use doctor, right? I never used doctor in my title. I'm always like, “Just call me Brenda.” It was my community partners that said, “We need you to use doctor. Please put Dr. Brenda Marsteller Kowalewski on this report, on this research that you've done. We need it.” I was like, “Oh, right, of course. We'll leverage it.” But it's fascinating. 44 Okay, that was an aside. Sorry. Any case, the community partners, where was I in this story? What was your question? Oh, what else did I want to say about CCEL? KH: You were talking about creating reports for these institutions so that way they can get the grants that they needed. BMK: Yes. Pathways of service, basically. There's this direct service thing, then there was this community-based research. Then, when Leah Murray joined us in the CCEL, we started looking at democratic engagement. So, civil dialog, discourse, right? There's a whole nother way that you can engage with your community, enhance the capacity of your community, by creating these civic-minded graduates who can have civil discourse, agree to disagree, understand each other's points, right? I mean, all of this stuff contributing to our democracy. So, we have these three legs that we supported in CCEL: service, community-based research, democratic engagement. None of that would have grown up the way in which it did without the input of a lot of faculty, a lot of staff helping to build and shape and mold it. Yeah, I'm at these national conferences and presenting and learning and taking stuff in, but that's not me alone shaping all of this. That's me bringing a thread from the national discourse and weaving the threads of all of these other folks who are helping to build this really cool thing. Azenett Garza was our first director of our community-based research, our community research extension. We built a research extension of CCEL, and Azenett directed that, and that was our community-based research arm. So yeah, we had all these very cool, fun things happening. 45 KH: Okay. The service-learning pedagogy that you've been talking about, did you bring that to Weber? Was an aspect of that already existing in Weber when you started? BMK: Service-learning really didn't exist here. The Volunteer Involvement Program, that volunteer co-curricular, not connected to the curriculum, that existed, and existed for decades, right? So, there was a commitment to doing service. I mean, culturally, the LDS faith has a strong commitment to giving back and service; all played really, really well for my passion for using service as a teaching tool in the classroom. Yeah, that conversation I was telling you about with Kathryn MacKay in my office, I really do believe that that was the start of service-learning at Weber State. Didn’t exist before. KH: Okay, and when did that become part of the national… How do I phrase this? You mentioned the national movement. Was that the service-learning aspect that you were talking about, and kind of when did that start? KH: When did the national movement of service-learning [start]? Well, I mean, we could go back to John Dewey, 1916. For us, for Weber State… Okay, so servicelearning, I would say late 1970s, ‘79, 1980, it was happening in K-12. But in higher ed, it really kind of started when I was in my PhD program. Really. Like, I have been so privileged to grow up with this movement. I really feel like I have ridden the wave with this movement. It's just so—I'm privileged. I really am. It existed before, right? But in higher ed, 1990, when I was just starting my master's and PhD program and started to play around with this pedagogy was when it was starting in higher ed. There's kind of some parallels, there really are. 46 I would say Weber State and the national stage though, like Weber State is known for our community-engaged work. We don't call it service-learning anymore, we call it community-engaged learning nationally. Primarily because the Carnegie Classification for Community Engagement has kind of shifted the language, first in 2006, and then beyond, sort of really has taken hold. Community engagement is the language. But I would say the model that Carrie Peterson and I created, co-directing that center that reported to both academic affairs and student affairs, that didn't really exist before. It either existed in student affairs and had a very co-curricular flavor, or it existed in academic affairs and had only a curricular flavor. We, putting it into that one-stop shop, started presenting this model around the country, and man, I still get calls today. It's kind of bizarre, because to me it's sort of [an] old hat, like, yes, of course. Of course, you would build a one-stop shop, you know? But started presenting it, and Weber State started to become known for community engagement, and what we do, and how holistically we do it, and thinking about our community partners as co-educators. Our staff are educators. Our faculty are educators. Education happens outside of the four walls of the classroom. Absolutely. We created a space where all were welcome to contribute what they could. Yeah, the democratization of knowledge. I love it. KH: Okay, so you were the director for CCEL for about 10 years. What was your next step? 47 BMK: Next step was this associate provost for… At that time, what was my title? High Impact in Faculty