A Conversation Between Friends

Welcome back to For the Record! After an unintentional hiatus (writing a dissertation), we’re back with one of my favorite people: Keisha Campbell. We talk about her fascinating career arc, her involvement with the AACRAO REG 201 preconference workshop, what life is like at an HBCU right now, and how she is staying grounded in the world today. It’s a wide-ranging and in parts funny, in parts serious conversation between friends. Plus, a discussion of karaoke.   

Key Takeaway:

• The REG 201 pre-conference workshop would be a great opportunity to extend your network, reflect on where you are in your role, and work through some case studies about issues affecting registrars today.

Host:

Doug McKenna
University Registrar, George Mason University
cmckenn@gmu.edu   

Guests:

Keisha Campbell
University Registrar and Executive Director, Morgan State University
keisha.campbell@morgan.edu

References and Additional Information:

Core Competencies: Leadership and Management

Transcript

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Hello. You're listening to For the Record, a registrar podcast sponsored by ACR. I'm Keisha Campbell, university registrar and executive director at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland, and this is a conversation between friends. Hello. Welcome to For the Record. I'm your host, Doug McKenna, University registrar at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Today, we're going to be hearing from a dear friend of mine, an acro All-Star, and an all-around great person, Keisha Campbell. Keisha and I recorded an episode, was it 2 years ago, 3 years ago, and it's one of only 2 times where I wasn't able to salvage the audio from some technical glitches. So I'm super excited to have you here again today for the first time. For the first time. Let's do it again for the first time.-- Do it-- all again. Uh, gentle listeners, you also may have noticed that there hasn't been a new for the Record episode since early November, and my apologies for that. I am finishing my PhD. I was in data collection for most of fall 2025, and I've been writing and writing and writing since early December. So there's a light at the end of the tunnel. Hopefully it is not an oncoming train. We'll see. We'll see what happens. Yeah, without further ado, Keisha, welcome back to the podcast for the first time. I'm so excited to be here for the first time. I want to chat with you about a bunch of things today, but let's start just with you. Tell me about your career path. Why did you choose higher education? Where did you start your career? Where have you been, and where are you now?-- Give me the-- arc. So everybody who knows me knows I am. I'm a Marylander through and through, right? So they're gonna, you're going to hear a lot of Maryland in here. So I got entire ed by happenstance, honestly, um, as most of us do, as we do because like, you know, you go to college, you're like, I'm going to be a registrar when I grow up. Like I don't know that that's the thing, but you know we're all great. So I went to college at this, as you know, a university in Germany called the University of Maryland University College Faschemun. And it is a school that's about 45 minutes east of Stuttgart. As we know, our colleagues at the University of Maryland global campus now have campuses all over on military bases, but for a very brief period of time in the 90s and 2000s, they had a campus that was not affiliated with the military. It was like a small international school with less than like 300 students from all over. And because I took German in high school and I was an exchange student, they sent materials to my German teacher. And I was like, I'm gonna go as far away from Baltimore as I can possibly go. And originally, I was, I was like, I'm gonna go to Hawaii Pacific. It's gonna be amazing. And then I was like, well, I get to keep all this scholarship money and I get in-state tuition. So I'll go to this school for a year and then Then I'll transfer, but I never did. And Deutschland, yeah, yeah, in Deutschland. So I had, uh, 4 years there. And so my class was the last class that graduated in a post 9/11 world. The UMGC decided to close our campus, so we were the last class, and I just happened to be the class president. And so, you know, when people needed stuff, they'd be like, Hey, we know you're in Maryland. Can you help us get a transcript or can you do this? So I had a pretty good relationship with the provost at the campus because obviously we interacted with him quite a lot as the campus closed down. And so I would reach out to him and say, hey, you know, my friend and blah, blah is like having a problem. Can you help us? And he was just really gracious about it. the provost at the time was Nick Allen. So shout out to him for being awesome and, and very understanding. Um, and so one day we were, he was like, what are you doing right now? I was like working a crummy job. And he said, well, you know, we've, we've unfrozen some jobs like send me a resume and, and, you know, maybe there's something here. So I started off at UMGC as an advisor. And, you know, there's kind of tears there and, and I moved over to the degree audit team. So I was over on the degree audit team for a, a, a while. Um, that was super fun. And then I was there for like 3.5 years. And then I kind of went to a nonprofit world for a bit and did some work with students who had been just in, they were in jail, basically, like they were charged with adult crimes, but you obviously have to do school for them. So I worked at the school that was inside