Mills Matters

Provost’s office announces two new arrivals

After a spring with several departures, the Office of the Provost is finding revitalization with the hire of two accomplished professionals.

First is Patricia Hardaway, who is joining the College as interim provost. Hardaway has a deep background in higher education, especially regarding equity and inclusion. She was previously president and provost of Wilberforce University in Ohio, the oldest private historically Black university in the United States, which is also her undergraduate alma mater. After earning an MPW from the University of Pittsburgh and her law degree at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, she cofounded a labor and employment law firm in New York. In the sphere of higher education, Hardaway has also worked in administration at institutions such as Hebrew Union College, Trinity College, and Fairleigh Dickinson University.

Her arrival also marks a structural change within the provost’s office. The position previously included both the provost and dean of faculty roles, but starting in the 2021-22 school year, the two will be separate. Hardaway will begin work on defining and filling the new dean of faculty position over the summer.

In addition, Associate Professor of History and of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Judith Bishop will join the provost’s office as the director of the Center for Faculty Excellence. This new position involves supporting innovative teaching and professional development among the faculty, as well as antiracism initiatives. She has worked on similar initiatives in the past; most recently, she brought together a group of humanities and science faculty with Student Life staff members to participate in Stanford’s Life Design Lab’s Studio for Universities in 2019, which brought career readiness and resilience tools into classrooms and the First Year Experience.

Bishop, the Alice Andrews Quigley Chair in Women’s Studies, has been a member of the Mills faculty since 2005 and the recipient of multiple awards, including the Trefethen Faculty Award for Outstanding Teaching and Curricular Innovation.

Getting back to normal for fall 2021

After two and a half semesters of distance learning (give or take), the College will largely be returning to standard operations for the 2021-22 school year. On May 10, the Provost’s Office alerted undergraduate students that they will revert back to a mostly in-person learning environment, with exemptions available for those with medical or religious/philosophical reasons that preclude them from vaccination. Graduate programs will mostly do the same, though instructors did find that certain online and hybrid modalities promoted student engagement and will incorporate some of those elements into classwork going forward.

What will this new semester look like? We checked in with Chicora Martin, dean of students, about yet another school year unlike any other:

Vaccination: As referenced above, students, faculty, and staff must complete an immunization process to attend classes and report to work. That process will require proof of vaccination or documentation of exemptions for medical or religious reasons for employees and including philosophical reasons for students. Martin said that international students will be able to return to campus with proof of any COVID-19 shot that’s been approved by the World Health Organization even if it’s not yet approved in the United States, such as the AstraZeneca vaccine. Those who are not vaccinated for any reason may still have to wear masks on campus.

Residence halls: Only students who have been vaccinated will be allowed to live in on-campus housing. With virus variants still circulating, previous isolation protocols will remain in place— though Martin said only one student tested positive for COVID, near the end of the year, and immediately selfreported and quarantined themselves.

Learning environments: While many students thrived during remote learning, Mills is not accredited as a permanent online institution, so back to the classroom we go. (Anyone who can’t yet make that shift is coordinating with Student Access & Support Services.) However, that doesn’t mean that everything is going back to exactly the way it was before the pandemic; Martin says the College learned a lot about how to make events more accessible. For instance, last year’s orientation utilized an online course that many new students revisited throughout the year—an unexpected upside.

Campus: As of June 15, the official reopening date in California, the Mills campus is available for alumnae and the surrounding community to walk and enjoy. However, due to the recent departure of the aquatics director, the pool will likely not reopen until August. As with other sectors, the College hopes to use more of its open-air and outdoor spaces for gatherings.

Activities: With the help of robust protocols and testing requirements, athletics and the performing arts are expected to make a full comeback in 2021-22.

Four retirements cap odd academic year

For the second year in a row, the annual Retiring Faculty Reception went online, giving departing professors the chance to interact with family and friends from around the world as they celebrated illustrious careers at Mills.

On May 6, Associate Professor of Dance Ann Murphy and Lovelace

Family Endowed Chair in Book Art

Kathleen Walkup joined an appreciative crowd on Zoom to look back on their years at the College. Departing

Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning, and Faculty Affairs

Sheila Lloyd presided over the reception, offering grateful words to each new retiree, and colleagues of each shared stories in their honor.

“I had no idea that dancers were interested in Nietzsche before you,” said Associate Professor of Philosophy Jay Gupta of Murphy, who joined the Mills faculty in 2007 touting a long career as a dance writer and critic, including as the editor of Dance Magazine and the founder of several others. Appropriately, Murphy earned her MFA in creative nonfiction from UC Riverside in 2011.

At Mills, she made inclusion the key of the dance department, according to her colleagues—for instance, staging performances with dancers in wheelchairs. Murphy organized and curated dozens of vibrant dance events across the Bay Area and on the Mills campus, and she elevated the College’s profile in dance: “Mills MFAs are highly coveted teachers because of her efforts in the program,” said Professor of Music David Bernstein. Current and former dance faculty—including Sheldon Smith, Molissa Fenley, and Linda K. Johnson— all toasted her accomplishments.

