Retrospective from departing UM Provost Pardis Mahdavi

This is A New Angle, a show about cool people doing awesome things in and around Montana. I'm your host, Justin Angle. This show is supported by First Security Bank, Blackfoot Communications, and the University of Montana College of Business. Hey, folks, welcome back and thanks for tuning in. Today I am speaking with Dr. Pardis Mahdavi, an Iranian-American professor, administrator, outgoing provost at the University of Montana, and the newly named president of the University of La Verne.

The most profound moment for me was recognizing, okay, our students are succeeding in spite of us and our scaffolding as opposed to because of us.

Pardis is a prolific scholar with expertise in diversity, inclusion, human trafficking, migration, sexuality, human rights, feminism, and public health. She is the author of multiple books and served in leadership roles in several prominent universities. Pardis, thanks for coming on the show.

Thanks so much for having me, Justin. It's an honor.

At the risk of perhaps taking up an entire show with our first question, You'll get the first question that everybody always gets, and that is, where did you grow up and what did your parents do?

That is a long one.

That is, yeah, a lot of that is the story.

That is the story. Well, my parents fled Iran during the revolution in the late 1970s, and my mom was 8 months pregnant with me when they left. So I was born where the plane landed, essentially, which was Minneapolis, Minnesota, and then we lived there until the mid-'80s, And then one day I came home from school and there was a sign posted on our front door and it said, burn this house, terrorists live here, which was chilling because that was in the midst of, you know, the Iran-Contra hostage crisis. And my dad made the difficult decision to pack us up and move us to Southern California where a lot of other Iranians were. He thought it would be much safer for us. Mm-hmm. sort of less exposed to discrimination. But my dad said something to me during that move which always stays with me as a leader in higher education. He said, you know, Pardis, people are going to try to take everything from you. They're going to try to take your home, your belongings. They can even take your country. Wow. But the one thing no one can ever take from you is your education. So that's what one of the things that stayed with me. I was only 7 years old at the time, but Education, going to school became my job. And that's kind of what has always inspired me to be a leader in higher education, to help others get that which can never be taken away from them.

Give us sort of the short-form version of your path into academia. I mean, it seems clear that education was a core value of your family from the start. I assume that had— that played a role in leading you into being an academic.

Yes and no. I think going to school was, like I said, like my job, but I often call myself the accidental anthropologist because I actually, when I went to college, I went to Occidental College, but when I went to college, I actually wanted to study diplomacy and world affairs, and that is what I studied at Oxy because I wanted to be a bridge. I grew up Iranian American, and growing up seeing images of American flags being burned in Iran and then having Iran referred to as this great, you know, sort of the satanic presence. My 2 countries were always kind of in this low-level war with each other. Yeah. And so for me, I often thought, well, if Iran and America are so often at war, what does that mean for those of us who are Iran and America in one body? And so I have always been a bit of a bridge, bridge builder, a bridge person. So I wanted to study diplomacy, and be a diplomat. So I did that as an undergrad and then went to Columbia to pursue a master's in international affairs to study human rights. I was somewhat frustrated with the way in which international relations at that time sort of approached epistemology, right? It was this very top-down.

Sure. This is the early, mid-'90s at this point?

At this point, we're at like 2000. Oh,

okay.

Yeah. So in the summer of 2000, before I started at Columbia, I actually went back to Iran.

Okay.

And I was, at that time, I was a journalist, and I was a journalist for the LA Times Magazine. Wow, yeah. And I wanted to write stories about the Iranian women's movement and convinced my editor to let me go. And I arrived in Iran, and it wasn't the women's movement that inspired me, it was this sexual revolution. Sure. So I started writing about that, came back to Columbia, and wanted to find a way to bring the stories of the real Iran to the United States, like bring that voice. So I started taking anthropology classes, and specifically I took a class that became formative for me, and it was called Gender, Sexuality, Health, and Human Rights, and it was taught by a medical anthropologist named Carol Vance, who became my advisor, but I'd never heard of medical anthropology. Yeah. This was like not something I'd ever conceived of, but it turned out that if you wanted to study sexual rights, which is what I wanted to study, You had to kind of bend and tuck yourself and your way in and through classes and majors. So that was my first taste of how important interdisciplinarity is, and all the different ways in which we as students, and now I think I see the next generation of students here, kind of have to double and triple major and minor and take a certificate and kind of turn themselves into a pretzel.