Excellence, I think. High Impact Programs, maybe, in Faculty Excellence. That was 2016. I moved into this role. Again, I must get about a 10year itch; I’m not sure. I moved into this role, but I moved into the role thinking that I could have a broader impact, right? Community-engaged learning is one form, it is one type of high-impact practice. I had read George Koo's work, and his work has been around for a while, and he has this list of top 10 high-impact practices. Community engagement, service-learning, whatever you want to call it. But community-engaged learning, on the list. Undergraduate research, on the list. Internships. Study abroad. All of these kinds of things. First-year experience courses and whatnot, on the list. He has this list of these top 10, and I've dabbled in all of these things, because really for me, experiential learning is where it's at. I think that's part of my working-class roots too, quite frankly. For me, if I can do it, I will learn it. That's why teaching is learning for me, right? ‘Cause I get to learn while I'm teaching. I get to do it; that means I learn it. Experiential learning has always been really important, and community-engaged learning was just the cornerstone for every class that I taught. It had either community-engaged learning, like direct service component to it, or a community-based research component. I also oversaw internships in sociology for a while. Again, experiential learning. So, I knew this was the way to learn. I saw students’ light bulbs go off much more quickly when they had that experience and they had some concrete example from some concrete experience that they had. Like, I knew. This is the 48 way people learn. Maybe I'm being egocentric again. Maybe it's the way I learn best, and therefore I think everyone does. But there's a lot of research out there. It talks about experiential learning and how it does indeed help us learn, not just me, right? Helps a lot people learn. I think that move in 2016 to this associate provost position was really fueled by this notion of, gosh, could I help grow experiential learning at Weber State even more broadly? We do this very well here, and have been doing this very well here for decades. This isn't me. This is me just helping get it to another level. I wanted that new challenge, and I kind of felt like I had done maybe everything that I could for community-engaged learning, and it needed new energy, and it need new vision, and needed new life. You know, somebody else needed to come in here and put their fingerprints on it, and I needed to get out of the way. I had had people asking me, I had faculty asking me, “How long are you gonna do this? ‘Cause I think I might want your job. How long do you think you’re—" I was like, “I gotta get out of the way. I think people want this job; I gotta get out the way.” That's what kind of spurred me to apply for the position in the first place. I knew that I was gonna have a bunch of different high-impact areas that were going to report up in that position. That faculty excellence piece was really—and they didn't call it faculty excellence. It was called faculty development. It was High Impact Programs and Faculty Development; I think that was the title. That faculty 49 development component, really important for advancing any new pedagogy. Any of this high-impact pedagogy had to have faculty buy-in. I was really excited about that combination. So yeah, I had the opportunity to help bring communities of practice to campus through what was then called the TLF, Teaching and Learning Forum. Has now changed to Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. Got to help influence that, and shape and mold, and we created these communities of practice, as well as all the other things that we do in that Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. Those communities of practice, many of them lined up with these pedagogies. There's one for community-engaged learning, there's one for undergraduate research, there’s one for global, there’s one—right? They lined up, and it was a fantastic way to create momentum for embedding more of this high-impact practice into our curriculum and co-curriculum at the university. I’d already had the experience in CCEL living in two worlds, student affairs and academic affairs, right? Curriculum, co-curriculum. So, I said all these high impact things should be curriculum and co-curriculum. Now, we have an entire data infrastructure that is built that you can designate your curricular and your cocurricular experiences with a high-impact attribute that goes onto your curricular or co-curricular experience. It feeds into the data warehouse, which then allows me to say things like “Students that have a community-engaged learning experience are two-and-a-quarter times more likely to be retained at Weber State University.” I get data. Feeds me into the data warehouse, and it also feeds onto 50 the student's transcript. Whether it's curricular or co-curricular, high impact experience shows up on their transcript. That's powerful for the student when they are marketing themselves for jobs, or grad school, or whatever. Also, when they're putting their e-portfolios together, they look back at their transcript, and they are like, “Oh yeah, that's right. I forgot I served as a mentor.” That's a totally