Maria Klawe Reflects on Her Career So Far, Part II

This is the second part of the interview—the first part appeared in the last issue. I recommend reading the first part before this one. —Ed.

Q: I associate you with doing a lot to increase participation of people in STEM at university level. Your CV doesn’t show a lot of classroom teaching. How did you come to Math for America?

A: It’s sort of ridiculous but true—one of the things college presidents do is they stalk billionaires. Particularly a place like Harvey Mudd that’s relatively small, relatively young, and doesn’t have a lot of billionaires in its alumni base. I think as an organization, as a college, it is just phenomenal in terms of the role it plays in higher education. The collaborative approach to rigorous education, I think, is incredibly important. One of the things I was very interested in doing was getting to very wealthy philanthropists and interesting them in Harvey Mudd. So one of the people, I thought, who would be a great choice would be Jim Simons. David Eisenbud, whom I’ve known since the year I was at Oakland University, 1977–1978, asked me if I was interested in joining the board of Math for America.

I knew that one of the things that Math for America was interested in doing was having other sites across the country. I thought I would start one in Los Angeles and then they would have to elect me to the board. I reached out to Darryl Yong, who is a math professor at Harvey Mudd, probably one of the best people in the country doing professional development for K–12 math teachers. Together we started Math for America in LA. Probably I was going to get elected to the board, anyway. We started in 2008, and I joined the board of Math for America in 2008.

Contrary to what you might have seen, I actually have had a lot of involvement with math teaching, particularly in grades K through 6. Back in 1992, I was trying to think how to get children more interested in mathematical concepts, and I don’t mean in addition and multiplication and those kinds of things. But really in thinking about mathematical concepts. My son was 10 at the time, and the only way you could really have extensive conversations with him was about video games. I was spending a lot of time watching him play video games in order to be able to have these conversations. And it struck me that a lot of what you do when you’re playing computer games or video games is you’re looking for patterns. You come up with a hypothesis. You test it, and it just felt to me like it should be possible to embed mathematical concepts in computer games and to interest children roughly, in the 8 through 12 age range in those concepts. So I started a project in 1992 called E-GEMS, which stood for Electronic Games and Math and Science. As part of that we had five teachers, and we got funding from both NSERC and from Electronic Arts Canada. We ran the project for ten years, and I spent 1–2 hours per week in a third-grade classroom for those ten years. I claim that I learned more about teaching from doing that than about anything else I’ve ever done in my life. I’d also spent a fair amount of time with Science World British Columbia with their Scientists in the Schools program. And I would go out, give talks about math to everything from third grade through eleventh grade and did several of those a year. So it’s been something I’ve been interested in for a long time. I also volunteered in my kids’ schools. I love teaching kids math. Now I do it with my grandkids—it’s really fun. But in any case, that’s what got me on the board of Math for America.

I decided in 2021 that I was going to step down from the presidency of Mudd at the end of June 2023. So that was 15 years as president and I wanted to make sure Mudd was doing extremely well. We came out of the pandemic, we made a lot of progress. Part of it was that the tech sector was really the only economic sector that did well in the pandemic. Our number of applications went up by 39% in the fall of 2021, but the number of black student applicants went up by 79%. I felt it was really a good time.

I didn’t want to leave Mudd, my favorite job in my entire career. I’m sure it will always be my favorite job in my entire career, but I wanted to leave it at a time when it could recruit somebody totally fantastic as the next president. And I happen to think Harriet Nembhard is totally fantastic. I couldn’t be happier about her replacing me and and I was sure I didn’t want to retire. I also wanted to be sort of young enough that I could take on something and do something with impact. And so I was at the [Math for America] board meeting in December of 2022, where John Ewing announced that he was going to leave the position after 15 years, at the end of 2023. I was sitting beside David Spergel, who’s the president of the Simons Foundation, a very distinguished astrophysicist, and I wrote on a little piece of paper, “Should I be interested?” And he wrote back “Yes!”. I still wasn’t sure that I was really interested in the job. But probably 10 days later I got a phone call from Jim Simons offering me the job. What basically happened was, there was a search committee and they met at the end of the board meeting that I was at, and David Spergel claims that he told Jim to hire me. Jim was chair of the board, so it was his decision. At the time I was a finalist for the presidency at Bates College which I would have been reasonably interested in. I had been a finalist for the presidency at RPI the the year before. I definitely was looking. But the fact that our son lives in Manhattan—it was pretty clear once they made me the offer that my son would never forgive me if we didn’t take it.