Navigate these crazy bureaucratic systems.

Yeah, and sometimes it takes them longer. Sometimes we can't retain them. I can't count the number of times that I'm like, okay, I give up. You know, all I want to do is write about this sexual revolution in Iran, and they're putting me in classes from like epidemiology to like, you know, historical theory. And I'm like, wait, you know, I'm very clear on what I want to study. Right. But those kind of twists and turns, that also really stayed with me. And when I discovered anthropology, I fell in love with the method, which was ethnography, storytelling.

Yep.

Understanding people through their stories as opposed to kind of trying to make comments on an entire country or an entire people based on their government. So that kind of is how I became an academic was because I fell in love with a discipline and I fell in love with a method that allowed me to ask the questions I wanted to ask.

Sure, and now we're catching you at another transition. in your life. Congratulations on your new role at the University of La Verne, president. Yeah, talk about that opportunity and why it's the right thing for you at this moment.

It's a very exciting opportunity. I think that I realized I wanted to be a college or university president probably in my 5th year as an assistant professor at Pomona College.

That early on, as an assistant professor?

Yeah, yeah. Just as, I think, just as I was coming up for tenure, I had this moment where At the time, I looked up into higher ed leadership, and the higher up I looked, the less anyone looked like me from a whole number of perspectives. There weren't that many anthropologist presidents.

Sure.

There certainly weren't that many women, women who identify as from another culture, hyphenated American. I did feel that I had a perspective on education that I wanted to share with people.

Sure.

I think it was around that time at Pomona, I went to college where I thought, gosh, you know, I want to be in leadership at a university because I want to help higher ed be what we in America promised higher ed would be.

Yeah.

Right? American higher education was the gold standard globally. You know, my parents, one of the main reasons they wanted to come here was so that their children would have the opportunities, you know, in higher education that my cousins, for instance, don't have.

And we should mention one brother of yours is a physician and another is an academic, is that right?

That's right, yes. I have 2 brothers, yeah. All kind of went all the way through.

Exactly.

Yeah, exactly.

But yeah, so you envisioned being in a leadership role and you have been in leadership roles at a wide variety of institutions, public, private, large, and small. Maybe talk about that landscape a little bit. University of La Verne is a smaller private institution. Yeah, what do you see as the strengths and weaknesses across the various types of institutions you've served in?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think it took being in such a wide variety of institutions for me to continue to hone what I see as my core values and what I can contribute to higher education. And that's why La Verne is actually the perfect fit for me. So I think one of the most important things I realized pretty early on was that there are a series of false dichotomies posited in academia, and one of those is access versus excellence. So there's this tendency amongst certain types of institutions to measure themselves by who they exclude. Yeah,

isn't that crazy?

Yeah.

Like, it's a measure of prestige how many people we turn away.

Exactly, and I remember sitting every first day of school at Pomona, and every year it'd be like, we accepted less than 8%. Now we accepted less than 7%.

Yes, yeah.

And I'm thinking to myself, and we're proud of that? Right. Like, education is a human right. It is what allows for mobility. It is what allows for social transformation. It is what upholds our democracy. So why would we be proud of excluding people? That false dichotomy of access and excellence really troubled me because I benefited so much from education. My family benefited so much from education. And like the words of my father, you know, help people get that which can never be taken away taken away. I wanted an institution that wasn't just excellent. I wanted to make higher ed more accessible, and I also wanted to reach different kinds of learners, different types of learners. Sure. Meet people where they're at. And La Verne, to me, is one of the best examples of an institution that has excellent faculty and excellent resources and yet is accessible, is making their knowledge available to different types of learners.

