Interview with Maggie Monteverde, November 21, 2019

Victoria LaTeano: Alright, I'm here with Maggie Monteverde, she's a professor at Belmont University and we're going to be talking about leadership. So if you just want to start by telling us about yourself a little bit, some background--

Maggie Monteverde: Okay I guess I have a question before I do that. Do you want me to focus, since you're doing global leadership class, on involvement with study abroad or more broadly in terms of background or whatever?

VL: Just more broadly. I'll ask specifically about Study Abroad.

MM: Alright well I'm Maggie Monteverde. I have been living and working at Belmont University since 1988, which is hard to believe, and I'm originally from Philadelphia. I went to college in Pittsburgh at Chatham College where I studied English and did everything except my student teaching in order to teach High School. And then I went and spent two years, I spent junior year in college-- I lived in London for a year program with Tufts University and then came back and finished college. And then did my Master's Degree. I went and lived in Leeds in England for two years. And the summer in between that I worked as a live-in cook for a family outside of London. And then when I finished my Master's Degree I went to Ohio State and studied Medieval English Literature. That was also what my degree from Leeds was in, but it was a masters and I spent eight years at Ohio State doing my Doctorate and also teaching and that was probably the longest period of my life when I had never left the country. So then I came to Belmont and took a position, you know like all positions at Belmont, something of a generalist but really was hired to teach medieval studies and also history of the English language, but also do other things. And shortly after I started at Belmont, when I first came here we didn't have a large study abroad program and I was fortunate enough to become involved with an organization that actually started in Kentucky called the Cooperative Center for study abroad. I think Belmont joined them I believe in 1991 and I was the representative for Belmont for many years. I believe it was in 2009 I became the director of CCSA while also became the head of study abroad at Belmont. In between that time I also was department chair of the Literature and Language department for 8 years and Associate Dean of the School of Humanities for six years and I think it was four years I was director study abroad, and so now I'm just a teacher and I lead study abroad program.

VL: How do you think that the experiences you had before Belmont shaped what you're doing now?

MM: For one thing without any hesitation would say that my junior year in England was the single most important educational experience of my life, just no doubt about that. It was not the first time I left the country. I actually had gone to England, I think it was my freshman year in high school with a friend of mine whose mother was English and she went over every summer, and I went over with her one summer and I already loved all things English at that point but having that Summer spent in Cornwall really shaped how I knew I wanted to go back to England for a while. I also had my grandfather when my grandmother died, move over to Berlin and I went over and visited him, so my junior year in England I went with Tufts University on a program that was studying theater and English. I think I was maybe one, of two or three students on the program, who were there studying English. Most of the program was studying theater. But that year in London shaped me in so many ways. One of them is I changed the field I was studying. I was originally, I know it may not sound like much of a change, but I was originally going to study Shakespeare. And the whole world of the Middle Ages, particularly the Early Middle Ages which I knew nothing about. I took a course on Beowulf that was taught by the man who had translated it, a man who's also a poet named Kevin Crossley-Holland. It was like how did I not know this? And so I changed the field I was in and decided that I would go back to England to do a master's degree, because I really needed to focus on studying the early part of English. And not a lot of American schools still did that on the Graduate level, or not as many. So that was one way I think, that it that it really changed me. I also without any doubt will say that I went from being a child to being an adult in that year because, I would have been furious with anyone the year I went if they'd said I was still a child and not an adult, but looking back I realize that was when I really became independent. I travelled for 2 and 1/2 months at the end of my program. I went to Egypt and then worked my way, I don't mean like did a job, but spent 2 and 1/2 months finding my way back to London. You know did some of the stupid things you do when you travel, like flying to Egypt with no hotel to stay in and arriving at 10 O'clock at night, which was really dumb. And you know other things that that you do that are stupid and then you learn better. I was really, really lucky the year that I was abroad the dollar was very high against almost every currency in Europe, and so I was able to really able to travel for 2 and 1/2 months on not a lot of money. And I will never be a backpacker, I'm just not. It's not who I am. And it's actually somewhat harder not to be, and still find a reasonable cost of being somewhere so it really showed me I could be independent. I could manage my own affairs. I think my father in particular raised me to be that way, but that was where I really realized you can do this. So I think that really brought home to me how important, educationally, being overseas is. So I really that year discovered the field I wanted to do, which is Old English, which everyone will tell you you're crazy. I mean the year I went on the job market there were eight jobs in the whole country in my field, and that was a good year. But I just, I fell in love with it. I still love the Middle Ages. It's not the only thing I do, because I love a lot of other stuff and that's how I ended up at Belmont. I went to a relatively small college so I never really had a desire to teach at a large institution that was focused primarily on scholarship and secondarily on teaching. I love to teach and I also discovered, mainly through study abroad, that I also have some skills at administration and take a certain pleasure in it, which a lot of people don't. I don't just mean the skills. Even people who are good at it often hate it. I actually enjoy it. I have a kind of problem solver mindset. And I think that was the other thing. Travel really teaches you, "Okay there's no one here that's going to solve this problem for you. You have to figure out how to solve this problem" You have to make a plan, know how to find answers to things, particularly when you're traveling in countries where you don't speak the language. So I think those are things that really had how doing some of those things really shaped who I am.