the jail for those students, which was an eye opening experience. Let me tell you. And then I worked at Goodwill at their corporate office doing job readiness work with people from like drug court. It was like a diversion program. I started my master's degree at the University of Baltimore, um, in negotiation and conflict management. And so I was like, what, I should probably go back to higher ed so I don't have to pay for this. But also negotiation and crisis management is the perfect thing to study as a future registrar. I think it's the perfect thing to study to just be alive, honestly, because I, I got it because I felt like everywhere you went, you have the same kind of interpersonal dynamics, right? It just It matters what place that person is in, in the organization or in the friend group or whatever, but you have the same characters. It's just, where are they in the, in the scheme of things? And I just found myself being like, why are we like this? So I would, that's literally why I picked that program. I was like, I need, I got to understand what we're doing. So I, I was at UB and so I, I was working in the transfer office there. Well, I worked in admissions. I was transfer admission and transfer evaluator. And Seth, Seth came in was my boss at the University of Baltimore. And again, you know, Maryland is a small state. I was gonna say Doctor came in. Yeah, yes, that's true. Doctor came in, uh, so I was there for about 1.5 years, and then I went over to UNBC, which is the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and was there for 5 years as an assistant registrar, special enrollment. So that was athletics, English language programs, um. Veterans, SEO stuff, residency, just sort of in all of those things. And so my former colleague had become the registrar at Morgan State and he said, hey, I, I need you to come here. And I was like, but why? It's like I need you to do some things. I was like, but what? And I was like, OK, so it was closer to my house. I was, I'd kind of hit my ceiling with what I was doing at UMBC and I was like, OK, well, we'll take a leap of faith. So I came over, never anticipating to be anybody's registrar anywhere at any time. So I was Assistant registrar here as well, but it was a different kind of role, right? It was compliance stuff. And then about 12 years, 1.5, 2 years in, he took another job somewhere else and they were like, would you like to be the interim registrar? And I would have been sort of a fool not to take the opportunity. So I did and I was interim for about 6 months. And then I applied for the job and I got it and the rest is history. So I've been the registrar since then. And about, I think, I think in 2021, I got, I got, I got a little promotion. Uh, to university registrar and executive director, uh, for enrollment services. So I work really closely with our senior vice president of enrollment management and student success because I'm in the enrollment management umbrella, and we just, you know, just on different initiatives and whatever she asks me to do, I will do it. So I'm kind of like the project person. awesome done, get it to fruition. So yeah, that's, that's my pathway. That's how we got here.-- You have-- had a really Fascinating set of experiences at different places that brought you to the registrar's office and what little nuggets have you gleaned from different places that you find yourself leaning back on in your day to day registrar stuff? You know what's interesting, I think like each place, you know, everywhere you go, you're like, Ah, here are the things. But then there's always one thing that you were like, they did this so well, and I, you know, like I think that. YMGC was really good at training people. Like you really got put through like a tier, a tiered structure. You had to be released to do things. It was very, and I don't think I've worked anywhere again that has had such a really good, clear, regimented, yeah, just it was so good, and you'd never forget that stuff. And all of the people that I know that I worked with there, like whenever we get together, we're like, man. They trained the heck out of us. Like I've never gone anywhere else where I mean, we really did, you know, it was in the moment you don't really appreciate it until you go to other places and you're like, what do you mean you don't have a structured training program or you don't have levels, right? So you kind of had like you were an advisor and then you were an advanced advisor and then you were a senior advisor and then you were a master advisor, meaning you could do all of these things. Same thing with degree audit. Um, and I just the, the, the training was immaculate, right? Like to this day we're like sometimes I just lean back on that thing and it's, you know, it comes back into how you, how you lead your office or how you run your space or how you interact with folks, um, so I, I feel like if you ever get a chance to work somewhere that has like a really good training structure, you never, you never look it up, yeah, you soak it up and you apply it where in all the places that you go, I would say. Sort of the, the, the nonprofit experience was really interesting, particularly the jail one, right, because you're working with young people, and you know, these are kids, they're kids, uh, regardless of what you want to say, what they did, what they didn't do, what regardless of what they're there for, and this was pretrial, so they were innocent until You know, proven guilty at that point, like, I can't worry about that. I'm, I'm not here to judge you. I'm not here to judge what you supposedly