Hope to see you at Mudd Atrium between 5:30-7pm.

Come for the good food and iconic nametags. Stay for the good company and lively engagement with issues of mentorship, community, and equity.

As always, kids are welcome, and what an amazing chance for them to see, dare we say, a Maryland superhero: Senator Barbara Mikulski.

Want to know more? Here’s her bio:

Senator Mikulski began her career as a social worker in Baltimore determined to make a difference her community. That determination led her to becoming the first Democratic woman elected to the Senate in her own right and the longest serving woman in the history of the United States Congress. A tenacious advocate, she’s stated that it’s not about how long you serve, but how well you serve. In 2015, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.

After retiring from the Senate in 2017, Sen. Mikulski became a Homewood Professor of Public Policy at Johns Hopkins University, where she co-teaches undergraduate courses in Political Science, Sociology, and Public Health. She currently serves on the Boards of the National Democratic Institute and the Baltimore Community Foundation; she has been appointed to the federal Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commission and is serving as an honorary Co-chair for Baltimore City’s Census 2020 efforts. Senator Mikulski also participates in national speaking engagements related to leadership, innovation, advocacy, and women’s empowerment.

We invite all students, staff, faculty, and their families (kids, yes!) to join Women Faculty Forum next Monday (Nov 4), 5:30-7pm in Mudd Atrium, to discuss mentorship, community-building, and equity at Homewood.

In that spirit, here’s some advice to consider from Shampa Biswas in the Chronicle:

Based on my (continuing) experiences on this front, I offer the following lessons I’ve learned. I hope they will be of value to all faculty members, but especially to those who disproportionately take on the responsibilities of advising minority students.

They feel seen and unseen. Students of color can find themselves at opposite poles on the visibility spectrum:

• On the one hand, they feel “invisible” — and inaudible. In certain settings and forums they are trying to be seen and heard but are constantly overlooked. Students notice, for example, if the professor calls only on white men in class discussions about male-normed topics such as “international security.”
• On the other hand is the problem of being “hypervisible.” Either they are viewed as representatives of “their cultures” (e.g., an international student asked to speak for her country in class), or they are seen as the source of some infraction (e.g., a black male student profiled and singled out to show his ID in order to enter a campus party).

 . . .

There’s a lot of diversity in diversity. When a campus is relatively homogenous, like my own, there’s a tendency to clump all forms of difference into a broad category of “diversity,” and neglect the enormous heterogeneity of experiences, needs, interests, and occasional tensions that exist within.

 . . .

How approachable you seem will change. You might consider yourself an easygoing, open-minded faculty member. It is easy to forget that first-generation, minority, and foreign students can be very intimidated by college professors — and less willing than other students to seek out our advice.

 . . .

Be as open about your own vulnerabilities as you can. I have come to recognize that, whether or not I want to play the part, being in the very small minority of female faculty members of color who have made it into the rarefied upper echelons of academic rank, I serve as a “role model.” I will confess to sometimes experiencing that role as a burden rather than a gift, especially when I am exhausted by the need to constantly model a vocal presence on the campus in order to be taken seriously.