VL: I can see how that would be helpful in leading study abroad trips and directing people and planning it all out.

MM: Yes. I also was lucky. I grew up in a city that had wonderful public transportation. Philadelphia has fantastic public transportation. I grew up taking public transportation. My father would take us down to the Greyhound bus station and his mother lived in Pittsburgh and he would say "Don't forget to get off at Pittsburgh". You know we were like 10 years old and he was putting us on the Greyhound bus. So I had a comfort level from a very young age with traveling on my own and making travel arrangements. And one of the things I realized pretty quickly in college is that a lot of people don't have that, and so a lot of people cannot do what I did which is take 2 and ½ months and just plan out a trip for 2 and ½ months and look into what you're going to do and figure out what to do if you arrive in Cairo with no place to stay at 10 at night and you're traveling with a friend who's an idiot and only brings contact lenses to a place that's covered with sand. And so you know, but you realize that there are a lot of people who don't have that. So feeling as I did, that travel is an amazing educational experience and it's particularly educational if it's framed educationally. Growing up we didn't go to a lot of resorts or anything like that, so in some ways you know the kind of travel we did was often more oriented towards seeing new cultures, new places, things like that. So I think I realized that my experience changed and shaped me into who I was. It made me much more open-minded and to take pleasure and to notice, you know this is one of my things I want to say when I watch students walk around. They've got their headphones on, they're looking at their phone and I'm like stop. Look. Listen. And I watch so many students who do study abroad programs and they come back and they say, "The one thing I really got from this is, I'm never going to be as plugged in as I was, because I became more open to the world." So for me, it was both a recognition, that was kind of a calling to help other people have this experience. To stop seeing it as a, which a lot of people do, as a luxury, and recognize it may in fact be a necessity. If we don't open our eyes to the world. If we don't recognize not everybody looks at the world the same way, that's how we're going to end up not solving the very, very real problems that we have. I also happen to love history and I feel that Americans have a kind of disdain for history. I think that's another value that study abroad has. It helps us recognize some of the value of the past. So that's a long answer to a short question, I'm sorry.

VL: No that was perfect. It's funny because that connects with my paper I wrote about Theodore Roosevelt. He placed a lot of importance on history, and that's one of the reasons why he started the national park system, because he wanted to maintain and hold on to all these historical places and keep the land that we have historically, and then he started like historical landmarks and all that stuff.

