As the daughter of a Swarthmore College physics professor and granddaughter of a Harvard University botany professor, navigating academia comes naturally to developmental psychologist Sarah C. Mangelsdorf, PhD, who took the reins as president of the University of Rochester last summer. Mangelsdorf brings with her every level of academic leadership experience—starting with serving as the first female psychology department chair at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, then as the first female dean of its College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, dean of the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University, and provost and chief operating officer at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
At Rochester, she is aiming to build a stronger national reputation for the school and bring in more research funding. “The key to that is really focusing on important interdisciplinary issues that are bigger than any one field,” she says.
The Monitor asked Mangelsdorf about her plans to attract diverse talent and the challenges today’s students face.
You have pushed for increasing faculty diversity in your previous roles. How will you do that at Rochester?
At Wisconsin, I fought hard for and built a special fund for recruiting faculty from underrepresented groups, called the Target of Opportunity Program. I will be working on re-creating that here. If you are trying to diversify your faculty—whether it means hiring more women in fields where there are no women or hiring more faculty of color—you can’t just rely on your normal search processes. You have to be more aggressive and proactive. You must go to conferences, meet grad students and postdocs and know the pipelines in respective fields—something I really encouraged our department chairs to do. Then, when there is an opportunity to hire someone, instead of missing out because there won’t be an opening in your department for three years, a chair can go to the administration and say, “If we can have the money right now, we can go recruit this star.”
Campus sexual assault is another national issue of concern. How do you plan to address it?
That is a challenging topic for all of us in academic leadership. The recent Association of American Universities (AAU) survey on campus sexual assault found that while there had been increases in people’s knowledge of what sexual assault and harassment are since the last survey in 2015, the rates of harassment and assault had not declined. That is discouraging. Will better education on sexual assault move the needle down the road? We certainly hope so. Here at Rochester, our reported rates of sexual assault and sexual harassment were lower than those of our AAU peers, but any level is unacceptable, so we are trying to improve our trainings and processes so that students know who to go to for help and know that there are resources available. We require faculty, staff and students to participate in sexual assault and sexual harassment prevention training. The training here is one of the best I have seen; it is quite comprehensive and very good in terms of pointing out subtle forms of harassment and emphasizing what faculty and staff should do when students come to them for help. It’s not okay to keep silent if a student says “Please don’t tell anyone” after they have just told you they have been harassed or assaulted. If a member of our community has been harassed or assaulted, we must do everything we can to address it.
What are the biggest challenges today’s college students face?
Stress and anxiety, because today’s students push themselves so hard. When I was in college, I had one major—psychology. Now, almost all the students I meet here have at least two majors and perhaps a minor and they are involved in everything. I know they will be successful, but I hope they don’t stress themselves out too much along the way. It is something I am interested in looking at more closely.
Another challenge is student debt. If your parents are saying, “This education is really expensive and you really need to make the most out of this opportunity,” that adds to your stress and anxiety. At Rochester, we do our best to keep things affordable, but as costs rise, I do feel we need to get out there and raise more money for scholarships so students don’t graduate with a lot of debt. Right now, only about half of our students do: Our average total debt is $25,000, which is not a high number when you look at national averages. But I would like to see that number decrease and for the percentage of students with debt to decrease.
What aspects of your training have helped you succeed in leadership?
One way being a psychologist helps me tremendously is that I know the importance of gathering data and looking for meaningful trends. If you have a program in place to improve graduation rates, well, does it improve them? Look at the program and see if changing certain practices really helps more students graduate.
It also helps to be a psychologist because there is a lot of listening in my job. Listening to the life stories of alumni has always been fascinating for me and I have figured out ways to engage alumni to come back to campus and tell their life stories to students—many of whom are very anxious about the job market and want to know exactly what to do with the rest of their lives. These talks help students see that there are successful people who have done really interesting things with their lives that may have had nothing to do with their college major. They see that a college education helped those alumni become critical thinkers and that helped them find their paths.
