Reflections from Mimi Chapman

Mimi Chapman, Frank A. Daniels Distinguished Professor for Human Service Policy Information in the School of Social Work, became a candidate for chair of the faculty on Feb. 6, 20 days before the first case of nontravel related COVID-19 was confirmed in the United States. She was elected on April 15 and began her three-year term on July 1. The Well recently talked to Chapman about her experience leading the faculty during one of the most challenging fall semesters in Carolina history and to Shayna Hill, who leads Employee Forum. Hill’s interview will appear Thursday.

What’s it been like leading the faculty during this unprecedented time?

I don’t necessarily have a frame of reference because I wasn’t leading the faculty before this time. The pandemic, at least at the beginning, became what the job was about. Along with everybody else on the campus, we’ve all been figuring out our roles in new ways as we go along.

Coincidentally, I started reading “Canoeing the Mountains,” a book about leading mission-driven organizations through change, soon after all of this started. The title refers to Lewis and Clark coming up on the Rocky Mountains with their canoes as they were looking for a water passage to the west. The point being, no matter how good a leader you are, you’re not going to cross the Rocky Mountains with a canoe. You’re going to have to adapt if you come upon something uniquely challenging that you didn’t expect. They [Lewis and Clarke] had to decide whether to abandon their mission or figure out how to continue with the tools at hand.

I think in many ways that’s a lot of what we’ve all been doing. We had tools to work through issues in our University and then we came upon this situation that has asked us to look at things in different ways.

What are you most proud of during over the past nine months?

I think the Campus and Community Advisory Committee has been a real success. I’m happy to co-lead with [Employee Forum Chair] Shayna Hill and with [Student Council President] Reeves Moseley. Doing that together and creating a body like that to consider plans for spring has been what we need to do on our campus. We need to think about ourselves as a whole and not as a faculty or staff or students having separate interests. We’ve got to find out what those common interests are or how we design strategies and plans and work to meet the needs of everyone.

It’s no good to say, ‘Well, this is a great plan for students’ when it’s not a great plan for faculty or staff or if it’s great for faculty and students, but not for staff. That’s an unsatisfactory result. We are working together more closely as these different bodies that represent different constituencies but seeing ourselves as a whole. I’m very proud of that.

What’s been your biggest challenge?

There are multiple challenges. Trying to listen and be sympathetic and empathetic to real anxieties, fears, concerns, worries and the traumas that people have experienced over the course of this pandemic. At the same time saying, ‘Yes, we’re all afraid.’ We have to face those fears and move forward in ways that protect all of us and protect the institution. Most importantly there’s been a trust issue on our campus that goes back a number of years. One of my biggest goals is to find ways to restore trust and create transparent processes within faculty governance that promote trust.

You talked earlier about the Campus and Community Advisory Committee. Why is this collaboration important, and what have you learned from it?

This is an example of something that I believe is promoting transparency, thereby increasing communication and trust. It’s easy for me to listen to faculty all day and understand their points of view and their concerns, even though there’s a great variety of concerns and ways of looking at things across the faculty. But I had never had the opportunity to think in detail about staff concerns. It’s also been good to hear not only from Reeves but from the other students to get to know how deeply concerned they are for both the campus community and for other students that they represent. Likewise, having community representatives from neighborhoods as well as businesses has helped the whole group think broadly about the questions we’ve been considering. I appreciate the ideas about how businesses can support what we’re trying to do on campus, incentivize students to do the right thing and perhaps to make quarantine less onerous. There are lots of ideas that I think are positive that have come out of having those groups represented.

I think hearing all of those voices and moving toward a more collective vision for our campus is a positive development. The committee process has brought more transparency to decision-making and more voices to the table.

Do you feel like your collective voices are being heard?

I do think our voices are being heard. We create recommendations and send them to the provost and the chancellor. Shayna, Reeves and I meet with the provost weekly to talk about what’s going on in CCAC and then also to think about what comes next and who needs to be at the table for discussions. CCAC weighed in on the University’s plans for COVID-19 testing of students and employees. We’ve talked about community standards, housing density, in addition to questions on the academic calendar, among others.

You recently expressed concern for Carolina staff during a Faculty Council meeting. Can you say more about why that’s important to you?

It derives from this experience of working closely with Shayna and understanding more about the great variety of staff on our campus. Some folks are working from home and they have similar challenges to all of us who are faculty working from home and trying to keep our kids together and deal with school.

Then there’s a group of staff that’s never left campus, that has to come to campus to do their work and will continue to have to come to campus, even as more students are on campus. We need to think about their needs to be sure it’s balanced and that we are not taking them for granted. We also need to understand that sometimes our anxieties and worries as faculty may actually do damage to staff. The choices that we make have consequences for people outside of our fellow faculty members and we need to recognize what those are.

Six months from now, what do you hope you’ll be saying about the pandemic?

I hope I’ll be saying that it’s over, that there’s a successful vaccine and people have access to it on an equal basis. I hope that we can return to doing our work in the ways that we feel like are the best for our teaching, our research and our scholarship. People have learned a lot through this pandemic about new approaches and how we can use technology.

For me, I could not stand Zoom before this. I tried to avoid using Zoom whenever I could, but I have found that there are some advantages and I don’t feel as averse to doing that as I used to. That said, I look forward to being able to run into colleagues in the hall and have conversations after meetings and collaborate spontaneously in a way that I can’t right now. But there are going to be things that we all take with us from this time that help us work more flexibly.

What have you been doing to stay healthy and well during the pandemic?

We have an active dog, so my husband and I are in the woods with the dog a lot. I go out for my own walks early in the morning and listen to podcasts. I’m a big reader, so I always allow myself to read for pleasure, in addition to whenever I have to read for work. I never give that up. I still have one son at home and it is good to have more time to spend with him.

I do have a blog, ZigZagLife, which is my hobby. I’ve been taking some classes that I wouldn’t have been able to take, working with a writing coach who is helping me with my creative writing. That’s something that’s helped my mental health and helped me feel like I can grow, versus just survive, during this time.

This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.