did. I'm here to help you with some school and, you know, try to help you through the day and, and remember that you are a 13-year-old boy, right, or a 14-year-old girl or whatever, regardless of all this other stuff. So just being able to like compartmentalize things and put things into a box and just deal with the person in front of you for how they're engaging with you, that was super interesting. I'm not a teacher by trade, but you know, you, you learn that, and I wrote, I worked with students who were on like in separate, they couldn't come down to the school, right? They were in like either on PC on protective custody, or like administrative, so you're kind of dealing with them one on one. And then you, you're talking to people and you're like, OK, so we are how old? And you're like, 17, and they're like, I'm like, What grade are you in? They're like the 9th grade and my head is just buffering. I'm like, I started college when I was 17-- and-- you're in Germany. What? Right? So you got it, you got it, you can't, they can't see that you're having that conversation in your head. They don't, you don't want them to think you're judging them. You're not, but my head just couldn't, that wasn't my experience. So I had to kind of like put my experience aside. And just deal with what it was in front of me. Just kind of acknowledging like how people learn different things. I, I, one of my favorite moments was we used to have these like parent-teacher, not parent things, but like parent student. They weren't conferences, but they would kind of have like a day where parents could come and, you know, it kind of felt normal to them a little bit because then they got to come in and do a little something. And 11 thing is people don't listen. So you'd always have parents that would show up in like attire that they weren't allowed to come into and then they would kind of be mad. Like, I can't see my kid. We're like, You're in spaghetti strips. We're still at jail here. We're trying to we're trying to. We, we, we tried to do a good thing, right? So one, people do not always listen even when it would benefit them because they want to do this thing. But number 2, just a learning style. And I remember watching this kid, and he's having a whole conversation with his mom. It's, it's Hand signals and whatever. And so towards the end I like go over to him and I'm like, I feel like you were, can I ask you a question? He's like, yeah, I was like, were you just having a conversation with your mother and like just gang symbols? And he was like, yeah, I was like, so I just wanna, I wanna, I wanna just say this to you, right? Like I know that you get a lot of like in your mind you're like you, you couldn't figure like you've learned another language. It could have been American Sign Language if you applied yourself, but let's frame it for like. Sometimes they don't even know how smart they were for the things that they did because it was put out of the context of what the normal learning would be. Yeah, but it's like, yeah, like if you write me a letter in hieroglyphics, right, which I got a couple of those. Yeah, if you judge everybody's ability by how well they can climb a tree, a fish is not going to do well in that competition.-- So-- exactly. But you, when you put it in a framework where they're like, I didn't think about it like that. I'm like, I obviously. Because here you are having a full conversation and you don't realize that you, if you applied yourself differently, this could have gone a different way. So that, that was, you know, those are two of my big things. So drawing a line from an incarcerated 17 year old to dealing with faculty members, for example, how do those skills translate into your day to day job in the registrar's office? So I would actually liken that more to The dynamics of the jail, like who has power, right? You know, I found myself some days being like, sometimes these CEOs are worse than the inmates are, right? Like the reality of it is there's, you start to realize how much self-control people practice. There's 30 of these dudes. There's one of you. If they wanted to overtake you, all it would take is somebody being like, I'm willing to sacrifice myself for whatever, right? So. You, you really think about like how people function. And that for me was a master class in power structures, right? And how people decide to wield power and how they decide not to use it or whatever in different circumstances. So I would say less about that than you think about when you're on campus and, you know, you don't have a PhD and someone is like, well, you don't, and this has actually happened to me. We had a faculty member who's gone. Who said, you don't have to listen to her, she doesn't have a doctorate, and I was like, oh, come again. What are we doing right now? It, it is about how people interact with other people, right? For me, that is the biggest draw from this to this, but I think that's how it happens in life. People get into certain positions and they feel like they can kind of treat people poorly or talk to people ugly or do whatever, and it's just not necessary. Right? It, it's unnecessary. It really isn't worth it, but it happens, and it's such a normal thing. But to see it in that structure versus like sort of the higher education structure is very interesting to me because I, I think about it all. I do, I think about it all the time. And I also think about like what the different structures are at the institutions that you That you work in, right? So I've worked at 4 very different schools. Yes, they're all in Maryland, but they're all very different. So