The Essence of DEI: Maneuvering the Nuts & Bolts

When you’re the first person of color in your role, how do you promote a culture of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion? H.E.A.R.D  host, Tashana Curtis invites Assistant Vice President for Enrollment Administration and University Registrar Patricia A. Scott to the pod to talk about her experience building a culture of belonging in the workplace as the first person of color to serve as University Registrar at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. Ms. Scott talks about how her own identity and experiences has shaped her approach to building an inclusive workplace; approach to policy development; and what she wishes she could tell her 18-year-old self now. 

Guest Bio: 
Patricia A. Scott, a native of Baltimore City, currently serves as Assistant Vice President for Enrollment Administration and University Registrar at the University of Maryland Baltimore (UMB).  In this role she manages the university office of financial assistance which during fiscal year 2021, awarded $184,325,975 in funding to over 7000 students. As the first person of color to serve as University Registrar, Ms. Scott ensures that all policies regarding student enrollment and residency are applied and implemented.  Ms. Scott uses her role to show the importance of students receiving adequate financial aid and how that impacts their enrollment, academic success and on time graduation.
 
Ms. Scott serves as ex-officio member of the UMB Campus Review Committee, the UMB president’s designated committee, to review instate residency appeals, the Maryland Higher Education Commission, Financial Aid Advisory Committee, and the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators FAFSA Simplification Implementation Working Group. 
 
With over 30 years of experience in higher education, Ms. Scott is an active in other community organizations and her church.  She is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated.  Annually she participates in a number of outreach activities assisting families and students to navigate through the financial aid process focusing her efforts on first generation college students. Ms. Scott has received numerous awards for her assistance to students and her service to student organizations. Her strong commitment of service to others is one of her core values.

Transcript

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You're listening to her RD Higher Education and real Diversity, a podcast for the Acro community sponsored by Acro. Welcome Acro community. Welcome to another episode of her. I'm Tashawna Curtis. I'm Porsha Lamar and I'm in Grenada. Today's episode, we will discuss the essence of DE I how to maneuver through the nuts and bolts of DE I. Today, our special guest is Miss Patricia Scott. We will talk to Miss Patricia Scott about building a culture of belonging in the workplace. MS Scott is a native of Baltimore City. Currently serves as the Assistant Vice President for Enrollment Administration and University registrar at the University of Maryland in Baltimore. In this role, she manages the university Office of Financial Assistance as the first person of color to serve as the university registrar. M Scott ensures that all policies regarding student enrollment and residency are applied and implemented. MS Scott uses her role to show the importance of students receiving adequate financial aid and how that impacts the enrollment, academic success and on time graduation with over 30 years of experience in higher education. MS Scott is an, is active in other community organizations and her church. She is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Incorporated annually. She participates in several outreach activities, assisting families and students to navigate through the financial aid process. Focusing her efforts on first generation college students. Miss Scott has received numerous awards for her assistance to students and in her service to student organizations, her strong commitment of service to others is one of her core values. Welcome, Miss Scott. Thank you so much for uh inviting me this afternoon to your podcast. So, ladies, let's dive right in. So, you know, actually, I have a question, Miss Scott. I um are you a native of, you're a native of Baltimore County? Is that right? Baltimore City, Baltimore City. Can you talk to us a little bit about your experience growing up in Baltimore City and how that has shaped your journey and kind of like leading you to this position. My uh upbringing in Baltimore City, Baltimore was a different city during that time. It was a city of homeowners, but also Baltimore has always been a red line segregated city. However, when I was growing up in the Upton area of Baltimore City, there were many doctors, lawyers, teachers who lived within the community. I always say that integration uh was a downfall for Baltimore City because as those professionals had the opportunity to move from the city, I saw a change in the public school system, I saw a change uh in neighborhoods during that time, even if someone was not purchasing a home in Baltimore City, maybe they were renting a home, they had more pride in renting that home. So as we saw a lot of what people term then, stable families to move out, the city itself actually changed, changed. But growing up in that type of environment, we were always told to do our best and our best always had to be better than what the median was. So if everybody was comfortable with getting grades of CS, we could not do that. But we were also taught that in order for us to have, right? And who we were, we always had to reach back and bring someone up and we always had to have the heart of a servant,-- my-- sister's keeper, right? I, you know what I and you, you saying you're from Baltimore and you're saying all the things but uh same applied to someone like me in, in Cincinnati, Ohio, you know, so you had to do better be better just to compete, to even be considered to compete. Absolutely. And people always say to me, why do you, why are you still in Baltimore? I think that because Baltimore has been good to me, I have to continue to be good to Baltimore. Why do you think it is important to address equity, diverse diversity and inclusion issues in your position? And what are some of the ways you might do that? Some of the ways you can do that it's very important. Uh First being a, a colored person and we have this conversation, uh people say, why do you refer to yourself as colored? My birth certificate says that I'm colored. So I will even if the name changes to uh we went from being Negroes to colored people, to black people, to afroamerican