#SevenQuestions with The New School’s first female Asian Dean – Erin Cho
Erin Cho is Dean of the School of Undergraduate Studies at the Schools of Public Engagement and a professor of Strategic Design Management at the School of Design Strategies at Parsons. She is also the first female Asian dean to serve at The New School.
We had the chance to speak with Erin about her journey, Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) issues, global leadership crises, and so much more. Read on!
This article has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Congratulations, Erin! You are the first female Asian dean to serve at The New School. How do you feel? What do you like the most about your job?
First and foremost, I am honored to serve as the school dean of the [School of Undergraduate Studies] whose pedagogical missions and research focuses are firmly grounded on and practiced in diversity, inclusion, and social equity. I am also honored to be the first school dean at The New School who is female, Asian, and also an immigrant, although I did not recognize this aspect when I accepted the position.
I’ve been faculty at The New School for over 15 years, and for a long time, the leadership at The New School has been dominated by white males, despite the fact that the largest contingent of our university is international female students. We are still lacking significant representation corresponding to our reality, particularly in terms of the internationality of our institution. Coming from a foreign country poses additional challenges including language, inter-relational, and cultural differences. I have experienced first-hand and am still dealing with these extra layers of complexity while studying and working in an American academic institution. I understand how much it means to be taught and led by faculty and leadership with whom I can relate. I sincerely hope that my being in this position has sent a strong message to our stakeholders and communities that The New School recognizes the internationality of our student body and reflects the significance of this constituent on constructing the institution’s decision structure.
What a fascinating journey! Could you take us through some of your proudest achievements over the years?
My proudest achievement is the place where I am at the moment. I took on the dean position outside my home ground at a time of great uncertainty and flux. The COVID-lockdown deprived me of the opportunity to build trust through face-to-face interactions with people with whom I had to work. At the same time, I had to manage and implement critical and painful decisions as we coped with financial exigency and emotional distress. Even going through such a tough time, we completed long-overdue curricular development receiving state approvals on a new major of Management, Leadership, and Entrepreneurship, housed within the Bachelor’s Program for Adults and Transfer Students (BPATS), and program revision of our Environmental Studies program.
In addition, your question gave me an opportunity to reflect on my own academic career thus far. I can say that this is also my proudest moment as a researcher and a teacher. My google scholar citation is over 2,200 and is growing, and I have earned a respectful scholarly status in my field, particularly in the space of Human-computer interactions, Human-centered design strategies, and technology for social justice. I have been invited for research seminars and conferences as a keynote speaker (my upcoming keynote appearance will be the DesForm which is the International Conference on Design and Semantics of Form and Movement in Spring 2022 on the theme of “Boundless: Aesthetics, Human Experience, and Intelligence for the New Normal”), which also serves as an opportunity to promote the new school and our programs. In my teaching, I worked hard to develop cutting-edge contents with human-centered approaches in design and management and to create learning environments that honor the voice of individual students, promote a climate of collaboration, and build creativity and confidence in students. In 2009, I received the university teaching award, which validated my efforts and dedication toward teaching. I am confident that all these experiences will help me perform my admin role in promoting excellent research and teaching of our faculty, and developing and delivering excellent curricula to our students.
There can’t be light without darkness. What are some low moments that you experienced in your career? How did you overcome them?
The lowest moment in the context of my career development was when I moved to New York City in 2005. My relocation to the city was due to my husband’s job situation, so my career prospects were uncertain. I had to move without a permanent position except a two-year visiting appointment at the Columbia Business School. I also had two small children to care for. The situation was even more difficult because I didn’t have acquaintances in the city who could help me adjust to a new place and culture. Dealing with these all at the same time was overwhelming. But I told myself that it is okay to detour and sideline a bit in the journey of achieving my career goals and that I should measure my success with my own yardstick – not with one set by others. I also worked to be flexible in adjusting what I wanted to pursue and accomplish on a daily basis because I knew it is the burnout and the rigidity in your goal setting that makes you quit and cut your journey to the goal short.
What role did the Parsons School of Design play in the 15 years of your career? How has the college changed over the years?