co-curricular thing. “And I took this course that was designated as undergraduate research. Hey, I need those things in my portfolio.” I mean, pretty powerful. I'm really proud of that. That's a cool thing. KH: What does a typical semester as the vice provost look [like] for you? BMK: Again, typical is just not a thing [laughs]. Every day is different. My experience in this role has just evolved and evolved and evolved, because I kind of keep getting more and more stuff put into my portfolio. It started out with, you know, Teaching and Learning Forum, and CCEL, and SPARC—Sustainability Practices and Research Center—and Office of Undergraduate Research, these kinds of things. It has now grown into all of those things and more. Mentoring, and Wildcat Advantage, and international. All of international came to me. All the grad programs came to me. My portfolio just continued to expand over time, so there was no typical. But I do tend, in this role, I meet with a lot of people. I chair a lot of committees. I have a reputation on campus for being a committee queen, but it's because of my style of leadership. If I'm going to lead, I'm going to do it with people, and if you're gonna lead with people, you're going to bring them together. 51 I am like, the convener. I convene a lot a people. Pretty much that's what my days look like. I convene a lot of people, because we have a lot of initiatives happening all at one time. Digital fluency, that whole initiative, I was a convener. Here we go, just convene people. That's what happens. Yeah, so those are my day. The people who report directly to me, I go to them. We'll have one-onones twice a month, typically, and I go to them. I get to see them in their space, and I get see the folks who report to them, who are also on our team, and I get to connect with them. Relationships are important to me. Yeah. My days are full of meetings, and then I do email at night. I could have just said that. KH: I like the expounding; that was great. You mentioned the digital fluency, would you talk a little bit about what that means, as well as making the campus the Adobe Creative Campus? BMK: Oh, yeah. Digital fluency basically means that students are going to have the skills, knowledge, to be agile and adaptive, to work in any technologically enabled environment. It won't be with any particular type of technology, it won't be with any type of software platform. It will be, “Yes, I've worked with databases before. Yes, you're hitting me with a brand-new database, but I've worked with a database before, so yes, I'm agile enough, I’m fluent enough that I will be able to do this.” “Yes, I've worked with cameras to record things.” “Yes, I’ve—” Right? I mean, any of these technological innovations that are coming down the pipe here, our students have enough knowledge that they're going to be able transfer those skills to whatever comes next. That's digital fluency. 52 That really started with Adobe, actually. So, Madonne Miner was the provost at the time. I was associate provost. Adobe was asking for representation to come to a creative campus event that they were having down at their Adobe campus in Provo. Or, not Provo, but you know, Point of the Mountain. American—what is that? American Fork? KH: [All speaking at same time] Lehi… LR: It's Lehi… BMK: Lehi? KH: Thanksgiving Point. American Fork’s rather south. LR: Yeah, it's Thanksgiving Point. BMK: Thanksgiving Point. It's around there. LR: Yeah. KH: Yes. BMK: Okay, so that Adobe campus. Madonne is thinking, “I don't want to do this. I got this new associate provost. It’s 2016. So, Brenda, what do you think?” I'm like, “Sure?” What do I know about Adobe and stuff? “Sure.” So, I go to this thing. Unbeknownst to me, Adobe had also reached out to Jan Winniford, vice president of Student Affairs, and said, “We need some representation. Send someone to this creative campus.” She chose Carey Anson. Well, I am at the Adobe thing, and I'm like, “Carey!” He's like, “Brenda! “What are you doing here?” 53 “What are you doing here?” I mean, that whole thing, you know? That whole thing. It was so funny. Well, we sat in that workshop. It was all day. We heard from these different campuses around the country about what they were doing with Adobe and how they were infusing the curriculum. Every break, Carey and I were out in the hallway, and we're like, [mimes her hands talking to each other and babbles], “Oh my gosh, this is great!” and [continues babbling]. I mean, it was like our brains were exploding, and innovation was happening like right then and there. We just started to think about, well, how are we going to do this? What are we gonna do on campus? That was the summer of 2016, and I had started in like February of 2016, so you know, here we go. We started convening people, and we just got a bunch of people who had been thinking about supporting students on campus. Our whole CATS [Creative Academic Technology Solutions] team, Alan Ferrin, that whole team, they were like, “Oh my gosh, we get stopped all the time. Students are asking us, ‘Where can I get support?’ ‘I have questions about this.’ ‘How do I get—’” Forget it. He's like, “We're in. We want to be at the table,” so they came to the table. We had faculty coming to the table, saying, “Yes. I mean, technology’s influencing our classroom all the time. Like yes, we wanna be at the table.” This big group of like 30 people sitting around the Miller Admin boardroom table and on the chairs on the outside, and we met, and we met, and we met, to define what the heck do we mean by digital fluency? We basically came up with three areas: students have to know how to create, collaborate, and consume 54 ethically in this world that we live in. ‘Cause there's a lot of digital stuff to consume. LR: Oh, yeah. BMK: Yes, and you can create all kinds of things digitally, right? Ethics were an important component of all of that. So, we came up with a definition. We started playing around with different partnerships, Adobe partnerships, Pluralsight partnerships. We just tried to figure out like, who's playing in the space and what could we do with it? Adobe was there from the start, I think. They kind of were the spark that catalyzed our thinking around digital fluency, then they just kind of stuck with us. I got this $100,000 grant from USHE, from Utah System of Higher Ed, to get Adobe licenses that we gave to students in English 1010. …Yes. I had to think about that. No, no, it's the composition. LR: Is that 2010? BMK: Jason Barrett-Fox. [Points at Lorrie] Yes. I think that's 2010. LR: Yeah. BMK: Jason Barrett-Fox was the composition director at the time. He's gone from Weber now; he’s in Kansas. But he said, “Yeah, I'll try this Adobe stuff in my classroom.” Adobe had this—he called himself an evangelist—Todd Taylor, and he was an English faculty member in North Carolina. He guided us on how he implemented this in his composition classes, and we tweaked it a little bit, but Jason Barrett-Fox really did this. We collected data again, and we found out that the students who did the Adobe assignments and developed these digital fluency skills were more likely to 55 be retained than the students who didn't have these experiences. Not only retained at the university, but more likely to retain the content, and more likely get to the student learning outcomes. That's all we needed. We were like, “Oh, yeah, okay. We gotta do this thing.” That then catalyzed us to push to become an Adobe Creative Campus, which meant we needed to buy Adobe for all of campus—all students, faculty, staff. $300,000 a year. It’s a big, huge lift. Big, huge ask. We got there. The students had access, and faculty had access. We were already designing a digital fluency hub in Lampros Hall over here, and COVID hit. KH: [Laughs] Perfect timing. BMK: But right before COVID hit, we had already gotten some Adobe licenses, and right before COVID hit, we had already planned what we wanted our digital fluency space to look like and what we would do to Lampros. We had a portfolio, a trifold, made up, and we did 21 presentations around campus to everyone from Student Senate to Faculty Senate to the President's Council, the Board of Trustees. I mean, we went everywhere pitching this idea for a digital fluency space in Lampros Hall. It was February, end of February, when we gave our last presentation of 2020, and we closed down, what, mid-March because of COVID. Then—not HEERF money. HEERF money came through, but there was other money that also came through, and we used it to build out the digital fluency space in Lampros, because we are equipping our faculty to be more digitally enabled in this time where we needed to be more virtual with COVID. So, the timing, yeah, 56 pretty darn good. I mean, could have been worse. It resourced this idea, and it just kind of grew from there. KH: Is there anything else from your time as vice provost that you'd like to mention? BMK: I've talked a little bit about the data infrastructure for high-impact. That was a huge feat. Wildcat Advantage was a brand-new program that we created while vice provost. KH: What is that program? BMK: Wildcat advantage is a program that incentivizes students to do high-impact educational experiences. We kind of created levels, almost a gaming situation. You do two high-impact educational experiences by the time you graduate; you get this cool cord to wear at graduation. If you do three or four, you get a certificate and the cord, you get all these other benefits, and you also get to get some counseling— [does air quotes] “counseling,” I'm calling it—from our career services folks on your resume and whatnot, and your ePortfolio. If you do five or more, you get not only the cool cord and the stuff from Career Services, but you also get to go to a career fair wearing a Wildcat Advantage pin that all of the employers know that you've done all this high-impact work, so they're gonna know ahead of time, and you get a selfie with the president and the provost, and—right? I mean, you know, we're doing these goofy kinds of things, but we gamified it a little bit to encourage students to do more. Our motto is “Early and often.” Do high-impact educational experiences early and often, early in your career and as often as you can in your college career, because we know the benefits. Retention, shorter paths to graduation, 57 they get to graduation. I mean, this is good. We know the impact of these things, and we know that it's even more impactful for students who have been historically marginalized in higher education. Including folks like me, first gen. We know the power of this. This is why we created Wildcat