MM: I also realized, you do not know who or what you are, as an American, until you leave this country. And I mean that there's negative things you learn about yourself as an American, but there are also some profoundly important, positive things that there is no way to understand this, living in this country. I had two kind of mind-blowing experiences. Both of them I had more as an adult and I think my travel before that opened me to it. One of them, I was very fortunate that Belmont had a faculty exchange program, so I took students for a semester to Cambridge in 1996 I think, and then in 1997 I went for a semester, really from January until the end of July, to Germany. Studied German and then taught at Dresden. When I was studying German, one of my classmates, we were all adults because it was a term time, you know everybody else's in school. We were from all different countries so the good thing about that was, we were going to learn German because we had no other common language we could talk in. We were in class one day, and I had a friend who was from Eastern Europe, she was from Zagreb. We were having a class day where it was to practice nationality words. So like the teacher would ask you to say something about your nationality, and of course as an American I said I'm in American but, which of course most Americans would then go on to say, but you know I'm part German, part Italian, part Irish, part English. Obviously I was showing off a little bit of my vocabulary words, but that's also true. But my friend from Zagreb at that point said "It's a pity you're such a mongrel." And this light went off in my head at that moment, that I don't feel that way about being, the word that she actually used is a word Mischling, which also can mean mutt or mongrel for a dog. I don't think she meant it to be insulting, it just came out that way. She was at that time very upset about what was happening in Eastern Europe, about the ethnic cleansing in all of the wars, and I didn't have the language to be able to say to her the realization I had. That that viewpoint is what is causing what's going on in your country. Causing some of what's going on in our country right now. But it really brought home to me what an experiment this country is in the modern world. I mean I think the same thing happened in the Roman Empire but, all of these people from different backgrounds, different races, different religions are all trying to live together. And I really realized that it's still a big experiment. We haven't been doing it for that long. We don't really recognize that and it was an amazing insight that I had. And it really gave me an understanding of what I am as an American, that I would never had gotten had she not said that. I would never have realized what is unusual here. And it's not just here, the same thing is happening in other places. It's happening in Canada. I realize it in London, when I'm in London. It's part of what people in Iceland right now are trying to come to terms with. It's a very, very isolated society and it has suddenly become popular with the world and how do we deal with that? We want to be open. We don't want to lose our culture. What do we want to do? And that's actually happening all over Scandinavia right now. And then the other one happened when I went to China. And I went as an adult but I wasn't a trip leader. I was going on the program as a participant. We were in the Tibetan Autonomous Province and, well none of the participants spoke Chinese well. I didn't speak any Chinese so you know, we would have our teachers who did speak Chinese. And then we would often have a translator with us and we went to Tibet we had two translators. We had an official government assigned translator to translate Tibetan into Chinese, so that our Chinese translator could translate it into English. And our Tibetan translator, I don't know if he was a miserable person or he was just unhappy. He was clearly kind of assigned to our group kind of as a government-- spy is too strong a word--but you know oversight. So I wanted to kind of try and talk with him and get a feel for and maybe see if he could be less unhappy. So I was asking him about himself, and I think I must have done this through a translator because I don't recall him speaking English, but I could be wrong. But anyway, I said to him you know "Do you speak Tibetan because your family is from TIbet?" And he said "Yes my family moved to Tibet a thousand years ago." And my head just went *explosion sound*. That was just a concept of time I couldn't-- that he still considered himself Tibetan even though his family had moved from Tibet a thousand years ago. As an American, probably even if I just been a European, wrapping my head around that statement just made me realize, boy time is relative. So anyway that was a long digression but those are the kinds of things that I feel that that having global experience, helps you know not just about the places you're going but about the place you come from.

VL: Thank you. Where do we go from there? I saw on the Belmont Department of English page in your little biography, you are a recipient of the Presidential Faculty Achievement Award, so I don't know if you want to just tell us about that and what that pertains to.