There are three big reasons I came to Math for America. I already mentioned the location, and our daughter is nearby too, which is also really important to us. She was in Geneva with the United Nations. She’s a peace negotiator and was the number two in Syria for three years, and has now moved to the US Institute of Peace in DC. But the second thing is, I actually think what mathematics does is incredibly important. I’m enormously passionate about teaching math and science at any level, whether it’s in graduate school or elementary school, in a way that leads everyone to believe that if they work hard they will thrive, and they will excel. This is all part of how we get people who are underrepresented in STEM careers. And you know, I think STEM careers are incredibly important, because they solve a lot of the world’s problems—not by themselves, but it’s really important—but also they pay well. I also just believe that the work that gets done in STEM is better if you have a diverse population that is doing that work collaboratively together. So I think of Math for America as being both. What it’s doing in New York City is really important.

The other reason I was very interested in taking this role is that there was the hope of a national program being launched through the National Science Foundation and I was very passionate about wanting that to happen and wanting to be be able to help make that happen, and it just got announced the day before yesterday [this is the National STEM Teacher Corps Pilot Program]. It was hilarious, because I was at a meeting at the Simons Foundation with David Spergel, the CEO Euan Robertson, and Abe Lackman, who’s a lobbyist for Jim Simons. They’ve been lobbying for this program for several years now. We were having a meeting to discuss where we were with this, and on March 14th I had a Zoom that was set up by the National Science Foundation. They hadn’t said what it was about, but of course, when they reach out to do a Zoom with you, you say yes. There were rumors that the legislation to fund the national program was going to pass soon.

I asked, “What can you say? Tell me about the national program.” I was talking to the director of the Division od Mathematical Sciences David Manderscheid and James Moore, who’s in charge of all of the educational part of NSF. They looked at me, and said “We can’t talk to you about that.”

In my head I was saying “I know the reason they reached out to me is because they know I’m very interested in helping with the national program.” So then I said “Well, okay, if you can’t talk about it, let me just say the following. If there is a national program, I will be delighted to help in any possible way that you would like to make it a success.” And they both grinned and said “OK, we’ve got that recorded now.” Then later that day, they announced.

Q: You just said that Mudd is your favorite job of all. What specifically made it your favorite?

A: Well, the first thing is that it’s a model of education that I just think is absolutely wonderful, where students are majoring in the same area. And they’re taking a broad range of things across STEM as well as across society, social sciences, humanities, and the arts. So I really like that. I really like the whole culture at Mudd, which is all about being collaborative and humble and helpful, where every student believes it’s every student’s responsibility to help others succeed. I think it’s also an unusually supportive place to be a faculty member. I love the fact that when we hire a faculty member we expect them to get tenure. It’s not like a place like Harvard or Princeton, where you go ahead and you think 30% of the people you hire are going to get tenure. I love the fact that as an institution it has become really committed to diversity and equity. I love the board, it’s a board that really understands the balance between thinking strategically, financial and oversight, and yet not micromanaging. I love the shared governance with the faculty and the students. I think that’s really important. It’s just an institution I’m very proud of, and it changed enormously during the 17 years I was there. It was very white and very male when I arrived. And now it’s 50% female on the student body. I believe it’s about 40% female on the faculty. It’s racially very diverse in the students and increasingly diverse in the faculty. I mean, it’s just all things that I believe are important. And the thing about Mudd is that the president does nothing by themselves. Everything that happens is a collaboration with the community and it’s a very good model.