Advantage, to incentivize our students to engage in these kinds of activities. We added a new component called HIEEs Pay, and that, High Impact Educational Experiences Pay. We coupled it to work-study funds and 50/50 funds. So, students who are engaged in a high-impact educational experiences on or off campus can access work-study funding to do that experience. We've done this because we know that our students work, they have families, they got all this stuff going on, right? So, again, incentivizing them, and also good retention strategy. LR: What are some examples of high-impact… BMK: Educational experiences? LR: Educational experiences, yeah? BMK: Community-engaged learning. Undergraduate research. Global learning, including study abroad. Mentoring, being a mentor or being a mentee, so you get—right? Peer education in general, like our supplemental instruction and whatnot, for sure. Engaging in capstone projects; most of them overlap with undergraduate research. Internships, another high-impact educational experience. All of those, yeah. Even leadership, like being engaged in student government? High-impact educational experience. LR: Thank you. 58 BMK: Yeah. KH: Changing gears a little bit, would you be willing to share your thoughts or any memories you have of all of the presidents that you've worked under? BMK: Oh, my heavens. KH: So, Paul Thompson, Ann Millner, Chuck White, and Brad. BMK: Paul Thompson, so interesting. Nice man. Could never remember my name. But as soon as John started working on campus, and he worked very closely with the president. I mean, not very closely, but enough, and he had to go straight for the president sometimes. John started after I did, right? I've been here 30; he started probably five years after I did here at Weber. Paul always knew his name, never knew my name, and I was like, “Man, this is not cool. This is just not cool.” [Laughs] It's fine. But very nice guy. Did not work with him very much. Ann? Worked with a tremendous amount. Loved the fact that we had a female president. She was such a role model, and a mentor to me. Definitely shaped and molded my thinking about how big we could go with communityengaged learning. She encouraged me to dream big, which was amazing. Mike Vaughan did too; also another very good mentor for me here. So, dream big. Ann, amazing. Ann gave me language around steward of place. The university is a steward place. That expanded my thinking about community-engaged learning. You've heard my story. I started this work in grad school focused on the student and why this is good for the student and what the student's gonna learn from this, right? But as I had opportunities to co-found this Center for Community Engaged Learning, and had Ann as a president saying, “We are an AASCU 59 school.” What's AASCU? American Association of State Colleges and Universities. We belong to that, and they're using stewards of place language. We are a steward of place, and your work in the community is helping us be a steward of place. It wasn't just about student development; it was about community development. It wasn't just about students doing the work in community; it was about the institution acting as a good citizen itself in the community. I started to expand my thinking, and Ann helped me do that. Ann and Mike gave me opportunities to go to the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities, CUMU, conference for the first time. Both Ann and Mike went. I'm thinking, “I'm this little faculty member who's like directing the center, and the president and provost are having me come to this cool national conference with them. This is nuts!” It was awesome. It was absolutely awesome. They were fantastic mentors, and they helped me learn how to network, right? I had no idea what I was doing, but they helped me dream big. They helped me see the possibilities, and once I saw the possibilities, the sky was the limit. That was really, really cool. Ann would help like, Habitat for Humanity. She'd help on builds for houses. I mean, what president does that? Ann Millner. That's who does that. You know, that was very cool. She was so incredibly supportive of community-engaged learning. I really think undergraduate research was her first love and her baby, but she really fueled the flame and fire for community-engaged learning on campus. I think we ingratiated ourselves with her, and then she loved us too. 60 Brad, oh gosh, Brad. Brad and I have worked together for a long time, and before he was president. We would always talk about, you know, we'd get into a conversation, and two hours later we would be like, “Oh my gosh, where'd the time go?” We were changing the world in those conversations, right? Changing the Weber State world in those conversations all the time. Definitely community centric. I think Brad very much thinks externally. Helped position my thinking around community engagement and what we could do at Weber State. Then, me in this associate, eventually vice provost role, Brad as president, he and I and Bill Cook went to a CUMU conference—the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities, CUMU, conference, because we were co-presenting, and it was right after Brad had just become president. He is totally bought in on all of this work, this high-impact work. He's in. He was in on this communityengaged work. But to have him co-present at a national conference with us sealed the deal, right? I just remember—the presentation was great. All of that was wonderful, and he tells his great stories, and he told the story about the Marriott's, you know, working in the field and looking up, the whole thing, does this whole thing. But I remember we went to—what is the name of the restaurant—where we got a chocolate cake shake. It's Brad's favorite shake. I was like, “I'm not a big cake fan. I love milkshakes. I'm gonna be drinking a cake shake? Fine, it’s the president, I'll do it.” I loved it. It was amazing; it was awesome. But Bill, Brad, and I and our chocolate cake shakes at the CUMU Conference will always be a memory that I cherish. 