“I shouldn’t have been at Mills. I had a journalistic career, and I didn’t want a break from embodied knowing,” Murphy said. “Being invited into this community is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

Walkup, the other honoree at the reception, is another giant in the Mills arts program. She has nurtured the College’s renowned Book Art Program since 1978. Like Murphy, whose son was present to celebrate his mother, Walkup’s children were in attendance: “They all had their babyhoods on campus!” she said. “They put up with me on a merciless schedule, helped me feed the strikers in 1990, and camped with me on the Oval when we were fighting apartheid in South Africa.”

Professor of Book Art Julie Chen, a former student of Walkup’s and the new program head for Book Art, listed her mentor’s many accomplishments—first noting that “the patron saint of the Mills Book Art Program” had secured the largest cohort of MFA students in program history just prior to her departure. While at Mills, Walkup also taught at Stanford, City College of San Francisco, California College of the Arts, Camberwell College of Art in London, and the University of Georgia’s study-abroad program in Cortona, Italy.

Murphy herself spoke to Walkup’s legacy in recalling a visit to F.W. Olin Library to view a book art exhibit: “I was stunned by the complexity of the array of the work. She said that book art is performative, and I saw it in the case,” she said. “Her vision is fully formed— she has the beginning, the middle, the end.”

Also retiring at the end of the 202021 school year are Professor of English Diane Cady and Associate Professor of Computer Science Almudena Konrad, who did not attend the reception.

Cady started at Mills in 2006, and since 2018, she has held the Frederick A. Rice Professorship. Two years ago, she was named the MACK Awardee for Faculty Leadership. Her scholarly work focuses on Middle English and medieval England, and at Mills, she taught courses on Shakespeare, science fiction, and queerness in premodern literature.

Konrad, who joined Mills in 2003, most recently published “Engaging Women in Coding: An Interdisciplinary Approach” in February 2020 as part of Proceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. In 2020, she was also named to the Letts-Villard Professorship of Natural Sciences. Her courses covered all manner of computer science topics, from operating systems to web programming.

Hosting this reception was one of the last duties undertaken by Associate Provost Lloyd, who started a new position as associate vice president of academic affairs at the University of Houston-Downtown on June 1. Lloyd had served in her role at Mills since 2018 and spearheaded a number of projects, including the College’s re-accreditation process and the founding of the Center for Faculty Excellence. She was also instrumental in the sudden shift to virtual learning last spring, leading the Digital Learning Team and rolling out Canvas, a new learning management system. Lloyd was one of the leads of the “We Are the Voices” project, funded by the Mellon Foundation, which will continue under faculty leads Ajuan Mance, Kirsten Saxton, and Stephanie Young.

Sheila Lloyd

Virtual summit reveals pandemic research

The great minds of the Mills faculty kept firing on every synapse while sheltering in place during the pandemic. In addition to teaching over Zoom, professors continued working on their research— and some took on new queries prompted by the unprecedented moment in history. To mark the one-year anniversary of the initial shutdowns, four Mills faculty members shared their research findings over Zoom in a COVID-19 Research Summit.

• Associate Professor of Education Jaci

Urbani took a look at early childhood special education during the pandemic by interviewing 10 teachers across the Bay Area with the assistance of student Samantha Watson-

Alvarado. For many of the families those educators work with, spring 2020 brought with it a confluence of stressors, which transferred some needs onto those teachers and forced them into more of a social worker role: They were helping arrange food banks, packing up and delivering basic goods, coordinating donations, and providing tech support. Urbani

connected these findings to the statistic that teachers stay in the field an average of five years, leading her to the conclusion that universal childcare and preschool are a necessity, as well as basic funding.

• Associate Professor of Business Carol

Theokary examined how commercial services and systems adapted their practices by mining data from

Yelp and comparing various factors among businesses that survived.

She reported creative approaches to retaining customers, such as virtual wine tours, and found that businesses that were considered more affordable, with “do-it-yourself” options, and with higher Yelp ratings were more likely to survive. Theokary also confirmed that outside services such as Grubhub were unsustainable for many businesses.

• Professor of Business Practice

Darcelle Lahr focused her work on

BIPOC businesses and the inherent disadvantages they had already faced before the pandemic, such as a trust gap in local communities and lack of access to capital. Wealth disparities, including those in administering Payroll Protection Plan (PPP) funds, were especially destructive to Black businesses. Lahr held listening sessions with Oakland entrepreneurs to evaluate outcomes from the pandemic, finding—for example—that restaurants that were able to partner with larger organizations such as the World Central Kitchen were able to weather the uncertainty. There were also elements of the #BuyBlack Campaign that drove sales, like a Blackout Day on July 7, 2020.