Q: You adopted some stereotypically male traits earlier in life, and you succeeded in a male-dominated field. To what extent is it important to change the culture of academia and professions in general, rather than just give more opportunities for aspiring members of underrepresented groups to get in there but require them to conform?

A: That’s a great question. I’ve had lots of conversations with women who have also, like me, been the first women in their role, or one of a very small number of women in their role in a discipline, and I think the vast majority of us—I don’t want to say all of us, because I don’t know all the people—had “male” characteristics in the way we went about our careers. Outspoken, fearless, very persistent in pursuing the things that we want to get done, etc. When I was growing up, I basically thought all women should be like that. Why wouldn’t you? And the first time I realized that I was just wrong about that was when I became a manager for the first time at IBM Research. I would have been 31 going on 32. And I suddenly realized: Oh, my God, that’s ridiculous. We ought to welcome people with all kinds of characteristics. It’s just crazy that we would think that to be a physicist or a computer scientist or a mathematician, that you need to have the traditional characteristics of the people who are in that field. We would all be better off if we welcomed many, many different kinds of personalities and styles. I’m never going to be somebody who is “glossy” in a feminine way. It’s not who I am. But it should be fine for people to be glossy, male or female. It just doesn’t matter. And one of the joys in my life was, I was on a panel with Kyne, the drag queen of mathematics who’s a 26 year old from just outside Toronto, got his degree in math from the University of Waterloo, and does drag shows and talks about math. One of the things I’m also very proud of at Mudd is that among both the faculty and the staff and the students there are lots of people with different gender orientations, sexual orientations. It’s a place where it’s totally fine to be queer. I felt for a very long time now that we’ll all be much better off if we have not just people from diverse races and backgrounds and genders, and that stuff, but just diverse ways of seeing the world and experiencing the world and expressing themselves.

Q: You are well known for being very persistent (using the motto “fail openly and often”). But were there times in your career where you doubted what you were doing and and considered giving up?

A: All the time. First of all, I had a serious head injury when I was 43, and ever since that I have had really quite serious depression and I’m on medication. I’m very affected by suicide and was very suicidal before I eventually went on medication. All the time I feel like I’m never going to succeed. I found Princeton a particularly difficult place to be effective in causing change, and I came home once from an unfortunate disagreement with the president. Our son, who was a graduate student computer science there at the time, was over for dinner, and I walked back in and said “I just don’t know why I always have to run straight into a brick wall.” And he said, “Mom, somebody has to make the mistakes others can learn from.” He has a really very sarcastic form of wit. I believe very strongly in perseverance. I also believe in asking for help, which has traditionally been very hard for me to do, but I’ve gotten better at it, I would say in the last 15 years or so. I believe in reevaluating your strategy because it could be that you you’re running straight into brick wall, but if you just moved over slightly there’s a a door with a handle there. So I’ve tried over time to be more varied in my approaches other than just trying to go straight through the brick wall.

One of the the things I talk a lot about is the imposter syndrome. I know tons of very successful people who have the imposter syndrome, so many that I have the theory that actually it’s a recipe for success. And the reason is that if you view yourself as being a failure, you’re constantly looking for what you can learn from your failures and how you can do better in the future. I think probably the most important thing about about being successful is not just perseverance. It’s also the willingness to learn as you’re going along and to constantly try to figure out a broad swath of approaches that might be more effective.

I was talking to the the incoming chair of our board, Beth Hammock, about this and the challenges that I’m facing as the leader of Math for America. And she said “Maria, you need to remember that the first year in any job is always the hardest.” That’s really true. And she’s just starting a new job as the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank in Cleveland, Ohio. She’s nervous about it, and excited about it. She was at Goldman Sachs, and she basically ran into a glass ceiling and left.

There’s this balance between perseverance and growth, because you have to persevere but you also have to be willing to grow and learn skills, no matter how your previous ways of doing things might have been successful in other organizations, other cultures. There’s no guarantee that it will succeed in a new one. I worked with an executive coach in the fall of my second year at Mudd as president. It was very painful to hear the things that particularly some of the faculty were saying about me, but I came to the realization that I have to be the leader that this institution needs, not the leader that I want to be. And I think that’s true for any organization that you join. What’s important is to figure out what style of leadership that organization needs, and then figure out how to achieve that.