61 KH: What about Chuck? BMK: Oh, I forgot about Chuck! Yes, how could I forget about Chuck? Here's my first impressions of Chuck. I'm meeting Chuck. I've worked with every president, especially around community engagement. I'm responsible for writing this Carnegie Classification for Community Engagement. I gotta make sure that I got the president on board with all of this, right? I'm walking down the middle of campus with Chuck, and I'm saying something to him about, “Well look, I'd really love to come chat with you and talk a bit about this Carnegie Classification and what it means to the institution.” He's new to campus, so I'm just trying to make sure that he understands the value and importance and significance. Two things came out of that conversation, because I said something about a strategic plan. First thing he says is, “I don't believe in strategic plans, they just sit on the shelf and collect dust.” I said, “Okay.” Then the second thing that came out of that conversation was, “You want to come meet with me? Well, just make sure Madonne's okay with it.” I was like, “Okay? We’re not very… We're pretty flat, hierarchically, here.” This is what I'm saying to him. He's like, “Yeah, I appreciate that. I just want you to make sure Madonne’s okay with it, and then yeah, sure, come talk to me.” I'm like, “Okay, this is gonna be an interesting shift.” But then I did, and I went and I talked with him, and he was incredibly supportive of the work that I did the entire time that I was there. But it was a shift, because Weber State has 62 always been pretty flat, hierarchically, and very collaborative, so I just felt like I had access to everyone all the time, anywhere, any time, and suddenly I'm being told I have to talk to my boss about going to talk her boss? Interesting. Okay. You know? But incredibly supportive, truly. KH: Okay. What are some of your favorite memories of Weber State? BMK: Team teaching with Tom Cools. We taught a women and gender studies class, and oh man, we wanted to talk about how clothing [tugs on her blazer], it’s props, [tugs on her ears] jewelry, right? We're communicating something about ourselves, always. [Gestures forward] I went to his closet and did a little shopping. [Gestures backward] He came to my closet and a little shopping. He put on a bohemian dress that I had, and his Birkenstocks, which look pretty good together, by the way. I had to wear my pants, but put on a shirt and a tie for him. My hair was short, like not quite as short as yours, Lorrie, but short. I put on all that, and we went to go teach class. He calls me before class. [Pantomimes holding phone] “Hey Brenda, I'm feeling a little vulnerable. Can you come up and walk me to class?” I said, “Welcome to my world. I'll be right there.” [Pantomimes putting phone down on table] Hung up the phone [laughs]. I go, I grab him, and we go to class. We said nothing about our clothing. We just went into class and we just started teaching. We just started teaching, and the students were like [turns to side and pretends to whisper] whispering [pretends to whisper on other side] to each other. Then finally someone went, 63 “Wait, just stop. Just wait. What is happening right now?” You know, one of the students. Tom and I were like, “Well, we were kind of wondering how long it was gonna take you guys to notice.” Then we unpacked, and that was really truly the whole lesson. What we wanted to talk about is, how do we do gender? How do we do it? We do it with our props [tugs blazer], we do it the way in which we walk, the way in which we sit, the way in which we clean a table. We do gender. We talk about it as a continuum, gender as a continuum. It's fascinating. The students loved it. Again, it's experiential learning. In a different kind of way, but fantastic, loved that. Loved that lesson. I think it was the phone call before class that I loved the most. He's like, “I am feeling really vulnerable. Can you come walk me to class?” I'm like, “Yes, I can.” [Laughs] It was pretty wild. KH: That is an awesome story. BMK: Yeah. KH: Are there any other memories you want to share? BMK: Oh my gosh, there are so many memories. I have these amazing students, Ron and Lorie, Kara, they were my research assistants in my research methods class. Oh, Lizbeth. She’s now a social work faculty member. KH: Nice. BMK: Oh, I'm just old. That's all it really means. They were my research assistants, and I had a group of them, and I taught this research methods class. We had different community organizations that we were doing research projects with and for. 64 