MM: It was mainly I think because of work I did with Belmont Study Abroad program. Now I want to be clear, I am not solely responsible for some of the things that happened, but when I first came to Belmont we only had a handful of study abroad programs. And they were almost all language study programs. So when we joined the Cooperative Center, at that point it was Cooperative Center for study abroad, it was really the first organization that Belmont had joined that was external to us and was dealing with English language programs. So I was Belmont's representative. Almost from the beginning my involvement was working with program oversight and you know, being the leader on a program. Often not being able to teach on the program, I did get to teach on several of the programs on the semester I did in Cambridge. My husband and I took 10 students with us on our honeymoon to Ireland and Scotland. But through doing that, I also saw the potential for Belmont to really expand what it was doing, and we began a process of, for one thing having Belmont faculty through CCSA which did the coordination, be able to teach in different places, initially primarily in the British Isles but we also eventually I think we had a faculty member who did a program in India. I led a group to Australia and New Zealand. So we broadened that somewhat. And then bit by bit we also Incorporated, we used to work with an organization in Australia called Austra Learn and became involved with Arcadia's programs, and so I think part of it was that. That a lot of people had laid groundwork for us to expand what we were doing in study abroad. And maybe it was that I was there to push it forward. So I think that was part of the presidential faculty achievement. Also I guess you know, in some ways it's hard to say why it why you get an award like that. But I think that was part of it. I also had a fair number of out-of-classroom things that I did, some of which I still do. On Sunday night I'll be having my students to my house for dinner which I do in my history in which language. It's actually a class meeting where we talk about what shapes our own English and eat dinner together. At that point I was also the first Associate Dean of the School of Humanities. So I think it was a variety of things, but I think it was probably study abroad was the main thing that I think I've helped to push Belmont forward. I think we probably would have done some of that anyway, and you know John Payne had served in that capacity for quite a while and Kathy Skinner. There were people who came before me who did this. I think the difference was study abroad broadly was what I was interested in. And I didn't think it mattered if it was long programs or short programs. I think the most important thing was that we get students, but also faculty, that we find ways to get our faculty overseas. Partly because of the nature of Belmont. Our students like their relationships with their faculty. They want their faculty with them. Also because many of our students at that point were first-generation college students. They were going to feel more comfortable going with faculty on short programs that they knew. Belmont's changed a fair amount, but when I came here it was also a lot of students could not have afforded to be gone for a semester for all sorts of reasons, and so really kind of moving us in the direction of focusing primarily on long-term programs and language programs to recognize that we needed to expand out. And there were other faculty pushing for that as well but I think that was-- And I was willing to put the time into it. The work I did with CCSA I did on top of a full teaching load. I used to do a tea, a study abroad tea every year, to make our study abroad programs visible to the students. I put together, before we had a website, I used to publish a book of all of our programs, just really as a way of kind of pushing things forward so I think that was probably the reason for it. That's just my guess.

VL: I feel like if you were a character on a TV show you would be Leslie Knope.

MM: I don't know who that is. I'm embarrassed to admit because I do watch a lot of TV.

VL: She is the main character in Parks and Rec and she's the parks department and she's just very passionate and very organized.

MM: We've been traveling to our national parks and it's reawakened something. If I hadn't gone into English, I would have gone into biology. I wanted to be an oceanographer and you think when you get a full-time job that all these things, the loves that you had, like I used to play the piano. I used to play the guitar. I used to sculpt. I used to paint. And I always thought I would go back to doing those, and somehow life never opens those things back up again. But Study Abroad let me do some of those things, you know? And I'm very sad right now at things, ways in which we have this amazing wealth that this country has of natural beauty, and we don't protect it in the way that we should. It's so easily lost you know, once you've paved something under you can never undo it, so anyway that was a total digression that had nothing to do with what we were talking about.

VL: No that is the whole point of this. It's a conversation. Focusing more specifically on leadership, what does leadership mean to you?