Q: How has the situation for girls and women in math and CS changed in the last 50 years?

A: Oh, that’s a good one. The first thing I want to say is that there’s been very significant progress in math. When I got my PhD in mathematics, about 9% of the PhDs were going to women and now it’s about 30%. Computer Science is weird. In the early days of Computer Science there were quite a lot of women partly because typing skills were needed to program because you had to program on cards. If you made errors, it was so hard to fix. There was this connection between typing and secretary work and the need to program. And also because it really started during WW2. Women were put into mathematical and software positions in WW2, because men were drafted into the war. The trajectories are just different. Because in math we saw a steady increase in number of women. I haven’t checked the data recently, but my sense is that it has tapered off over the last 20 years, that it has sort of stayed around the 30% mark. Whereas computer science was higher in terms of the percentage of women than math, and that has gradually fallen below. For the last, say, 25 years it’s been increasing. So when I arrived at Mudd somewhere between 10% and 15% of the CS majors were female. Now, it’s approximately 50%. While I was at UBC, about 16% of the CS majors were female, and we got up to 27% in 5 years. There’s absolutely no question that women can thrive in both math and computer science, that they can be very successful, that they can make great research contributions and other kinds of things.

I think the culture for women in institutions can vary greatly between different institutions and that if we want to have institutions that are producing lots of women as PhDs or lots of women as majors then it really is important to pay attention to the culture. Statistics has been a field, and particularly biostatistics, in which women have thrived for quite a long time. AI has been a field of computer science where women for the most part, have not thrived. And so now we’re seeing statistics and AI come together for data science. What I’m hoping is that women will thrive in data science. I can be optimistic about this for a number of reasons. First of all, there’s a huge demand for people with these skills, and particularly for people who are interdisciplinary with data, science and some other area. I think women in general have been drawn to interdisciplinary work. I think that the background in statistics will hopefully help us attract more women to data science than we would have attracted through AI.

But having said all that, I think it really matters how we teach, it matters how we mentor students, the culture and the department overall for graduate students and for assistant professors, and all those kinds of things. All you have to do is close your eyes and forget, and things can go backward.

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Alberta, or a graduate student, for that matter, I only once ever had a course that was taught by a female faculty member, and she was a visiting faculty member. And the male faculty members would say to me, over and over again, “Maria, you’re very talented.” I knew they thought I was very talented at mathematics, that you know this was not to tell me I wasn’t good at math. They’d say, “You’re very talented in lots of different areas. Why would you pick mathematics where there are no great women mathematicians?”. They meant “Why would you pick a path where everyone’s going to underestimate you?” Because there’s not a history of great female mathematicians. Now you know enough about me to know that the easiest way to get me to do anything is to tell me not to do it. And so, of course, that just reinforced my being there. If you look at many math departments, have a long poster that’s called something like Great Men of Mathematics. Occasionally they will have one woman, but that would be it. I have a narrative from a Mudd student who’s now doing his PhD in applied math at the University of British Columbia, and he went to a school in Hawaii, where he had a math teacher who told him he wasn’t good at math. He once told me when I was giving him a ride home from the Ontario airport “I’m so lucky I came here because coming here is how I learned that I was really good at mathematics.” I think the really important thing for women in math and computer science is to have a community that believes they can excel. People do so much better if you believe in them.