It was at Parsons where I felt that my research flourished and rode the emphasis on exploration and collaboration. I had a rather diverse educational, research, and teaching background encompassing design, management, and technologies, which makes it difficult to frame and categorize my work within (or according to) existing disciplinary boundaries. Parsons offered me the freedom and flexibility in exploring interactions that weave together the different knowledge and experiences that I accumulated throughout my career. As much as I appreciate this aspect of Parsons life, I was also concerned that Parsons significantly lacked diversity in the faculty body, as for many years, I was the only full-time Asian faculty in my department and at my school. But in the past several years, Parsons has worked seriously on diversifying the faculty body. When I attended the last AAPI faculty meeting, I saw that the size of AAPI faculty had grown significantly, and non-AAPI faculty are more keenly aware of the diversity issue and support this cause.
The influx of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) faculty at the school is the first step towards changing the global perspective towards the community. Do you have any tips for future AAPI media professionals to ensure stronger, better, and more accurate media representation of the community?
Asians, particularly East Asian descendants, were brought up with particular orientations in relationship management and problem-solving toward valuing patience, silence, harmony, and humbleness, which unfortunately has often gotten in the way of systematically voicing and protesting injustice against the Asian community. The oppression, scapegoating, and disenfranchisement against AAPI have existed for a long time, but the conversations about these issues have largely stayed only amongst ourselves. For a long time, the AAPI community has been silenced and invisibilized (sic) by the country we choose to be home.
So first and foremost, I must emphasize the importance for the AAPI community to speak up loud and clear that we should matter and deserve a just space in our society.
We also need to work to get out of our own echo chamber and build allies outside our communities. Otherwise, changes will take much longer. A greater amount of work is ahead of us in order to see some real changes and the AAPI community needs to continue to fight the fight we are fighting now until we take our just place in society.
Speaking of the fight, what role do educators play in times when leaders and citizens across the world are becoming increasingly prejudiced? How do we fight hatred in such times?
Crisis brings out and breeds fear about our safety and security, which tends to move people to self-protection mode and to focus more on preserving the welfare of those who we see as one of us, which in turn results in rejection of and hatred toward people different from us. The health, economic, and financial crisis brought by COVID-19 escalated such propensities in society both at local and global levels. To fight hatred in such times, we must help people avoid and get out of the traps of such a mindset, particularly in-group and out-group categorizations.
Educators should also work on helping people understand power and privilege, encourage them to step up against injustice and not be bystanders of hatred and violence against differences, and contribute to building social systems and mechanisms to counter bias and deter hate. It is not enough for educators to build specific courses and offer workshops to house and further these critical conversations. We much infuse these principles into all the courses we teach with appropriate methodologies and corresponding contexts. In particular, we should help students develop a more flexible cognitive style by encouraging them to learn about different perspectives, consider different options, and adjust approaches to problem-solving when things do not go as intended. Such cognitive style helps us avoid processing information in a more categorical matter as to whether it is for or against, which manifests in support of conservative, authoritarian, and nationalist leaders.
And lastly, the world as we knew it has changed. Could you share some leadership tips for a post-pandemic world?
Normalcy in 2021 will look very different from what we are used to prior to the pandemic. Most likely, the next academic year will present different kinds of uncertainties and challenges as we aim to build a better version of ourselves in the new normal. When navigating uncharted territories, one critical aspect of leadership, I found, is the ability to deploy empathy toward others in decision-making that can foster trust and confidence among our faculty, staff, and students.
If you are too reactive to immediate issues, empathy can easily lead you to short-sighted decisions or decisions that are not fair to other members of the community. I would also like to emphasize the danger of group thinking. Because we tend to surround and talk to people who are similar to ourselves, we often lose sight of perspectives that we may need from outside. It is critical to be open-minded and inclusive, to elevate underrepresented voices and create space so that their perspectives are also reflected in decision-making.
Thank you so much, Erin, for shedding some light on your inspiring journey. All the best!
Learn more about Erin Cho and email her at: choje@newschool.edu.