don't you see is, of course, a mostly online, you know, they're very innovative, technology forward. Something coming to like front and getting it done is like, you know, they're on top of it. They have to be. That's what they do. University of Baltimore had long been a transfer institution only and a graduate school, and, you know, so you could not go into UB as a freshman, but right around the time that I was there, they decided to start opening up to freshman students. And start having classes, but they had traditionally been a very strong just transfer institution, great graduate programs. UNBC is the youngest in our area, right? UNBC is only about 55 years old, I think they celebrated 50 years a few years ago. And so they have an incredibly diverse campus. A lot of commuter students, sort of their location is a little bit different than everybody else's, and Morgan is, of course, an HBCU, but it is a traditional urban campus open to the community, not sort of gated off or anything like that. We're just right here in northeast Baltimore just kicking it, right? And then, of course, yeah, and of course the HBCU component is another piece of why and how it is such a different function. So I've been at like 4 like distinctly unique places and each one has its own kind of aura and vibe and and and everything and so you just kind of like, you know, roll with those things as you get there but-- pick them up-- yeah. Yeah, tell me about working at an HBCU. Also, Happy Black History Month. Black History is American history. And is there anything that Morgan State does to sort of recognize, celebrate Black History Month, or is it just like, hey, we're Black History Month 12 months a year? Both. Definitely we're Black History Month 12 months a year. I think you will find that with most of our HBCUs, the HBCUs, yes, they're like, listen, for the listener at home, an HBCU is a historically black college and university, not limited to black students, but historically black. That's the HB part, yeah, correct. So yeah, we have several complications and events throughout the month, right, that are geared toward obviously. celebrating Black history. So we generally have like 3 convocations, um, this month that are around just sort of the themes. It makes the most sense, right? And so there's guest speakers and just really celebrating sort of HBCU's roles and, and, and just black history in general. So we definitely do that. But also 365, right? 365, 12 months a year, 7 days a week. At all times, and I, yeah, and I sometimes like people are like, did you go to, why did you go to an HBCU? I'm like, I'm from Baltimore. I am an HBCU. Like I don't know what to tell you, like, like I love it, but also I wanted to, you know, I wanted to have a different experience, but that's kind of the running joke, and they're like, Oh, you didn't go to one. I'm like. But you, you, you learn to appreciate other people's experience, right? Like I. If you were to say to me, which this actually happened, our, our VA office was having uh an event, and some folks were talking about the fact that When they first had their first black teacher, and I was like, I don't know anything about that because I've had a black teacher since I was like pre-K, right? Because they're coming from areas where that's not normal for them, right? They may be from, you know, Minneapolis. We had a student from Minneapolis, I'm using a real example, or from somewhere where they just were like, I might have been the only black kid or You know, I was definitely the minority and I'm from here, so I'm like, I don't, I don't know what that's like. Yeah, and I grew up, my dad was in the army, and so I grew up on military bases in the United States Army is one of the most diverse organizations in the United States. And so my experience was also very diverse growing up. Amazing. This is a sensitive question. How has the current administration's approach to higher education affected Morgan State, if at all? I think what you'll find is, you know, we, we've got the same challenges as everyone else, and you're consistently concerned that there's going to be something around sort of diversity, equity, inclusion by the very nature of the type of institution that we are, right, that is. Are you going to be, you know, singled out, or are these types of institutions going to be singled out, more importantly, um, and lose funding, right? And, and, you know, I think lots of places have lost funding, but for the schools who don't have a lot already in their coffers, it hits them a lot harder, particularly around the financial aid pieces, a huge amount of concern, a good portion of our students, more than. 90% of our students are hell eligible. That's a problem, right? Um, as you know, a lot of African American students, black students are in professional programs like nursing and education and things like this.