When I first went to math conferences I got hit upon constantly by famous male mathematicians. I remember when I was on the board of the AMS, saying that now that I was going primarily to theoretical computer science conferences the famous theory male faculty didn’t hit on junior women like this and I really appreciated that. And one of the other people on the Council said to me “Maria, you’re way too powerful to be hit upon now” (!) What I do know is that if I look at the people like Dick Karp and Steve Cook who were very well known male leaders in theoretical computer science, they treated young women with respect, and I think it actually made a difference. I felt very much when I made the transition from math to theoretical computer science that there was just a different culture about how young women were treated. And I once had, in probably 1980, a very interesting interaction with Dick Karp. I’m often pretty goofy—I mean, I joke around a lot. And Dick and I had been trying to sort out some problem in the afternoon, and he was visiting. He’d come down from Berkeley to visit on IBM Research San Jose, and he and I just happened to be working on this problem. We worked on it for several hours. We didn’t finish it, but we made some progress. Nick and I went up to Berkeley to meet with him and Manuel Blum and somebody else the next week. And while we were walking to lunch Dick said “Maria, I want to apologize to you.” And I said, “What for?” And he said, “ Well, until we spent that time in your office working on that problem I didn’t realize what a serious mathematician you were. Because you often make jokes I just didn’t realize you had the capacity to take on a problem in that kind of way.” And I said, “Don’t worry about it, Dick. It’s totally fine. I’ve never felt like you disrespected me, or that you didn’t take me seriously, or anything like that.” I would have been 28 at the time. So young, just married. The fact that he would actually acknowledge that that could happen, I thought was very impressive.

Q: What can change institutional culture and what needs to be in place to to effect change? Or are there places or ways in which it’s intractable?

A: Princeton has changed a lot in very positive ways. I think my leaving Princeton caused way more change than would have happened if I’d stayed because they just couldn’t believe I would leave. I had several trustees come visit me, maybe after I’d been at Mudd for 8–10 years, and said “We totally understand why you left.” They were still making changes at Princeton 10 years after I left, that were things I had asked for. People would send me messages saying they’re finally doing X or Y, or whatever.

I do think that there are a variety of ways. It’s often really helpful not to be the first person to be pushing for something. I call this first wave versus second wave. So when I went to UBC, the person who had been the head of computer science before me, somebody named Jim Varah, would meet with me often to tell me why what I was attempting to do wouldn’t work. I interpreted this as really frustrating, because I was sure I was going to make it work. And here he was trying to persuade me that it’s not possible. What I finally realized was every single thing I had tried to do, he had also tried to do, and had gotten too much pushback to push it through. And then I came along maybe three or four years later, pushing the same thing, and everyone said yes. So one of the things I learned is that often the first time that somebody wants to do something perfectly sensible, people will push back because change is hard. Change is just hard for many organizations. And then, when the second person comes along. enough time has gone by that they decide that they can support the second person. At the end of that first year I took Jim out to lunch and apologized to him. I said “Jim, what I now recognize is, you were just trying to be helpful. Because these were all things you had tried, and they didn’t happen, and then I come along and they happen, and it has nothing to do with it being me versus you. It has to do with the fact that you had pushed first.”

There is value in having an outsider talk about something. Often the person who’s internal to the organization, whether they’re the president or the dean or faculty member, and they’re pushing for something to happen, the organization pushes back. And then an outsider comes in and talks about it and all of a sudden they can embrace it. After I arrived at Mudd, we did strategic planning, and I was able to convince Freeman Hrabowski, who was the first black scientist to lead an R1 university—he was president of UMBC at the time—to give a talk. We did four one-day workshops in a single week. It was the week of fall break, and we canceled classes for the entire week to do it, which got me a lot of pushback from the other Claremont colleges. We had about a third of the students participating in the workshops, pretty much all of the faculty, many staff, many trustees, etc. Freeman was the 20-minute keynote speaker for the third workshop. Because diversity was such a big thing on my list, we had diversity as a breakout session for every single workshop. I had sat at the breakout sessions on Monday and Tuesday, and here we are on the Thursday where Freeman is speaking. On Monday and Tuesday the discussion that I heard from faculty and trustees and students was: the reason we don’t have more women and people of color at Mudd is because they’re not interested in a rigorous STEM education. We’re a merit-based institution and that’s just who we are. Freeman gave his talk, and by the breakout sessions after his talk, people were saying: “We really need to pursue diversity. We’re not going to lower our standards at all. But it’s an imperative.” It was just unbelievable. That’s how unsurpassed excellence and diversity became one of the themes of the strategic plan that we launched that year.