So the promise of access balanced with excellence, or, you know, the sort of refusal to accept that false dichotomy, was some of the promise here at the University of Montana that presumably attracted you to this position. Well, you've been here a little over a year. We'll talk about your time here. What were some of the reasons you said yes to this opportunity here?

Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head, Justin. I think that was sort of the promise that drew me here was, okay, here's an institution, a flagship, R1, right?

Yep, one of 50 University ofs.

Right, committed to serving this state. And I'll confess, I fell in love with the state of Montana. It's kind of hard to explain. It's like a love. I came here and I fell in love with the land, with the mountains, the sky, the rivers.

It's a cultural fit on many dimensions.

Yeah, and one of the stories I tell my close friends is, you know, on my interview trip, my first trip out here when I was interviewing here in Missoula, I was driving down towards the Bitterroot, just kind of checking things out. And there was a car that had sort of flipped because it was snowy, as it often is here, I've learned. And everybody that was driving on that highway stopped and everybody got out and helped to right side the car. Now, in Phoenix, where I had been living, nobody would stop. People would have just kept right on going. And I remember looking at that and thinking, like, these are the people I want to serve, right? And so I saw this as an opportunity to serve a state that I had fallen in love with.

And so your time here has had, you know, some ups and downs. University of Montana, I've been here 11 years, and It's been a difficult 11 years. We've had enrollment struggles. Things seem to have stabilized, and maybe we've turned things around to some degree. But give us kind of your state of play here at the University of Montana. Well, I'll let you give the commentary.

I think now, a year and a half later, I think that the institution is ready to have a lot more conversations about interdisciplinarity.

Okay.

And I think that now there are more conversations poised about innovation, but change is hard. I recognize that.

Let's zero in on that. Why is it that institutions and institutions of higher education are in some ways not designed to change, particularly not designed to change quickly? In my opinion, we've had a little bit of an aversion to big change here at the university. I mean, we kind of tinker around the edges and call it change, but it hasn't really changed the core way the university is designed and how education is delivered. How would you respond to that framing of my experience here?

You know, I think I would take it also back to my own experiences, which is why I shared about being kind of the accidental anthropologist. One of the things I see here at the University of Montana, I meet, I really make an effort to spend as much time with students as I can. I always say, my door's open. Tell me about your experiences, because, as the provost, I saw my job really as serving the students.

Absolutely.

Creating an academic ecosystem that met their needs, and over and over again, I would have conversations with students who were triple majoring, double majoring plus a certificate, because they couldn't study what they wanted to study, and so the most profound moment for me was recognizing, okay, our students are succeeding in spite of us and our scaffolding, as opposed to because of us and the scaffolding. And so I saw it as my job to help to create, I often use that word, epistemological architecture. I see the job of a provost as, I'm an epistemological architect, which is just a fancy way of saying someone who designs knowledge landscapes, right? Mm-hmm. I felt very compelled, given the student conversations I was having and reading 10 years' worth of reports on the University of Montana. There have been a lot. Yeah.

Various acronyms.

Various acronyms, APASP, POND, AIAP. It's like alphabet soup, right? But every single one of them kind of distilled to, we need to change. We need to be more interdisciplinary. We need to meet students where they're at. And at the same time, in many of the opening remarks of these reports, people kind of lamented, we did these exercises and nothing happened. Yeah.

Yep.

And that really struck a chord with me. I thought, how frustrating must it be to put so many hours into a self-study or an evaluation or a strategic plan only to have the fruits of that labor

We'll be back to my conversation with Pardis Mahdavi after this short break. A New Angle is supported by First Security Bank, Blackfoot Communications, and UM's College of Business. Access to capital, broadband, and education are 3 ingredients any community needs for success.

Hi, this is Kelly Webster, Chief of Staff at the University of Montana, and you're listening to A New Angle.

Welcome back to New Angle. I'm speaking with Pardis Mahdavi about her time as provost at the University of Montana. Going back to something you said about meeting students where they're at and helping them sort of use these institutions to propel them toward their objectives, what do you think of the concept of a major? It's a really important way students select a university. The data show that students select universities primarily based on if they have the major they're looking for, but yet at the same time, a major and the sort of academic architecture used to deliver a major is kind of an impediment to a lot of the outcomes students are looking for.

