CHATTING WITH DR. MARIA KLAWE,​PRESIDENT OF HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE: How Maria Klawe Becamethe First Female of Five HMC Presidents!

Dr. Maria Klawe spoke with MOTAL Board members Jo Ann Brannock and Greta Nagel at Harvey Mudd College on April 11, 2022.
The story that follows is from notes taken that day.

Maria Klawe was born in Toronto in 1951, the second daughter in a family that eventually had four girls. When Maria was four years old, the Klawe family moved to Edinburgh, Scotland for her father to take the lead role at Thomas Nelson in publishing atlases for schoolchildren. She liked to help her father with drawing maps and doing tasks that were predominantly for boys.


When Maria was 12, the family returned to Canada to live in Edmonton, Alberta. There, her father served as a professor of geography at the University of Alberta, and her mother also taught there as an economics professor. Young Maria’s parents believed in her and supported her interests that were not typical for a girl in the 1950s. Maria did not play with dolls, nor did she dress in frilly, girly clothes. She also loved doing math problems, and looking back, she declares, “For me, math was like a chocolate milkshake; it was delicious and required no effort.” Out of the family’s four daughters, her father saw her as fulfilling the role of the son he never had. Dr. Klawe describes herself as independent, stubborn, and outspoken—qualities that got her into frequent trouble with her strict father.


After a highly successful high school experience, Maria started college at the University of Alberta. While registering for classes, Maria learned that engineering majors were not allowed to take the honors math classes and changed her major to mathematics, even though she lost her $500 engineering scholarship. Maria worked hard and was known as a talented student, who also had fine abilities in art (painting) and leadership. For example, when the mathematics department decided not to offer a lounge for undergraduate majors when moving to a new building, Maria organized a petition and got it signed by several hundred students, resulting in the desired lounge.


On the first day of STEM classes during her college years, professors sometimes made comments that taking their challenging class would “weed out” students. They would make comments such as, “Look to your left, and then look to your right. Fifty per cent of you will not be here by the end of this semester.” Furthermore, math professors often asked Maria why she wanted to be a mathematician as there were no great women mathematicians. These comments did not deter Dr. Klawe; they only signaled an opportunity! She prevailed until she made an unexpected decision—to drop out of school to travel. It was a surprising choice, one she never regretted. For twenty-one months, she had wonderful adventures and learning experiences travelling from Europe to India.

When she returned to complete her undergraduate degree, for the first time in her life she found mathematics courses challenging because she was taking graduate courses without having taken the prerequisites. It made her realize what “normal” students go through all the time.


Maria stayed at the University of Alberta, and went on to earn a doctorate in mathematics. After a year in a tenure track assistant professor position (Oakland University in Michigan) that she didn’t enjoy, she started her pursuit of a second doctorate in computer science, a field in which she had no experience, at the University of Toronto. Wanting to complete the course work in her first year, she went directly into graduate courses and studied sixteen hours a day.


In the subsequent years, she pursued a rigorous career, and held several prominent positions. She spent the first eight years as an IBM research scientist in San Jose, becoming a group manager and then a department manager. Next, she became a professor and department head in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, followed by serving as the institution’s Vice President of Student and Academic Services, and then Dean of Science. After UBC, she accepted the role of Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton. From there, she decided to accept the presidency at Harvey Mudd, an excellent liberal arts college known for its emphasis on STEM fields. She believed  that working with undergraduates could make a big difference in the field at large.
 
Her philosophy of instruction as a professor included how important it is to start the first day of class and acknowledge to students that “This is a challenging course, BUT if you work hard, you will succeed.” She compared that approach to her own introductions to STEM courses and vowed not to speak that way. To her, effort matters in order to be successful: a way of thinking that is known as a “growth mindset.” Growth mindset views challenges and failures as part of the learning process.


Maria is committed to a life of growth. She likes to say, “I can learn every day. Regardless of what it is, I can grow. Every day we can be better than before.” She also brings a broader approach to teaching, partly because she’d worked in the business world at IBM. For example, she was thrilled when the engineering department developed a complex course in mathematical transforms that including building underwater robots. Final assessments showed no differences between the performance of males and females. For the previous two decades in the “lecture-only” version of the course, males had outperformed females with the difference being statistically significant for eighteen of those years.
 
Dr. Klawe’s career has been mainly in academics (holding teaching and administrative positions), where she has been the recipient of a multitude of honors. Among them, she has been awarded twenty honorary doctorates from universities, was featured in the 2018 Forbes magazine as among “America’s Top 50 Women in Tech,” and is cited in forty-four references along with innovative classes she has developed.