-- So what is going-- to happen with the loans, right. So then what happens to those individuals? Do they stay in those programs knowing that, you know, you may not. be able to afford to continue in that program, like what happens to those things. So, these are all just concerns for our institution as usual, right? Research, we, we are an R2 and really eager to become an R1 institution. So what happens when some of the subject matter that you may be wanting to research and, and that's a big part of who you are, lives in this space and those researchers. Dollars cannot come to your institution. So, you know, definitely these are all just major concerns for us as, as we're trying to just navigate day to day with students and making sure that people are fed and, and housed and all the same problems that everybody else is having, but exacerbated by the fact that many folks that we serve are already underserved. So it's been a, a challenge, but I think something that you will also hear folks that are HBCUs say is like, we're not new to this, we're true to this, right? You've been serving underrepresented and underserved people for as long as you've been in existence. And HBCUs have been underfunded since their inception and like in the billions of dollars of underfunding comparatively with a non-HBCU institution, and that's all the way back to the 1800s. So again, like not new. And if anybody is, you know, sort of interested in this, you know, the 4 HBCUs, so Maryland has 4 HBCUs. If, if for those folks who don't know that Morgan is the largest, we have Coppin, we have University of Maryland Eastern Shore, and we have Bowie State, and our 4 institutions collectively sued the state for this a few years ago. And, you know, anybody can look that case up. It went on for a long time and, and there was a settlement a few years ago as well, but that dragged on for a, a while. I'm just saying basically, you know, our very existence here has been challenged by, by how you fund it and how you've resourced the institution. And we have had a, a just a renaissance in the last few years. Anybody who's ever come to our campus, if you came to our campus 5 years ago till today, you would You would, you would do the, the blink, you know, the blinking, yeah, my goodness, right, like, 00, right, I love describing memes in words like, you know, the guy, the blinky guy, just the, the, uh-huh, what, what, yeah, you're gonna, you would, you would hit that because the campus has transformed. I mean, just transformed new buildings. Yeah, Keisha, that's what happens when an institution is appropriately funded by the state. Like these are, you know, yeah, and you got yourself out there. Our profile has been raised, you know, there's a lot that, that goes into it. Our student body has grown all of these things. So it's when you come, you're like, oh, OK, I see you, Morgan. Right on you go. Let's shift for a minute. Let's talk about your role with Acro. You've done a bunch of stuff with Acro, and specifically I want to talk about the Reg 201 workshop, and I should probably pause for a moment and also plug. The Reg 101 and FERPA workshop, which is a pre-conference workshop. It runs the Saturday and Sunday leading into the Acro annual meeting. So sign up now. It's not too late. And, and Reg 201 runs that Saturday and Sunday as well. So Reg 101 is like an intro to Registering plus a full afternoon of FERPA. How would you describe Reg 201? Oh boy, Reg 201 is for folks that are probably either like new to being the actual registrar, maybe associate registrars. It, it could run the gamut, but it's for people who've been in there a little bit more and want to go to that next level. So we talked about a couple of different things and, and we've changed it a few times and kind of plug some new things in, taken some things out as we've needed them. We talk a lot about leadership and management and, you know, just kind of building your brand. That's my segment of it. Um, and a huge part of that, like, who are you as a leader? Um, and how that impacts how your office is able to be effective on campus, talking about culture and how that impacts all of the things, right? You could be the best leader in the world, but if the culture doesn't support it, what does that look like for you, right? Like if it doesn't work for that particular culture, um, we talk about sort of the tech-savvy registrar. We've had sessions on just how to work with vendors, right? Some folks are like, I don't know what to do when, you know, it comes time to do contracts and stuff because they've never done it before. Um, we talk about the compliance conscious registrar, what that means, what that looks like, how compliance goes. We have a lot of things where we really just want people to explore like how you fit into that space, right? And that there's no one size fits all answer. There's, you know, everybody's institution is different. Your resources are different. Talking about how to use those resources. A huge part of it, as you know, when you get into those, those classes is like talk to the people around you because the things that you think are so bad at your institution, sometimes you're like, you know what,-- it's-- not that bad. We're doing all right.-- I'm not gonna lie-- doing OK. It's right. And then there are other times where you're like, oh, I gotta get my life together. I am that's some things to do, right? So it's, it's, it's really helpful, right? We, we talk. We talk really openly about this. We put some case cases out there like, tell us something, you know, at your institution, or tell us about something that you want to talk through or work through. We also have our, we have like a TED Talk style thing where we tribute and we talk about what we feel like is that one, you know, word, one thing. And then we give others the opportunity to kind of just go through and think about what is that thing that describes you? What's the thing that you feel like you need the most to be able to do this job, right? And so it really is a lot of reflection on just sort of who you are, where you are in that space, where you are at your institution, what you may be able to do. It helps to give people ideas about how they might move something forward or how they might work around something that is kind of a, a barrier to them. And then, of course, you build