to African American. So when I walk into a room, I have my name. You don't know what's behind that name until you see me. So when I walk into a room first, you see that I'm a person of color, then you see that I'm a woman and that has always been a challenge. But I never allowed that to be a hindrance for what it is. I feel that I'm assigned to do. But again, I've always been taught that it's my responsibility to bring someone along with me. And the, when I'm looking to hire someone, I'm always looking for the best person to do the job. But I think that it's a bonus when I find someone who looks like me or when I find someone who has a similar upbringing and has the same passion and the same work ethic to bring them along. Diversity has changed to mean so many different things and it has expanded, it's evolving and we had a session on Wednesday on campus talking about the impact of the midterm elections. But what we need to understand is the world is evolving and either you're going to be a part of that evolution or you're going to be left behind. So we have to understand diversity is expanding inclusion. You always wanna make certain that you have a wide variety of opinions and ideas, whether you agree with them or not, someone may have an idea or an opinion that you have not thought about. But that may be the best way to reach a goal or when you're looking at admissions, that may be the best way to recruit someone to your institution. But also you want people to understand that you need to look beyond what you can see in front of you because you have to always try to plan for the future, what we're doing today in 2022 we certainly were not even thinking about doing this in 2000, let alone, we were not thinking about doing this in the eighties and I'm not going to continue to date myself. Ok. So what is the biggest challenge as it relates to de I that you are facing in your role or have faced? And what are you doing to conquer that? When I think about uh a challenge with de I, the first thing is always a limited budget and with that limited budget, how do you staff the different units that you are responsible for? But also a challenge is uh other offices that don't understand that they need to kind of stay in their Lane and an example would be with the different gender pronouns that persons would like to use. Now, we as an institution have to understand that even though a new 1 may come up every day in the office of the Registrar, we do a lot of reporting reporting to local agencies reporting to state agencies as well as federal reporting. But we also do reporting to the University System of Maryland. And with that all of the schools within the system, we have to use the same pronouns but also using the same pronouns for federal reporting. So when we were at the point where we were going to allow students to use, for example, a preferred name and a preferred gender or preferred pronoun. There were a lot of people on campus who wanted to throw everything every, every new name or a name or a gender, they thought someone would want to use. They wanted that to be in the drop down box. So what I had to think about is who actually has to do this reporting and thinking about not just the office of the Registrar for reporting, thinking reporting that Financial Aid would have to do thinking reporting that the campus has to do through institutional research. That was an opportunity to say we need to do some consensus building kind of on the back end. And in order to do that, you have to know all of the players, you have to know what student affairs is going to bring, you have to know what admissions is going to bring and then doing a lot of work on the back end, we were able to say for preferred name, students can use only a preferred first and middle name. We're not going to allow students to use a preferred last name, even if, even if you're in the process of trying to change for whatever reason you can do that if you're an employee. But for reporting purposes, we came to the consensus that students could have a different name, a different first name and middle name. But of course, the last name would remain constant in terms of the genders. Now, we have approved genders that federal student aid, the Department of Education have approved. So when we do our reporting, we're able to do that, it began as a challenge. But we also realized that in order to make certain that everybody was on the same page, we need to create not just procedures, but this needed to become a policy and in doing so, it was challenging going in. But again, I think for any leader to be successful, you always have to know who the key players are an ally. Abs Absolutely. So you have to figure out and it's almost like playing cards. You've got to look at your hand and you've got to see because you're gonna play the hand that you're dealt. But if you have to exchange two cards for two other cards, you've got to be willing to do that. But also you have to delicately know, delicately have to know those two that you're replacing. You've got to give them an opportunity to be a part of something else. But again, as you are realizing this is the hand that I have and you may say, hmm, well, this student affairs dean is not going to get it. I'm gonna give him or her something else to do, but they can't be on this train or on this project. So knowing how to do that will make you successful in getting something through that is very important and beneficial to the student population that you're working with, but also faculty members or staff members that you're working with as well. So it seems like it was the, was it the policies that was hard to get through or did you find that it was people's beliefs that were starting to leak through on why the policy wouldn't go through?