• Professor of Business and Dean of the Lokey School of Business and

Public Policy Kate Karniouchina

also studied PPP loans; specifically, how they widened existing social inequities. She noted that class-action lawsuits had been filed against banks for how they dispensed PPP loans, which were supposedly concentrated in high-density areas. In her research, she noted that many of the banks facilitating those loans were regional, and she pulled a variety of factors within ZIP codes into her calculations.

Mills College Art Museum

The following exhibition is free to view but requires timed ticketing. Visit mcam.mills.edu to make a reservation. 2020 MFA Exhibition ■ June 26–August 1 Last year’s MFA graduates will finally get to show off the work that culminated their time in the Mills studio arts program. This exhibition features Cristine Blanco, Genevieve Rae Busby, Lucciana Caselli, H. Esmé Park, Crystal Gwyn, Megan Hinton, Emma Logan, Yétundé Olagbaju, Emily Villarma, and Hannah Youngblood.

Jay DeFeo: A Legacy at Mills College ■ July 14 This Zoom event brings together previous Jay DeFeo MFA Prize winners to discuss DeFeo’s impact with Mills College Art Museum Executive Director Stephanie Hanor. Register at tinyurl.com/jay-defeo-july-14. 12:00 pm.

Genevieve Rae Busby, Uncaught–Tossed Up

Campus kudos

A selection of recent achievements by faculty, staff, and students

The Mills Music Department was celebrated in an April article on Bandcamp that compiled recordings from a wide variety of Mills professors (past and present) and alumnae/i.

Professor of Psychology Elizabeth

Bachen spoke with the website WalletHub about addressing the effects of pandemic-related stress for a story on March 29 about the most and least stressed states in the US in 2021.

Assistant Adjunct Professor of Race, Gender & Sexuality Studies Natalee

Ke¯haulani Bauer participated in an event with the Commonwealth Club on February 26 regarding the ongoing work of creating antiracist classrooms.

Professor of Book Art Julie Chen

presented the solo show Julie Chen: True to Life at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC through February 12. She also participated in the PBS documentary The Bookmakers.

Ely Daley ’21, Mara Thwaites-

Albers ’21, and Professor of Book Art Kathleen Walkup spoke to the website Hyperallergic for an article on the artistic legacy of Mills in the wake of the transition announcement. Walkup also guided the students in her Freedom of the Presses class to present their final projects in an April 22 online event hosted by the San Francisco Center for the Book.

Professor Emerita of Psychology

Carol George was the co-author of a study published in Psychology Today about disorganized or anxious attachment demonstrated by 145 babies who split time between two parents’ households.

President Elizabeth L. Hillman

spoke in the webinar “The Role of Academia as We Age,” which was presented by the Amazing Care Network on February 12.

Susan Stryker

Cassandra James ’22 has been named a finalist in the national Truman Scholarship competition. If selected, James plans to enroll in the accelerated Master of Public Policy program at Mills.

Professor of Ethnic Studies and

English Ajuan Mance headlined the online workshop “Comics Journaling: Cartooning My Self”, hosted by San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum, on May 2.

Akilah Shahid ’22 was featured in a story in the Los Angeles Times on April 14 about the effects of DDT on generations of women. Shadid’s grandmother battled cancer three times, and Shahid is part of a study examining the causative factors.

Professor of English and Dean of Graduate Studies Juliana Spahr

wrote an article titled “Our Claude McKay” for the March 2021 issue of The Publication of the Modern Language Association (PMLA). She is also currently a Humanities Center Fellow at Stanford University.

Barbara Lee Distinguished Chair in Women’s Leadership Susan Stryker

served as a consulting producer on The Lady and the Dale, an HBO limited series documenting the life of Liz Carmichael, a trans woman who ran the 20th Century Motor Car Company in the ‘70s. Stryker spoke to Time magazine about Carmichael in February.

Wendi Williams

Assistant Director of Athletics and Head Swimming Coach Neil Virtue

co-signed an open letter from the NCAA LGBTQ OneTeam group that condemned recent anti-transgender legislation across the US and expressed support for transgender college athletes.

Dean of the School of Education

Wendi Williams participated in West Contra Costa Unified School District’s Black History Month by speaking about her career in a virtual event on February 16. She was also a panelist on the KPFA radio program “Black Women’s Liberatory Leadership” on March 7, spoke with The Oaklandside about reopening schools in the Oakland Unified School District, and was named to the board of Girls Leadership, a national organization that provides workshops for K-12 girls.

Professor of Studio Art Catherine

Wagner was commissioned by the de Young Museum to curate an exhibition from the permanent collection to celebrate the museum’s reopening. She also spoke with de Young staff in a virtual gathering on March 24 that revisited events from throughout the museum’s history.

Associate Professor of Education

Dana Wright co-edited the volume Engaging Youth in Critical Arts Pedagogies and Creative Research for Social Justice, which was released on March 31 by Routledge.