a network, right? We get some first-timers to the conference there. So, you know, I'm very serious about making sure that people meet other people because that's a huge part of acro, right? It's, it's who you meet there. The sessions are fan. Fantastic. We have, you know, our colleagues do beautiful presentations. Yeah, you've said we a couple of times. Who else is involved? Oh, in the Reg, yeah, in the Reg 20 and workshop. Yeah, of course, Alex Underwood, uh, Rebecca Mathern, my, my buddy from Oregon State, as you know, we have to say Oregon and Morgan, uh. And Yer and now we have Rhonda Kit is joining us. Oh, no way. Fantastic. Yeah, so we've got a nice run of the gamut there, a good group. We've, the four of us have been on it for the last couple of years. Rhonda's joining in because Helen cycled out. I think she's gonna do more FIA stuff, um, so yeah, that it's a, it's a good group and you guys are right next door to us and we pop. Over and see you and pop over and see the FUA session. So we, we do hope that people will consider joining us. It's a really nice opportunity to just really talk to some folks who are at different places in different spaces. Every one of us has a very different personality. Every one of us has a very different work history and how we got to where we got to and What our role at our institution is, is arguably different in each place, right? Some people report to the provost. Other people report to enrollment management. So it, it's, it's a really good opportunity to just meet some good folks and talk through some challenges, yeah, and you don't have to have done Reg 101 before you do Reg 201. It's not a prerequisite kind of setup. That's our language. Look at that. It is a great group though, and I, that's one thing that we try to emphasize in Reg 101 as well is that the people that you meet at the annual meeting and then at throughout the conference become people that you can reach out to and they can serve as guideposts, touch points, sounding boards, and all of those other ways that your professional network can serve you. It's, that's one of the.-- benefits of the-- sometimes you just need somebody to vent with-- and say-- like who is out of your regular sphere, right, and, and is not gonna have any sort of harm for you and, and we have found that that is one of those things where you're like you need to talk to me, come talk to me you need to say something. Here's my phone scream into the void, whatever you need, but we've made some great connections there, even, you know, even us as, as the, the faculty for it. Keep relationships with the, the folks that come to attend it and, you know, here's your new colleagues and we make sure that we are introducing people as they go out and connecting them to people. If they say something, you're like, you know who works with that vendor or you know who has that same suite of tools? Uh, this person over here does. Let me make sure I introduce you to them so maybe they can help you with whatever it is that you're dealing with. So it's It's just, it's really fun. So who, now that you've told, I've said who's in 201, who's in 101? Uh, it's me. Yeah, it's me, Heather Abbott, who's the registrar at Yale Law School. So she's the law school registrar at Yale. Jonathan Helm is gonna sit in and help out this time around, fresh off the boat of, you know, the ZD barge rolls up and dropped off Jonathan Helm. And then it used to be Leroy Rooker used to do the FERPA thing, and now Dale's gonna take over that session for the first time at the annual meeting in New Orleans. Oh, so I'm excited about it. It's gonna be a, it'll be a fun group.-- Are-- we doing looking forward to it. It's what I want to know, Doug. 100% we will be karaoke in New Orleans, although New Orleans is a difficult place for karaoke because there's so much live music anyway. And so it's, I say we're definitely doing it, but now I'm, now that I'm thinking through it for real, like the logistics of it, we gotta find a way. Well, OK, I believe in us. I believe in us, but for those who don't know about us, just showstoppers. That's right. House down. Bring the house down way in Columbus. We were like,-- Douglas-- much better.-- How dare you-- surprise us with these vocals, sir? The performance, the performance. Stop, stop. Keep going. Keep going. So let's, let's shift again. Third shift in the conversation, and this is like real talk because I don't want to look away from the things that are happening in the world, and it feels very disingenuous to even think about producing a podcast about like how are we operating in higher education right now without acknowledging. Acknowledging that like some things are on fire. And so I want to a couple of things, shout out to the people in Minneapolis. Keep doing what you're doing. You're inspiring and nobody thought that the revolution would start in Minneapolis except Prince. Prince, he knew it from day one, day one. And so in that sort of context with that, with the world around us, how are you doing? How are you managing and how are you both engaging and then also protecting?