MM: That's a very interesting question because, I feel like one of the reasons I'm no longer officially a leader anymore, in the sense of not in any sort of leadership position, is in part because my definition of leadership is a little different from how I think leadership is right now. And I don't just mean at Belmont, I just think broadly. I have done two different types of leadership positions. One of them when you're a department chair or you're an Associate Dean, like I was, you're a middle level leadership. You have people above you and you have people below you, and you have a small number of people who are at the same level that you are. I always felt as a leader, as a department chair, and even as an Associate Dean, that my primary job was to represent the people that I was the leader of. At the same time, I also had a responsibility to implement what came down from on high. But I had equally a responsibility to communicate if I felt that what was being brought down from on high, might be harmful to the people I represented. Because that's really how I see leadership, on some level, is that you are representing. Yes, you are managing the people who are below you, and maybe that's something I'm not as good at, is the management part. I think I'm pretty good at the management, the financial management. I may not be as good at the managing, handling whatever. But I always felt that part of your responsibility, as a large part of your responsibility and your effectiveness as a leader, is that people below you have to see that you're being fair even when you're doing something that you or they may not like. And that you also, on some level, have to be fair to the people you are above you. You have to be both just and compassionate. Of course this is something Christianity has been struggling with for a long time, because those two forces seem at odds with each other, and I think if people trust you they will trust that you are being fair and just, even if you are doing something that they don't like. And sometimes they can see that you're doing something you don't like, but you're being fair to the position you've agreed to take on and so you're doing this thing. So to me that leadership is a very delicate balancing act. And frankly even if you're the top dog it's a very delicate balance because, there's no position in which you're top with absolutely nothing that you are responsible to.

VL: And that could be dangerous if you're not responsible to anything.

MM: Yes, we're struggling with that right now. So that's part of it. I don't think that's exactly how leadership works right now, not just at Belmont but more broadly. I think we're going through a period where we have a very top-down notion of leadership. And I don't necessarily work well in that. When I did leadership positions, I tried to hear what people had to say, even if sometimes I didn't agree with them. And maybe there were times, as a result of that, is I may not have been as strict a leader as some people might have been. And so as a result one of the things I think that I often try to convey as a leader, is a sense of authority that people also trusted was fair, because one of the things I do think as a leader, you have to know what your own strengths and weaknesses are. And as a person who values both justice and compassion, I also recognize that my compassion can be a weakness; that it's also something that can be taken advantage of. So it's important for me to also convey that I have strength and that I have principles, so that we go into that with that understood, which I think makes it harder for people to take advantage of what aspect of yourself as compassionate. So those are some of the things. I also think a leader has to be willing to work hard, and dig into the details, and put in the hours. And I think a lot of leaders don't do that. They don't have the command of things that they need to have. I will say, some of this I think, it's not always but it's sometimes, a difference between male and female approaches to things. I think women tend to be very hands-on with stuff. Not necessarily micro-managing, but you know go into a meeting knowing what you need to know, and being willing to work at what you need to work.

VL: Do you find that also comes from women feel the need to prove themselves more?

