My parents are Haitian immigrants, they came to the United States over 50 years
ago, my mother actually came to the US as an au pair for a French American family
living the Boston suburbs, she eventually moved to New York to join her mother and
her siblings; my father went directly to New York and proceeded to earn an
engineering degree from the City College of New York.
My mom eventually became a registered nurse and when I went to college I went
with the expectation from my family that I would pursue a major that's very
closely connected to the kinds of jobs that existed in their universe so I was
either going to be an engineer or a doctor or a lawyer; a lot of my
decision-making as an undergraduate was really sharply structured around those
kinds of expectations, the idea of eventually becoming an academic, it was
not even something that was in the range of choices that were presented to me as
as possibilities. One of the ways in which my experience as the daughter of
Haitian immigrants has influenced the approach that I take to teaching and
mentoring is that I often work with students who are either first generation
or also from immigrant families and they come into college with clear
expectations about the choices they're supposed to make. Part of my role as a
faculty member and as a mentor is to respect the sort of the hopes and dreams
of many people often rests on the shoulders of these students and that I'm
not only engaging with the student but I'm probably engaging with the students
family; it's possible to pursue not only educational choices that are legible to
your family and that provide a sense of economic security but also to pursue
your intellectual passions; I think bringing that kind of sensitivity to my
interactions with students that's something that's so deeply influenced by my own
experience as the daughter of Haitian immigrants.
One of my greatest passions
in my time in the role as dean of social science for the last three years has
been nurturing what is the Inequality in America Initiative and the initiative
itself in the first instance is motivated just by the growing
recognition of the problem of inequality and the broad impacts it has on
everything from individuals to families to neighborhoods to entire societies so
there is a real-world urgency that really calls for our engagement on this
issue, but is also the initiative has been motivated by the sense that while
the study of inequality and teaching about inequality has been really a core
strength for Harvard and for the FAS in particular for some years that there's
actually a lot more that we could be doing in this space; we actually joined
collaboratively and defined the study of inequality as a collective enterprise
Over the last three years I've viewed my my position as an opportunity to have
this this passport that allows me to go and visit anthropology, attend seminars,
and understand what motivates and excites anthropologists and then the
next day visit economics and attend a job talk to learn what motivates and
excites economists and now with this role it is as if I'm stepping from the
balcony to a rooftop view and really being able to survey the full rich
diversity of the FAS and learn more not only about what's happening in social
sciences but now also what excites classicists in arts and humanities or to
learn more about engineering. I would also say that one of the things that's
tremendously rewarding about being in this kind of position is that you have
the opportunity to to shape and support the faculty and so the opportunity to
bring to our campus the best minds across a variety of fields and to help
set the conditions that allow them to do their best work and I find that to be
incredibly rewarding