-- So-- you know that's a, that's a loaded question, right? So there's a huge,-- and I know you asked it for that-- reason. And if you were like, we don't want to talk about this, I'll edit this out. That's the point, right? We got to, um. I think it's one of these, this is when, when you hear people say, oh my gosh, it's never been like this. You're like, ask them, ask a person of color and they'll tell you a different story, right? While I think we all are. I mean, this is disheartening. I don't, I don't care how you look at the situation. It's disheartening to wake up every day to some really negative piece of news, right? And, and a negative piece of news that is not just like a small negative. It's like Right,-- and I think-- if you talk about root core kind of violations are happening on the regular. And, and then you're being asked to get up and function like this email is really so important, and you're like, I, there are days where I'm like, I don't care about this email. I don't, it's not, it's in the scheme of things. And then you have a whole bunch of people that you have to take care of, right? You would be remiss if you didn't think that people are struggling to come in and get up and, and so on. We don't know everybody's situation. You don't know if they're having a personal experience around that. Um, you don't know. If they're suffering from food insecurity because the cost of food is out of control, that the cost of living is out of control, right? You don't know what people are experiencing on top of sort of just being forced to see traumatic event after traumatic event after traumatic event. I think that, and I'll, I'll speak for myself, and I know I speak for a lot of other people who feel this way. It's a hard pill to swallow when you're like, but when it was happening to people that look like me, you didn't care that much, right? There were people that do care. You don't want to make a general sweeping statement. There were lots of people that cared, but It's just unfortunate that this is how it has to go for people to wake up and kind of understand what other people experience on a regular basis and how they live, which is sometimes in fear, right? You talk to some folks, they'll tell you, I don't have children, but I do have a 16 year old nephew, and he's a young black man, right? A young, well, he's still a young man, but you know he's going to grow up and he has to know how to navigate in a world that might not like him just because of how he looks. He's a fantastic person. Right, but if you don't give him a chance to show that, then it's whatever it is. For myself, um, I just continue to have open dialogue with people and have conversations with people, but I have absolutely had to say there's a line for me with certain people that I just can't continue to cross. I just can't deal with dehumanizing other people. I never have been able to. You, you can't excuse that. I'm happy to have a conversation with anybody at any point, and that's kind of how I've always functioned in this space. I'm not a go out in the street protest kind of person. I never have been. I don't really like crowds like that, but, um, you know, I, I don't. I'm like, please don't, please don't touch me. I, I gotta have an escape route. My dad was a Green Beret. I don't, I can't be, I can't be living like this. It's just Is there caution on every corner, but, you know, you support causes where you can, whether it's donating time, donating money, which I've done both of, and just, again, engaging in discourse with people, where you know that this is a safe space for you to talk about something, uh, you know, having conversations with you, just let people vent, have just be open. But also hold people accountable where they are, right? And some people, they, they can't get, they can't stay with you because you're not a safe person or person to be around if you espouse values in that way. So that's been really challenging, but it, it, it is where we are right now. I, I don't think that you can be quiet about it. I don't think that you can be passive about it. Everybody is gonna do what they can do in their own way, um, and, and what works for them, but I do think that it is really challenging right now to ask people to keep going as if nothing is going on around them, um, and I think you're seeing that show up with people, quite frankly, people I think are a little bit more on edge. Um, I have personally noticed I think people are a lot less considerate of others because it's, I'm kind of looking for myself,-- and I-- think people have started to wall off and, and when you start to put those barriers up, they start to, they're solid, and they sort of protect from the outside, but they also then insulate and you stop being able to look past those things, and I agree, I think that people are Struggling to look beyond those things and to see other people as people and, and that's, it's a really hard thing to watch happen and to not know how to affect positive change in meaningful ways. I don't know. It's, I mean, I, I, I, I think, I think the one thing that you can, can, can put into place with that, right, is meaningful ways is such a sweeping statement, right? It's such a broad statement because what is meaningful over here is not over here. Um, I think people just have to keep educating themselves. One of the things that to your point of like, what am I literacy, I I've just joined the board of the local library branch, um, because we lost our way, right? We've lost our way with reading, comprehension, critical thinking, um, whatever I can do to support that, I'm gonna do, right? So just really trying to get back into that. I, I used to do library stuff when I was younger and now I'm, I'm in, I'm in deep now, so I'm back. Um, I have always been a champion of, um, study abroad, particularly for folks who may not necessarily have the opportunity to do that. 100%. You, you and I have talked about this before, co-founded a nonprofit, um, that we basically raised scholarship funds to send-- Baltimore City students on-- just for clarification, to clarify. Because it elided there and you