Yeah. And one of the things that I've noticed just reading national reports is that actually that trend of choosing a student— choosing a university for a major, that's actually declining.

Okay, good.

Yeah, so what we're seeing is students having kind of a general idea of, you know, I want to study arts and entrepreneurial management or entertainment management, or I want to study writing in some capacity. I don't know if it's journalism, creative writing, I'm not sure, or I want to study sustainability. What we're seeing is looking for institutions that have the strengths in kind of their areas. They're taking that added step of looking at faculty. Who are the faculty I could study with? Which is why one of the things you asked me about all these institutions I've been at, one of the things I really admire about ASU, about Arizona State University, is that they take their best faculty and they have them teach online courses.

Okay,

so

they can reach as many people as possible?

Exactly, exactly, and they have their rock stars teach. Everybody teaches at ASU. Deans, as a dean, I taught. Even President Crow teaches classes. Okay. And I think that that's really important because the students come for the faces that they see. And so, you know, I've certainly been at institutions where, you know, the rock star professors don't teach, or there's this notion that, well, why would we have our best professors teaching online? There was certainly this narrative of online is the kind of watered down, but not anymore. I mean, certainly post-pandemic. So it's the best of the best made accessible to as many as possible. Right. And La Verne does that too. And I love that about the University of La Verne, that people are hungry to teach, to teach a wide variety of students. And so I think that that's, That's pretty key when you think about students looking at an institution specifically for the professors. I can't tell you how heartbreaking it is to hear from a student, I came to such and such university to study with this particular professor, only to learn that this professor only teaches this one upper division.

Every other year.

Yeah, every other year, and the waitlist is so long, I don't know if I'll ever get to study with that person.

In your view then, how can and should institutions distinguish themselves? It's so often built around the on-campus student experience, like we give you the tour in these fancy buildings or this character. At the University of Montana, that's a huge draw. Our physical campus, I think, is unmatched. Oh, it's gorgeous. It's unmatched in terms of its beauty on various dimensions. How then can an institution like the University of Montana, or in general, distinguish itself versus others in the space?

I think the University of Montana should do what many other land grant or flagship public universities, actually what many universities should do, even La Verne, which is private, is doing this, which is ask yourself, who are we trying to serve? And if we're trying to serve the state of Montana, a state where educational attainment is in crisis, I mean, how many people do we have who started college but didn't finish?

Yeah, a lot.

Right? How many people do we have who want to go to college but can't find their way to Missoula for 4 full years? Mm-hmm. I think about a student, you know, that I met who came here and, you know, midway through the year had a family member get sick on the reservation up in Fort Peck and, you know, had to go home, was not going to be able to get back over here given the pass and the snow, et cetera, and then had to make the difficult decision between staying in school and being with their family. That a similar student with a similar profile at Arizona State wouldn't have to make that decision. Right. They could return to the reservation. They could return to, you know, we had, you know, a student who was Havasupai. They could return to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and continue their studies and not have to drop out. They could be hybrid. They could go back home, take online classes for a year, and then jump back into the on-ground when they're ready.

I'll press on that a little bit more. There are sort of top-down approaches to sort of putting the pieces in place to enable that type of innovation. But yeah, I see you shaking your head a little bit. What sorts of things can a rank-and-file faculty member like me try to embrace both in how I design and deliver my classes, but also how I operate as a colleague?

Yeah. I mean, if you saw me shaking my head, it's really because I am a big proponent of shared governance.

Okay.