-- Or you felt-- challenged? I felt challenged with the policy itself because of the limitations that we had to put as to who could actually change a last name. We were going uh we created one policy for the campus that would include students, faculty and staff. So on the hr side, hr says, well, we don't care what name they use their paycheck or their W-4 is still going to be the legal name, but for students, we did our homework, we talked to several other schools, not just system schools, but we have peer institutions. And so I spoke with all of the peer institutions asked for copies of their policies. And once I found out that the system schools and the peer institutions all said students can have a preferred first and last name, excuse me, first and middle name, no one, no student can change their last name. So I had that kind of as in my back pocket before I revealed it. So again, the limitations were really where we got the push back because people thought that if something came up, let's say today, a new pronoun would be us. They wanted to throw us in immediately and we said, no, we've got to wait, we have to wait until we can report us out before we can add that to the drop down menu. So I have a follow up question um on the policy piece because one of the things I was wondering when I read your biography as we were preparing for, this was what your view was on some of the policies that you think need to be interrogated. Maybe a little bit more at institutions generally when thinking about diversity, equity and inclusion. So what are in addition to the policy you didn't have, what are some of those other watch areas you're thinking of? So uh I think another watch area would be our student ID cards. And I say our student ID card specifically for members of our community who may be transitioning. OK. OK. We want to make certain that as we create those types of policies that we're very sensitive to what that person may be going through because for us and I'm sure most institutions have this, the reason they have the photo ID cards is they want to make certain that if Patricia Scott is coming to the building, that the name Patricia Scott matches the face that's on the ID card. All right. So I just wanted to, um, before I answer the next question, I just wanted to say that um Forbes had voted UN B in 2022 the best employer for diversity. We were number 109 out of 500 institutions. And I think I just wanted to give a shout out to you and B for that. Um And you touched on this a little bit, but as a higher educational professional, what specific things have you done to pro promote diversity in higher ed and, or the community? And how does this impact the culture? Wow. So that's going to take me back to the two thousands when I served UN BS Carey School of Law, which is what they're called now as their uh director of admissions when I took that role on the law school had not had success in and rolling and matriculating students of color. And when I took the job on, I said, if you believe in something you can sell it. And in admissions, I, that's what I and I know admissions, people probably say no, we're not selling anything. Well, you are, you're selling an education at an institution that you believe in. My goal was to do recruitment at schools that the law school had never really recruited and schools that I actually went to were schools that were in state. I visited a lot of, well, really most of in Maryland, the historically black colleges and universities. And then I went to other historically black colleges and universities and I asked their pre-law advisors. Uh let me speak to your students who are Maryland residents. And that was intentional because if you're from the state of Maryland and you would meet the residency criteria. Why spend thousands of dollars to go to a different school? Law school is basically the first year of law school is the same. Wherever you go, everybody is going to take criminal law, everybody's gonna take contracts, everybody's gonna take torts. You really don't get into taking electives until you are a second or third year student. So having that ability to go out and share with uh prospective students what Maryland had to offer. But also the law school had done a great job in the past of attracting enrolling and graduating a lot of successful attorneys and judges. So I worked with one of the faculty members who had been on faculty for a very long time. And we came up with this brochure that said you belong here. So we showed the generations of families who had attended the law school. And we saw passing that out students who thought that they would not come here. Once they were given an offer of admission, they came, we also incentivize those students because if they were eligible for scholarship funds, we told them upfront. So with the offer of admission letter, we also included, and this will be your law school scholarship that you will receive. We guaranteed those scholarships for three years. And we said to the students as long as you make maintain satisfactory academic progress. If we're giving you a $10,000 scholarship, the letter said you're receiving 30,000. Again, that was a marketing thing to do divided by three years. So we let them know that they were going to have this $10,000 and lo and behold, we were able to go from having eight students in the evening division, 16 students in the day division to having over 60 students in the day division. And it's escaping my mind, the number that we had in the evening division. And we did that while we were in a temporary building. So again, knowing that the campus itself really had something good to offer anyone of color and we just did not focus on students of color. We started looking in 2000 at diversity being something totally different. We looked at the number of women that we needed to have in the law school. We looked at the number of Hispanic Asian. We we just looked at everything. So if you even checked other on your application, we looked to see what were you bringing to the law school experience. I'm wondering about your experience on like doing work in diversity equity and inclusion, like on a committee or your experience with like a group that's coming to tackle ad E I ad E I topic? What maybe speak to? Can you speak a little bit about your experience as a black woman from Baltimore working on a, on a group on AD E I initiative and, and how like, what would you say to people on committees forming committees? What would you say to someone like me, for example, coming to do de I work on a committee with people with different identities. What sort of things would you want me to know? I would want uh anyone to know that you have to value everyone that's on that committee, whether they have your same background, whether they have your same experiences, everyone is going to have something to contribute. And I was on a, I don't know if it was a committee but it was at the beginning of the pandemic. Well, not really the beginning but kind of when the vaccine became available. It, yes. So when the vaccine became available, I was a part of a virtual group and they were trying to figure out what could this, what could the university do and what could this group do to encourage people of color to receive the vaccine? And the concern of this committee was uh they talked about the Tuskegee experiment and they also talked about uh what's known in Baltimore City, the Henrietta lack uh cell thing. So they talked about those things and they were saying, well, we think that if you know, we tell people this, then they