said you and I had talked about it before we founded a, a nonprofit. I didn't found you. You're you and other people co-founded a nonprofit. I didn't wanna, I didn't, I would, I love standing next to you because like the accolades roll downhill, but I'm I'm not going to take that from you. So you and some other people, yeah, yeah, I use we statements a lot as a habit, and it throws people off. They're like, who is there someone else here? I don't know about. Oh my grandma used to say, you got a mouse in your pocket. Right? It's my, it's my team, Mr. Jangles. No, it's always my team and I love that you got that reference. I, I'm a very, I'm a very we uh community-oriented, uh, speaker, but yeah, so some folks and I have, have done that, um, uh, support another local nonprofit called the Fund for Education Abroad, which is run by a, a young lady I went to high school with, and same concept, it's how do we get folks to have other experiences, go somewhere else, see something different that they may not have had the chance to see. And they may not have a chance to experience and, and may not have the funds or the means to do it. So, things like that are how I do it, and, and to your point of like, it feels weird to be doing a podcast. You know what, yes, it does, but we all know that joy is a form of resistance, and I was like, Oh, I get to talk to Dougie Fresh. Like, you know, I love you. Every time I see you, I'm like, Doug McKenna, registrar extraordinaire, because you're just effervescent. You're always effervescent. You're always bullient. You're always like lifting up the people around you. You just, you are like that person from the first time I met you. To every time I see you, you're always like championing just everybody around you. So it's like, yeah, I'll, this is, I'll talk to Doug. I'll absolutely talk to Doug, right, because this is, this is pleasant for me because I get to talk to you, right? So that's a piece of my resistance is I'm not gonna sink into the swamp of sadness. I'm not gonna, you know, another millennial, right? There is a great karaoke place in the swamp of sadness though.-- That's-- the, we gotta find it, but we don't have to sing like our text. We stay up like I pray you, you know what. Oh my God. I know somebody, somebody's crying and I'm still not over it. Not gonna lie,-- I-- cry-- Oh my-- gosh, we, we had our kids watch that movie. We watched that movie with our kids and like Ella, who is now 15 and almost 16, she was maybe 12, like got up and was like, why did you make me watch this? And we were like, well, cause we had 2. People, people do not understand. Like when you watch things back as an adult, and that's one of the things that I watched back as an adult, and I was like, Who let me watch this, right? There should be warnings. There needed to be warnings. And I was devoted. I mean, I, I like that is one of my top movies as a child. And when I tell you what the other one is, and then I watched it as an adult and I was like. It was Dumbo.-- I watched Dumbo as an adult and-- I was like lock Dumbo's mom up. It's like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna take, I'm gonna take a deep cut on this one. It never occurred to me as a child that the crow's name was Jim Crow. Never occurred to me, you know, I was watching it, and I was like, who, who did this? Who let me watch this, right? You, you watched these things back and just so many things that you didn't notice, but the Neverending Story is a deep cut, right, because it has all this like symbolism and it's about grief and it's about all of these things. And it's weird because it's, you know, like a German story, and we know that most of the German stories that we know have been Americanized and so they end a lot more gently than they do in Germany, they're like, nope, this is how it ends. Nope,-- it-- ends with Hansel and Gretel in the show. Thank you very much. They did not in fact escape the witch, but So yeah, it's, it's, it is interesting to like go back and like analyze these things, but we will not named the Grimm brothers for a reason. Like stories were grim, yeah, but yeah, I mean, I do think like you, you get to have fun moments like, you know, I love trivia. I go to trivia. That's my joy. That's my way of being. I don't look at anything on the news right now. I'm gonna step away from it. I'm gonna put my phone down and I'm just gonna be present with my trivia team for 2 hours and then we go back to it, so. I think that if what anybody folks can take around this is like, yeah, you do have to keep living, you have to keep on keeping on. You do have to like, you know, sometimes get up and, and, and just push and power through it, but it is absolutely human to not feel like it is not OK right now, cause it's not. And I think we're all experiencing that in different ways. So people have to take care of themselves, they got to take care of the people around them. Um, and just make sure that you don't ingest too much negativity, but that you pay attention to what is actually happening because it is, it is very serious. Yeah. Keisha Campbell, this is an amazing conversation and I love this. Um, we're going to wrap up for today. I would like you to do the little outro thing. I'm gonna throw a little razzle dazzle in there. Hi, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us today on For the Record, a conversation between friends. And what I want to remind you to do is drink water, moisturize, and mind your business because here's the thing, it's gonna send you with good skin and great vibes into the world. We love you. Keisha Campbell signing off.