And so I don't think that the top-down, you know, okay, now everybody has to do this. And so I think that a strategy that would say, okay, you know, let's sit together, the faculty, you know, the leadership, students, you know, all the different bodies, stakeholders, and ask, okay, what would it take? What would it take for, you know, Professor Engel's courses to be online and to be available? What is a gen ed course that that you might want to teach that we could put online? Sure. Is this something we want to decide to do as an institution? And I think there has to be, you know, I talk about my 5 I's that sort of drive me as a leader: innovation, interdisciplinarity, inclusivity, intersectionality, and then intentionality. And so I think there has to be intention. I think that there has to be that intentionality that says, we are going to do this. We are going to innovate. We say we want to be a flagship for the future. So taking some intentionality and saying, we are going to engage gen ed reform, and part of that is going to be the modality within which, let's say, gen ed courses are offered. So then you say, okay, what can a rank-and-file faculty do? I think it's a conversation with your chair and then kind of the leadership as it goes up to say, all right, well, how can I be a part of this? What are the things I can do? Yeah. And I will say one of the great pleasures of my job here has been working with the unions. They have been incredibly robust thought partners in helping me to understand and identify what the possibilities are. This was my first experience working with unionized faculty, and I loved it. I loved it. Everywhere I go, I'm like, I recommend it so highly because I gained such valuable insight from our union.

We've kind of had a lot of provosts. In the last several years. I think by its nature and construction, it is a very difficult job, but also appears one where it's, as we've sort of alluded to and spoken to directly in this conversation, it's hard to make some stuff happen. You know, if you were to leave our community broadly, the state of Montana, with some advice into how to propel this institution forward toward being that flagship for the future, what would be your key pieces of advice?

I think I would say to lean into the innovative spirit, that kind of roll up your sleeves and get 'er done attitude of Montanans, that attitude that had those people getting out of their cars in the snow to help unflip a flipped car. It was like, you know what, this is a little bit scary. It's the middle of a snowstorm. People are sliding all around. I'm still going to get out of my car, roll up my sleeves, and help this car get unflipped and figure out way forward. Montanans are some of the most salt-of-the-earth, practical, kind of get-'er-done people I've ever met. So I would say take that wonderful spirit of being Montanan and think about what it is that we want to get done in higher education. And how do we continue to lead a national conversation? Because I actually think that the national conversation about the ways in which higher ed needs to change is going to come from institutions like the University of Montana, right? It's going to come from places like Montana, Idaho, and then within states like California and Texas and New York, it's going to come from the more forward-thinking institutions like the University of La Verne, the ones that are willing to innovate and be nimble and be really intentional about changing in ways that meet the needs of the students, who ultimately are our workforce and our social transformers of the future.

And so looking ahead to the University of La Verne, like, how will you judge your success there? What are some of the things you're looking to continue and to achieve in that role?

Well, I have big shoes to fill. President Devorah Lieberman has done an incredible job. She has, I mean, University of La Verne has always been on the map, but she has sort of taken it to another level.

She was there, what, 13 years in that role?

Exactly, yeah. And a very forward-thinking, innovative leader. Mm-hmm. And so, you know, she's created a culture willing to receive that, that kind of innovative interdisciplinary mindset. And really what I want to do is continue that tradition and continue to elevate the visibility of the University of La Verne. One of the roles I see myself as president taking on is being a storyteller, you know, telling the story of the University of La Verne, which is in and of itself an incredibly compelling story. When you think about how it has grown and the number of people that the University of La Verne serves in all of these different ways, in these different capacities, I think it can definitely be, like the University of Montana, a role model in thinking about where and how higher education needs to shift, change, and go for the 21st century.

Well, it's sad to see you go, but I'm just excited for the University of La Verne, for you and your family, and, uh, yeah, hope we can keep in touch.

Thank you, Justin. Likewise.

Thanks for listening to A New Angle. We really appreciate it, and we're coming to you from Studio 49, generous gift from UM alums Michelle and Loren Hanson. A New Angle is presented by First Security Bank Blackfoot Communications, and the University of Montana College of Business. With additional support from Consolidated Electrical Distributors, Drum Coffee, and Montana Public Radio. Keeley Larson is our producer. Ella Hall is our production assistant. VTO's Jeff Ament and John Wicks made our music, and Jeff Meese is our master of all things sound. Thanks a lot, and see you next time.