Of her many projects at Harvey Mudd, “Homework Hotline” was a funded twelve-year project that, initially, offered free tutoring in math and science from home to kindergarten through twelve grades serving the Claremont and Pomona Unified School Districts. Maria launched this program in the spring of 2010 based on the helpline run by students at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, a small STEM-focused college in Indiana. On average, three thousand calls have been received every semester since its inception. After a year’s hiatus with no funding, it was resurrected by an anonymous donation in 2021, and permanent funding will now be provided by HMC. Homework Hotline serves 79 school districts in Los Angeles County. College students involved in the program receive work-study compensation and feel that it’s their way to give back to the community.

Maria is well-known for her advocacy for, and dedication to, bringing women into STEM fields. She has, indeed, increased the representation of successful women in these fields. During her five years as the NSERC-ICM Chair for Women in Science and Engineering at the University of British Columbia (UBC), computer science majors who were female increased from 16% to 27%, and the number of female computer science faculty increased from 2 to 7! Also, during her four years as Dean of Science at UBC the number of female faculty in Science increased from 24 to 48.


Indeed, she has been an inspiration to many females in the field of technology, meeting the changing needs of society. At HMC, she has increased the faculty to 40% female and the students to 50% female. Dr. Klawe has made presentations to female high school students, along with their parents, to encourage them to become STEM majors. Many of these students are from marginalized groups.


Maria believes it is important that her colleagues believe in students and encourage them. Their attitudes help young men and women have confidence in themselves and realize that they can succeed by putting effort into courses. To those who say, “I am not good at math,” she responds that is not correct. She believes everyone has math abilities and they can achieve if they apply themselves, especially with an encouraging teacher or parent.


To demonstrate this belief in students, Maria recalls when she made a post-it note for a depressed and doubtful female, chemical engineering student that stated, “I am a chemical engineer.” The student placed this on a mirror in her dorm room to see every day and attributes this message to getting her to become a chemical engineer. On her graduation day, out of gratitude, the young woman presented Dr. Klawe with a photograph of herself holding the post-it note.


Maria is a true feminist with the belief that women can succeed as well as men. She also has shown that a woman can combine a career and motherhood, especially if she has the right partner, someone who shares the load of household roles. She stated that loves being a mother and she and her husband Nicholas Pippenger cherish their two children, a son and a daughter who are now both adults. Her son works in AI and software engineering while her daughter works for the UN in Geneva on peace negotiations in Syria. With a smile, she refers to her husband Nick as “Saint Nicholas,” a versatile individual who has taken a lead role in raising their children and attending to home responsibilities.
 
Also, since her early childhood, creating art has been an important part of her life. Her stunning watercolors of scenes in nature, flowers, and people are displayed in her home, office and other offices on campus. Many times, she paints during the Presidents’ Council, even when she is the chair. Maria mentions that it keeps her from speaking out too frequently! Students at HMC also have the artistic side of music and art to their abilities in mathematics. This may be the reason that STEM often becomes STEAM, recognizing that the arts are important to reinforce and complement math and science, and enrich lives.


Dr. Maria Klawe has now announced her intentions to retire from her HMC presidency in 2023. Finding and bringing in a new president will be a challenge for the college community. She does not yet have a definite plan for her retirement, but the future will undoubtedly see her use her many talents in leadership, art, and computer science. Stay tuned!


Board members Jo Ann Brannock and Greta Nagel first learned about the dynamic STEM* scholar and leader, Dr. Maria Klawe (KLAH-vay), when they attended Decoding the Past, moderated by Allison Koehler of the Paul Gray Personal Computing Museum. They were very impressed, and eager to learn more. Readers may view that interview linked here:  https://vimeo.com/676153198
 
*Note: STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. The acronym was created initially in 1862, to promote the science of agriculture through the creation of land grant institutions. As time passed, STEM focused on technological developments such as atomic power, computers, cell phones and space travel, and the United States had to keep up with the rest of the world. in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the number of STEM jobs grew three times the rate of other occupations, and education addressed these newest demands.
 
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maria_Klawe&oldid=1079783320
https://www.stemschool.com
Maria Klawe - STEM Women on Fire https://stemwomenonfire.weebly.com/maria-klawe.html
Interview with Dr. Maria Klawe, April 11, 2022 at Harvey Mudd College
The Student Life, vol. CXXX111(19), April 8, 2022, p. 2, Claremont, CA


Submitted by
Jo Ann Brannock, PhD CGS 1981
Greta Nagel, PhD CGS 1992