I’m very proud of the impact I had at Princeton. I’m very proud of the impact I had at Harvey Mudd but in both cases it took different levers to actually achieve impact. My departure was very important in changing Princeton. Getting Freeman to come was very important in changing Mudd.

Q: You seem to have led a lot of strategic planning exercises. Why are they so important? And how do you do them?

A: Oh, that’s a great question. Prior to going to Princeton, I had never led a strategic planning exercise. I participated in many at UBC that had various outside facilitators, and they were entirely a waste of time. When I went to Princeton it was clear that the engineering school was very underresourced compared to the rest of the university, and the faculty had made it clear that if I wanted to be seen as being successful, I really needed to get Princeton to fundraise for the engineering school. The interview process was such that I had no idea of the magnitude of what needed to be fundraised for, and so off the top of my head in meeting with the president, Shirley Tillman, I basically said that one of the things that’s really important is to get the engineering school resourced in a way that’s compatible with the rest of the institution. Shirley had not yet led a campaign. She was relatively new in her role as president. And I said “If the Engineering School creates a strategic plan that is endorsed not just by the school, but by the entire university and the board, will you commit that your upcoming campaign will make that a priority and will raise the amount that’s needed to actually do it?” She said yes.

The thing I didn’t understand was that the previous dean had also done a strategic planning exercise. It was very much a back-room thing, and they had gone out and raised a whole bunch. They had gotten a commitment from an alum of $100 million as part of this whole thing, and his company went bankrupt after I believe he had given $34 or $38 million. So when I actually arrived and told people I was going to do this, everyone just laughed in my face: been there, done that, not happening. So I had to come up with a way of strategic planning that was completely different from what my predecessor had done, and in particular it had to really engage everyone. It was very carefully designed to bring people from all across the university, to engage alumni, involve faculty from several other institutions. We invited students. We invited staff. Students and staff being present for something like this was completely unheard of at the time. We did 11 one-day workshops over a three-month period and created the strategic plan. Princeton was very siloed. There were literally six departments in the engineering school, and most of the faculty in department A had never met the faculty and department B. Even if they actually worked in the same area—being there for 20 years, had never met the person. The place was secretive in a way I would just not have believed. The way we did the workshops was to make sure that we picked topics that crossed every department and we made steering committees that had a junior and a senior faculty member from each department on the steering committee for each workshop. That ensured that we really got people out.

It was sufficiently effective that we launched the strategic plan in the spring of 2004, and it was approved by the board later that year. Then we got a donation of $2 million to do low-hanging fruit. We got Princeton to commit to $350 million that would be raised from the upcoming campaign. In January 2006, I announced I would be leaving to be president of Harvey Mudd. At the end of June the department chairs went to see the president and the provost to say, we don’t want an external dean to be hired because this is our strategic plan. It’s not Maria’s plan. We all believe in it, and if you bring in a new dean they will want to do something different. And the president and provost said, “Well, we’d never hire an internal dean.” They did hire an internal dean and he was dean for the next 10 years and stayed on that strategic plan for the entire 10 years. It was evidence of the fact that we had managed to engage the community so deeply in the plan that there was no way they were going to let it go.

One of the reasons I was hired at Mudd was that the board had been pushing on the previous president to do a strategic plan and he didn’t want to do it. I think one of the things that was highly attractive was, yes, they wanted the dean of engineering from Princeton, but they also wanted somebody who had a lot of experience in strategic planning.

We stayed on that plan for for more than 15 years, and I know Harriet, and she is in the middle of strategic planning right now. And so here I am at Math for America. And what are we doing? We’re doing a strategic plan. It’s not for any of the reasons at Princeton or Mudd, because, first of all, Math for America is funded by the Simons Foundation primarily, so it’s not for fundraising. We’re a very small community. We’re 23 full-time staff right now, with 4 part-time people. There’s a tremendous sense among particularly the more junior people that they’re not listened to or heard. And so the reason we’re doing strategic planning is really about creating the culture that we want to have for people to feel heard, recognized, appreciated—all of those things.