MM: You know it's really funny, I went to all girl schools most of my life. I was at an all-girls school from first grade, was at an all-girl school 5th grade through 8th grade, and 9th Grade I went to a coed school, then 10th grade through 12th grade, and college. So much of my life was spent in a largely female environment. As a result of that, I tended to be less likely to see the world in gendered ways, and there are times when that became an immense disadvantage to me, there's no doubt about that, because as I've gotten older the world is gendered. I'm not even sure that I've ever felt I had to prove myself more as a woman, but there were times when I realized that I was not taken seriously. Fortunately, having grown up with a father who I think really raised me on some level to be the son he didn't have, I never had hesitation about saying to somebody, people will sometimes comment on the fact, and it is true, I am a person who apologizes for things a lot. And I mean it sincerely. And I have a lot of women who will say "You have got to stop doing that", and what I will say to them is "I'm sorry, it's just the way I am." But my willingness to say I'm sorry and apologize to things is not a way of not speaking, which it is for many people. Because I do tend to work at things at a high level of detail, I'm very aware that I will often come in with more things that I'm going to be pointing out are problems than a lot of people will, and I will say that I've learned that that goes down a lot better if I begin it not in an aggressive way. Because I've also been told by people that when I am upset about something, that I am aggressive, that I do have, and particularly to me it's been more of an issue being a northerner living in the south. As a northern woman living in the south, then being a woman. I know I'm not the same person I was when I came here, because there were ways in which I had to change to be. I read an interesting thing talking about Hillary Clinton that talked about that, who she was before she became the first lady of the state of Arkansas. I certainly am not anything that [exists under] that much pressure, but I think some of that I've realized as I've gone on is, there are ways in which my entering into things not realizing that my being a woman was going to affect things, occasionally made me blind to things that were going on. So I still believe powerfully in all girls schools. I was saddened though not angry when my college decided to go co-ed. I understand the financial decisions they had to make, which a lot of women didn't and were really angry. I guess because I was in academic administration for a long time, I understood how finance drives things in a way I wouldn't have. But I can think of very specific occasions when people said things to me here at Belmont, that they would never have said to a male in a similar position. I remember it happening on one occasion when my Dean did something in a public meeting where I raised some issue and he really dismissed it, and dismissed me, which this was someone I knew very well. And afterwards I had at least six women who came to talk to me because they said "How did it feel to be just completely disregarded because you're a woman?" And I actually went to the dean and I said, "I am not coming to you because I'm upset. I'm coming to you because you need to know how what you did to me in that meeting appeared to other women who were sitting there. I know you well enough to know that you don't feel that way about me, but the way in which you talked to me, you would never have spoken to one of the male associate Deans in that way, never. You didn't even realize you did it, but what you need to know is that every woman who was sitting out there watched you do that, and you need to be careful about that." In that sense there are ways in which being a woman, there are things that as a leader, you have to kind of eventually accept. Not accept as in "Well I'm just going to live with it" but accept I may have started by saying they're not true, and I've had to come to a realization that some of them are true. Maybe less true now. So yeah I think there are probably ways in which being female and being from the north have had a role in how people responded to me. I think maybe something that effective leaders do, that maybe I wasn't always good at, but I got better at, is you need to learn to pick your battles. There is a part of me that's naturally confrontational. You have to kind of learn which battles you're going to fight. I think another thing you have to learn when you're a leader is, for lack of a better way of putting it, you have to learn how you can make the system work to achieve things that are important. I think at one point I would have found that to be a kind not immoral but amoral approach. You know if you know that there is a loophole use it. Well after you've been doing something for a while, you learn how to make the system work. And if there's something really wrong with the system you try to fix it, recognizing some of those channels aren't going to work anymore. So there is a way in which you have to learn to be less about the ideal and more about what's real, what's really possible. Pragmatic, I guess. Even as you try and achieve the things that matter a lot to you.

VL: This is really funny because that ties in with the Theodore Roosevelt paper too. I said he balances idealism with pragmatism.

MM: I mean you have to. I know, occasionally I've had politicians that I really like the things they talk about, but I just know those aren't possible yet. And so I get frustrated sometimes where I'm like okay, that would be really nice but that's not going to happen, and if that's the way you're going to go into this nothing is going to happen. So let's see what we can do to bring people together to come to some sort of compromise, and make things work. The other benefit to approaching things that way, is if you approach most things that way. Then you have something that you absolutely believe "I cannot be flexible on this. I have to say this is non-negotiable." Then you've already behaved in a way that people understand that when you say that, you absolutely mean it. That's what I mean when I say you've got to identify the things, the issues that you're going to fight for.

VL: What are those for you?