These students, these research assistants, had already taken the class, so they then took on a different group and were a liaison with a partner. It was the only way we were gonna manage multiple research projects in one semester where you actually have to give a product by the end of the semester. It was a little crazy, but it was awesome. It was really awesome. Those were my favorite. These students came in, they too had keys to my office, just like Mady Segel gave me. They had keys my office. I had cleared a little bit of space on the bookshelf, several shelves, and moved my stuff over. They had snacks lining the shelves, they had the work that they were doing, and the surveys that we were working on, whatever, all—I shared my office with like four research assistants at a time. [Laughs] It was nuts, and it was so fun. I felt like I was back in grad school again with these students that just fed my soul. They just totally did. Yeah, those were really fun times. I loved that too. Tons of CCEL memories, tons of projects. Global trips to Peru, doing work, community-engaged work. There's so many memories here; we would be here all day. We really would be. KH: Okay, how about one more? BMK: Gosh. Do I do I talk about Peru? KH: Yes. BMK: Yeah, maybe I talk about Peru. We wanted to set up a global partnership with Juan Mejia Baca University in Chiclayo, Peru and go have our students do some projects in the community there, then have their students come to us and do projects in the community here. We'd have this kind of sisterhood, you know, this 65 sister relationship with Juan Mejia Baca, which we did end up setting up, and we did end up doing. We took a group of students, oh man, on this trip. I had never taken students. Fortunately, Mike Moon, my colleague in the center, had. I was not prepared for all of the food poisoning and, you know, all of the illness things that were happening on this trip. I became everyone's mother in some regards, because the boundaries just were let down, because I had sick students and I felt concerned for them. So, on the bus, we're going to a work site, and I would be walking down the middle of the aisle, [pantomimes as she describes] grabbing heads by their ears and putting their forehead to my cheek to see if they were feverish, and then I'd put it back. [Pantomimes the same action a few more times] I mean, this is kind of how it went. I was like, “Fortunately, HR is not here.” But there was so much that was going on. The people that were preparing our food, we are not really sure what they were doing, but we think that they were not maybe following all of the food handler's rules. So, people were getting sick and I was like, “Oh, man. What is happening?” But we did have one student really, she did get sick and ended up in the hospital. KH: Oh no. BMK: Yeah, and I don't speak Spanish. Muy poquito. Muy, muy, muy, poquito. In fact, the kids would start speaking louder to me. I could understand more than I could speak, and the one kid started laughing and saying to the other one, “She's not 66 deaf, she just can't understand you.” You know, it was very funny. It was very funny. Any case, Lindsay got really sick. She was in the hospital. We had to fly her home. I ended up in the hospital with her. Not me being sick, but I was like the caretaker, and everybody else was out on these projects. Fascinating to learn the system. I had to go across the street to the pharmacy and buy all of the drugs and the IV and the tubing and all kinds of things and then bring it back. It was wild. It was wild. But Lindsay, our student, amazing. Pre-med, applying to med school. When they have a needle fishing around for a vein, a needle in her arm, she's like, “Okay, well this is interesting, and this is different, and I am learning a lot right now about what maybe not to do.” [Laughs] You know? I mean, it was fascinating. But she got into med school, and boy did she have an interesting application, because of that experience, and she did recover fully. So yes, I think those kinds of experiences are my favorite, and you can tell most of them are because they were experiential. KH: What do you view as your greatest accomplishments? BMK: Here at Weber? I would say yes, absolutely, the Center for Community Engaged Learning and just being a co-founder of that. Maybe even more, building the architecture for community engagement at Weber State. I really pride myself on the fact that I see us working at three levels. We work at a micro level—and again, this reflects my growing up with this pedagogy, but—we work at a micro level where we are helping our students 67 become these civic-minded graduates. We're focused on student development. CCEL. We work at this meso level, where the institution is a good citizen in its community. We're looking at our business practices and we're changing our business practices. We're buying more green, more sustainable, right? We're changing your business practices, hiring local, purchasing local, because we know of its impact in our community. We work at this macro level, where we are a convener. As an institution, we convene these other anchor institutions through Ogden Civic Action Network, Ogden CAN, and we convene these anchor institutions. The hospital, actually both hospitals, the health department, tech college, the