Show Notes

Deb Mashek (@DebMashekHXA) is the new executive director of Heterodox Academy. She is currently professor of psychology at Harvey Mudd College, but will be leaving that position to serve full time as executive director. We talk about her career and her three priorities for 2018.
Selected Quote

"I regularly have students and colleagues swinging by for closed-door conversations where they say things like, 'There is this question I wanted to ask in class, or there’s an idea I wanted to raise in a meeting, but I didn’t feel comfortable with doing so because other people might tell me that I’m being ridiculous, or that it's an offensive question.' And that has a very chilling effect on inquiry and on the pursuit of knowledge."
 

Transcript

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Chris Martin: My guest today is Deb Mashek. She’s the new Executive Director of Heterodox Academy and this is her first appearance on our podcast. Deb also goes by Debra. I mentioned that if you want to search for her scholarly publications. She’s currently a tenured Professor of Psychology at Harvey Mudd College and despite being very happy with her job there, she has decided to leave and join us here at Heterodox Academy. You can follow her on Twitter, @DebMashekHxA. So here is Deb Mashek.

Welcome to the show and welcome to Heterodox Academy.


Debra Mashek: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Chris Martin: Well, thanks for joining us for this episode and congratulations on your appointment. So you’re currently a Professor of Psychology at Harvey Mudd. But you started out studying psychology, biology and women studies. So tell me a bit about how you got from there to where you are right now.

Debra Mashek: Yeah. So I was an undergrad at Nebraska Wesleyan University where as you mentioned, I was studying bio-psychology and women studies and then from there, I moved on to Stony Brook University where I received my MA and my PhD in Social Psychology with an emphasis in quantitative methods and my expertise developed there in close relationships and I studied the self-expansion model. The idea there is that through relationships, we take on the resources, the identities and the perspectives of other people and then ultimately increase our own agency in the world through interpersonal connection.

Since then I’ve applied that theoretical frame to the study of romantic relationships and incarcerated people, college students and also inter-institutional collaborations. So after Stony Brook, I went on for a three-year research fellowship at George Mason and then as you mentioned in 2005, made the move to Harvey Mudd College, which is a small liberal arts school in Claremont, California. We’re very STEM-focused and we’re one of the Claremont Colleges, which includes Pomona, Scripps, Pitzer, Claremont McKenna, Harvey Mudd, Claremont Graduate University and Keck Graduate Institute.

Chris Martin: So last year you applied to our director position at Heterodox Academy. What made you decide to do that?

Debra Mashek: It’s a great question. So I’m at this job I absolutely love working with students and colleagues who just wow me every single day and I’m getting ready to leave it and so the question is, “Why in the world would I do such a thing?” and the answer has to do with I am worried about what I’m seeing in the broader landscape of higher ed.

You know, given my relationships work, I think a lot about relationships among people, among institutions, among ideas and I am personally very fascinated by – kind of these emergent properties of togetherness, the ways that when we come together, we can think, we can create, we can discover when there’s really room at the table for diverse people, diverse ideas and I’m worried that higher ed has become increasingly ideologically homogenous. That we’re developing these monocultures and I worry that there’s no...