MM: Although it sounds super immature, and it's going to be one of those ones that I've had to compromise on because it's reality, I think for things to the extent that it is possible, to be fair. Recognizing for the most part in this world, things are never really fair, at least strive as best you can for them to be fair. To treat people with decency. The older I've gotten the more I have realized how profoundly important that is. When you don't treat people with decency, because you have the power to not treat them with decency in the long run you are helping to undermine everything, because you've now created a grievance that the person has. But more importantly you've undermined the ability for others to believe in a system. Leadership is part of a system; it never exists in isolation. You can't just have Chiefs. You can't just have people who are at the head, and maybe decency is more what I think of even more than fairness. So that's one of them. Hard work. That's partly because I'm the adult child of a workaholic. But don't be a leader if your vision of being a leader is that it means you do less work. You may do work of a different kind. A good leader has to be able, has to be willing to work. You don't go into that position because you think it's going to make your life easier. No leadership position I ever took made my life easier. Nothing. There might have been responsibilities at one point that I was able to not have because I stepped up into that leadership position, but what I would often come to realize is that, the thing I was no longer doing, which maybe at the time I was kind of tired of doing, but the thing I was no longer doing because I had become good at it took me far less time and energy than the new things I was taking on. Another thing, open mindedness. I think there's nothing worse, really, in a leader than being close-minded, because sometimes somebody else has the idea that is absolutely great and they're going to see something and you've just got to be able to be open-minded. It doesn't mean that anything goes. It's not the same thing as that. But being able to recognize, and most people would tell you this is something I'm not good at, but I'm actually somewhat better at it than people realize. You've got to be able to recognize that sometimes you're wrong. That your passionately held viewpoint on something, was never the less wrong. And the only way you're ever going to learn that is if you don't close your mind to things. That's kind of what made me mad at myself about my teaching on Monday night, when I let my students know that I didn't like that particular text, because now I've closed their mind to it. And I just shouldn't be doing that. As a teacher you're a leader. I truly think if you're a teacher, and you tell yourself that you are the equal of your students you are just deceiving yourself. I am personally an equal to you as a human being, but when I'm standing there in the classroom, even if I'm learning alongside my students, by virtue of how they perceive me, we are not on the same footing. In whatever you do you have to realize that you are both part of the community and part of what is moving the community, part of what is driving the community, and be willing to recognize others are driving it as well. I'm sorry, that was another long answer.

VL: You know what people say about don't say sorry.

MM: I know! You know I was knocked out once from having surgery, and when I came out of surgery I was apologizing to the nurses that I was making a fuss. After I apologized about 5 times the nurse said "Look you're not making a fuss, and even if you were making a fuss, it's our job. That's what we're supposed to be doing." And I started saying "I'm sorry, I can't stop saying I'm sorry."

VL: I guess there are worse problems to have.

MM: At least I have a sense of humor about it.

VL: Okay I have two more questions for you. So as a professor, how do you measure success, and what are some ways you enable your students to be successful?

MM: That is a hard question. I'm not really sure why that question is so hard, it should not be that hard. Some of it is that you personally feel that you've done the best you could. That means it's a flexible thing. It's what is the best you could may not always yield an A, and helping students recognize that so that you point out to them things that are good. Now I think there can still be scales where one students best may only reach to a certain point on the scale. But that student may realize that was an achievement. That was a lot. And that is a wonderful thing. This is what worries me with grade inflation, is that rather than helping people have a recognition that at a B you achieved a lot. Maybe you're not at an A yet. Now you have something to strive for. So I think that's part of it. Feeling that you've done the best you could in the circumstances you're surrounded by. And the time that was available to you, because all of those things are important. Occasionally I'll tell a student when I give them the option to revise, think about if you really want to revise this. It's going to take you time to do a decent revision, and at best this is the difference it's going to make. There should be a feeling that you've personally done the best you could. And I know that I've had classes before where I did not get decent grades in them. I feel that I achieved a lot because I did the best I could in that. And even though I don't deal well with failure, I don't think anyone likes to fail, I recognize there are some things I'm more skilled at than others, so I think that's an important part of success, is feeling that you did the best you could in the circumstances provided. And I think it has to be all of that. Not the best that you could. The best you could in the circumstances that were presented to you, in the time that was available. That's a measure of success. If you're always saying "I always have to do the best I can" then you're constantly going to be putting yourself in a situation of feeling like you failed, because life just doesn't present us very often with all the perfect circumstances and all the time in the world to achieve what we want. I have told my students before that on some level, success for me as a teacher relative to my students is, is there something you took away from this class that will stay with you? Maybe you didn't do particularly well in the class but is there something that is going to stay with you, that has been of value to you, that becomes of value to you at some point? That's a success. If I'm thinking about when I'm working with students on their papers, I try very hard both to point out the things that are working and the things that are not, because even the best thing there's always something that could be better. But trying, again, to be fair. I almost never write a grade on a paper in pen until I have graded everything, and then go back. Even though I'm going along pretty confident after 32 years that the grade is going to be okay. I still need to be sure that I've evaluated them on a somewhat level playing field.I don't know why that question is really hard for me to answer, but it is a hard question. I guess maybe another one is if something connected. That either I've personally made a connection with something or something has connected with me. And sometimes it happens to me, I love it in class when my students say something and I'm like I never thought of that. I don't know that that's a very useful definition of success but that's about the best I can come up.