city. I'm forgetting people. America First is now at the table too. Any case, we're convening all of these folks to address issues of concern in our community around health, housing, education, right? We work at all three of those levels. I have been a part of building all three of those levels. I'm really proud of that. I’m really proud that Weber State does that work. Not just our students as instruments and active actors in our community, but our institution is a good steward of place. I've contributed to that. Have we done that for decades before me? Absolutely. But I like to think I have helped to advance that culture, and on lots of levels. I'm really proud of that. I'm really, really proud of that data infrastructure too, at this institution, for high impact, and all those attributes on courses and co-curricular activities. I'm really proud of that. That is not something that exists elsewhere. My colleagues 68 all over the country are like, “You need to write this up, because we have been trying to figure out how to do this. Like, people just don't do this.” A former colleague who used to be here over international—then I inherited international, which actually I knew nothing about, and now I know a lot about. Not enough, but I know a lot about, and what a beautiful gift that was for me to inherit them. They're such an amazing group. Any case, former colleague Yimin Wang said to me, “Brenda, this data infrastructure, this attribute infrastructure that you've created for high impact stuff at Weber State, it is so valuable. I can't get anything done at my current institution because I don't have that infrastructure. I can’t get the people to do the things that I'm trying to get them to do with the global work, because the infrastructure doesn't exist.” I'm like, “Yeah, I get it.” Like, I too see it's beneficial. It's useful. This is why we built it. I didn't build it by myself. Whole lot of people, right? But I've been carrying this vision with me since about 2008, and it took me since about 2008 to create that infrastructure, and it's finally there. So yeah, I'm really proud of that too. KH: Okay. You've mentioned some of your mentors; are there any other mentors that you'd like to mention, either just globally or in your career here at Weber? BMK: I think I've mentioned a lot of mentors in my career. I think my mom—and this is gonna make me cry, ‘cause she's gone. Sorry. Her example. I've always tried to live up to that. When you go to her funeral and the place was packed with hundreds and hundreds of people. For a woman who got her GED when she was 69 36 and I was 6, to have that kind of impact on people's lives, and that many people? Amazing. I hope I can do just a quarter of that, you know? KH: Yeah. BMK: [Wipes eyes, exhales] Did not anticipate that. Sorry. LR: No, don't apologize. KH: Oh good, we do have those. BMK: [Takes tissue] Thank you. LR: You’re welcome. KH: What recognition have you received for your accomplishments? BMK: Oh my gosh. People have been so generous to me. So generous. The Brady Presidential Distinguished Professor Award is probably the top one. The Dixon Award, also really, really meaningful. These are Weber State awards. Lots of Hemingway Awards. The… man, why am I blanking on… I'm blanking on her name, the Hemingway aunt. Oh, I can see her face. The award's named after her. I'll come back to that, ‘cause it's alluding me at the moment. That one, several different awards from the Utah Campus Compact. I just received a national award from CUMU, from Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities, the Barbara Holland Scholar-Administrator Award. That was a really cool thing. That was just this past fall. People have been incredibly generous. Incredibly, incredibly generous. KH: Well-deserved. BMK: Well, I don't know about all of that, but I do know that they have been very generous to me. Very, very kind. 70 KH: Okay. What advice would you give to students starting in your field, either sociology or higher education? BMK: Be part of something bigger than yourself. Period. That is usually through something that you're going to experience, right? I mean, for me, it is. It's all about that experiential learning, those high-impact educational experiences. They link you to something bigger, and then you situate yourself. You see that you are this little tiny thing here, and if you can be used for good, to do good, to this bigger thing that we're all part of. That's what I would say. Follow your passion. KH: Do you have any other questions? LR: No. KH: Do you anything else you'd like to share? BMK: I think I've talked a lot. [Laughs] I'm really sorry. KH: It's all been great. Please do not apologize. BMK: [Speaking at same time] I’m really sorry. It’s too much. KH: No, no. It was great. I loved it all. LR: We could sit probably for another three hours— BMK: It's a problem. LR: —and just listen. BMK: ‘Cause I am a talker. LR: It's good. KH: We appreciate that. LR: We appreciate it. 71 BMK: I should have looked more closely. I would have maybe tried to string some answers together. KH: You did! BMK: But last night I was just like, “Oh man, I can't even look at these. They look like things I know about.” LR: Fantastic. KH: Well, great. Thank you for your time. BMK: Oh, thank you. I really appreciate it. I feel really honored. 72