Harvey Mudd President Maria Klawe Talks About Her Career Thus Far and the Future of Harvey Mudd College

On October 19, 2007 The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference (GHC) occurred in Orlando, Florida and Harvey Mudd President Maria Klawe gave a keynote address.

According to Business Wire (accessed through Lexis-Nexis), President Klawe developed her strategic plan, "HMC 2020: Envisioning the Future":

Prior to joining HMC, Klawe served as dean of engineering and professor of computer science at Princeton University. During her time at Princeton, Maria led the School of Engineering and Applied Science through a strategic planning exercise that created an exciting and widely embraced vision for the school. At Harvey Mudd College, she is leading a similarly ambitious strategic planning initiative known as "HMC 2020: Envisioning the Future."

Here's the podcast interview where she unveils At first, President Klawe discusses her career in academia, at IBM, and in the computer industry where she gained her management skills. She bounced back between industry and academia and credits both of them to her success. She talks about how presidents are seen to have hidden agendas, even though they really don't. Presidents, she notes, have a lot of influence, but little power.

She talked about how intimate Harvey Mudd is. President Klawe, to her credit, memorized the names of all of the incoming students at Harvey Mudd using flashcards and photos. She did some skateboard practice, replete with padding.

She's planning events with "influential Harvey Mudd alums" to raise the profile of Harvey Mudd. (Sound a bit like the Day Gift?)

Most importantly she talked about HMC's strategic vision addressing what HMC needs to change and what it needs to keep the same.

She outlined three things HMC needs to change at a part of her strategic vision.

1. Diversity. She lauded the strides for female students -- up to 43% female -- and commented on improved numbers of Hispanics. She pointed out the dismal failure at attracting significant numbers of African-American students and said that Harvey Mudd needed to do a better job at "recruitment" and "outreach." [As an aside, I think this will result in more quotas and diminishing the reputation of Harvey Mudd College as a merit-based, curve grading school of intense students. But perhaps, Klawe reads that mandate more as focusing and improving ]
   
2. International focus. Klawe also wants students to have more of an international experience. In part, this might have something to do with Klawe being a Canadian, but she says that it has to do with students being more comfortable in a multicultural environment. She stressed the need for ties with India and China.
   
3. Increase name recognition. She says that she laughes when she thinks about how Harvey Mudd is the best institution that no one has ever heard of and how that needs to change. She does not outline any of the plans she has.
   

If HMC improves its numbers in these three key areas, they will undeniably rise on the U.S. News and World Report rankings, but I wonder at what cost?

Later in the interview, she stressed education on computing technology and the need for people to have computer skills. She also went off on how much she wants to encourage women to take computer science.

Exploring The Humanity of Our Professors

More often that not, I've found that we, at the Claremont Colleges, put our professors' on a pedestal from which they cannot come down. We imagine our professors as superhuman and in so doing, rob them of their humanity.

And so this Newsweek article, written by Claremont McKenna professor Frederick Lynch struck my fancy. (Admittedly, he wrote it in July, but I've been slow on keeping up with my news alerts.) The beginning says it all: "I recently paid $11,000 in veterinary bills for my cat, Fritz."

Though I do not necessarily agree with his choice of expenditure, I can understand it. As a many year vegetarian, I know that we are judged by others and ourselves on how we treat the least among the world.

Here's to wishing Fritz a speedy recovery.