VL: There are subjective questions so whatever your answer is, is the right one. Okay the last one, and you can take time to think on this but, what do you want your legacy to be?

MM: This is going to sound like little merry sunshine. I would like to hope that the world is a better place because I was in it on a personal, for individual people. I don't think I'm a person who's in the any sort of position that is, on any literal way changing the world in the sense that, you know, I'm not I'm not in a big government position. But I do think, particularly as a teacher and I really do consider my work in study abroad to be a form of teaching, I do think that I have some sort of ability, maybe a responsibility, to not make the world worse. On a broader level, I hope that I will have opened some student's minds and maybe colleagues as well. I hope that I'll have helped some people. I'm not a person, I don't know why it's partly because my job consumes me, but I don't do a lot of community service. I don't think that way. I know that how important it is to a lot of people at Belmont. I think the work that I'm doing that maybe could be regarded as both pleasure and service is my work that I do as a teacher, and I think that's where I would like my legacy to be. One other. I love experience; experiencing the pleasure of friends. Many of my former students remain my friends after they left. The wonder of the world that we live in, the wonder of people, the wonder of past, present, where we're going, I hope maybe my wonder and my pleasure and my joy in things, which sometimes makes me into a little bit of a nerd, I hope sometimes that engenders some of that pleasure and joy in other people. Dear God, you kind of have to hope that when you teach something as totally arcane as Old English literature or history of English language. But I think that's a legacy I would like to have; that I've helped to engender that in people. These are all rather vague things, because ultimately I don't really care if I ever write anything that's published. It's kind of a strange statement when I teach, but I really don't. I don't have that drive. I might have some books I might work on, but it's just never been what's driven me. I've never felt the drive to be published. I love creating but I've never felt the drive to create things that will remain as a legacy. My teaching is my legacy and my relationships with people. And maybe that's why I'm back at being a teacher and not still a leader, you know not still a person in a leadership capacity. Not so much because I didn't want to be anymore, I did feel there were things I was able to achieve. I think there are skills right now that I have that are not really used, and that makes me a little sad because I think I spent a lot of time developing some of these skills that are no longer used. You should use the skills that you have. Ultimately I guess it's not something that is as profoundly important to me as other things are. I guess that's my answer.

VL: Thank you. That was all I had for you, so thank you so much for taking the time.

MM: Well I want to thank you. I no longer think of myself really in that capacity as being a leader, so I feel very flattered that you asked me to do this interview. And I hope that, I'm assuming doing something on Global Studies and Global Leadership, this is the direction that you're going to go with your life because I think that you have that capacity. I think this might be my last thought on this. I think there are leaders who become leaders because of what they can get and there are leaders who become leaders because of what they can do. And I guess to me the leaders that we really should strive to be are the leaders for what we can do, not for what we can get. Final thought.

VL: Very well said. Thank you.