will trust us and they will be able to do this. And I said to them, there was a pastor of a church in the Upton community who had already done a lot of work with getting people in the Upton area to just get the flu shot. And he had also done work with the university. And I said to them, have, has anybody ever thought about reaching out to him? And people said, you know him, it's like uh yeah, I, I do. And again, there were other people, we had a social worker on that committee as well who does a lot of work. And she's um she's not a person of color. She does a lot of work in the Upton community community. And when I saw that she was on the call and I said, well, if he can't do it. I know she can convince people that she works with in the community to actually do the vaccine. And she was surprised that I knew what she did. But when I am invited to be a part of a team or a committee, I actually do research on the people who are part of the team do you meet with? Yeah. How do you, and how do you approach that? Can you say more about that? So the first thing is Google is your friend. So, yeah, so I will Google names to see, you know, where, where did they go to school? And if I can, if their linkedin profile is not blocked, I'll go there because I'll see exactly where have they worked? Who are they connected to? And in some cases when you see who people are connected to, you could and if you happen to know some of those people, then that's how you form that initial relationship. So when calls are started, especially in the virtual environment, when the calls start and I'm seeing OK, yes, this person joined, this person joined. Uh And we're just doing, having a conversation before the meeting begins. And that's when I'll say, oh, I was able to, you know, see your profile and I see that, you know, Tashana not seen her in a while, how she, how is she doing? So then that forms that type of bond and you always want to make certain that after that first meeting, anybody who has shared something that resonated with you, you want to reach out to them to either thank them for bringing that up. Even if it's something controversial, you want to reach out to that person because you always want to have the opportunity to share more or you want to use that, that opportunity to create allies because you may be on this one committee and you may have a desire to be on other committees. But you've got to make that type of connection so that people will know your interest as a person, as a woman, but a person who's not of color that someone may think. Oh, well, what is she here to do? She not really know anything about de I, but in that meeting, you've shared something, you make that connection and then you're able to share more information and then take it as a learning experience because you're gonna learn more from the people who are on that committee. The last thing that I would say on that topic is never shy away from something, a committee, a task force or anything because you think you don't have anything to offer. You always have something to offer because you've had a life experience that's different, that has something that can be shared. You would bring a different lens to a topic that we may not even have thought about. I so appreciate that. It makes me think of in one of our last interviews, we talked about how like getting to know people and creating shared context is really important. Like if you come from the same institution, that's great. But that's not like sometimes that's not sufficient and how that is not transferable to other people because everybody is different. So you have to do it over and over again, right? You have to start fresh with new people, reinvest and create community. And I love what you said about using your comm community. So it sounded like you were using your familiarity with your community in Upton to Poland be like, well, I know people, I know people that can help. Um That's, that's amazing. That is great. Yes, it is. So if you can go back and give your 18 year old self, one piece of advice,-- what would it be as it relates to D E-- I I would say to my 18 year old self that there are allies and those allies don't all look like you. Mhm Because when I was 18, I was of the mindset that the only people that could help me to get to the next level were people that looked like me. So I would what I do now and what I've been doing, I would say over the past maybe 25 years, I would go into a meeting early on in my career and I would just look at the room and I would say oh, they have nothing here. They can't help me or I'm not going to select them to be on my team. I don't care what they've gone through. It's nothing like what I've gone through. But then I started saying, well, I was actually burnt by somebody who looked like me. A black woman. And so I had to say to myself, no, you can't cut off every black woman from now on. But what you need to do is you need to open your eyes. And what I learned was someone who didn't look like me, said to me, this person is threatened by you. So she's not gonna give you the opportunities that you need to be successful. And I heard that and said, OK, they're just saying that. But then it turned out to be true. So that showed me that I had to not judge a book by its cover, but I had to read the book in order to find out what's in it. I also learned that it's not my responsibility to find the good in everyone, even though I believe that everybody has good in it. That's not my assignment to go and find the good in everyone. I can pour into people. But I don't have to be around to see what happens with my pouring into people. When I pour into people. I have to say this is what my assignment is and just water it. But then understand that if I never see the good, the good is in there. Maybe it's just not time for it to manifest. Mhm. Yeah. Good. I had a colleague who said that a similar thing about emails, not every email has aged appropriately yet and it won't taste good you respond to. So sometimes you have to let things age. Abs. Oh, I like that about email. So now now instead of opening it and letting it sit in the tray for a couple of days, let it age like fine wine, Miss Scott, Miss Scott. Thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate your time. You are so welcome. Look, Ingrid, now, you see why I love my boss. She's great mentor. Great, great. And I'm sure she appreciates her employee Tashaun Curtis.-- Oh,-- I do, I do, I do. Thanks for listening to HD. A podcast sponsored by Acro. We'd love to hear from you. Share your episode, ideas or feedback for us at HD at acro.org. Episodes are produced by May Oa Inna. Thanks, May oa. We'll see you next time.