The Last Lecture is a signature element of the senior academies efforts to continue to enrich the IU Indianapolis community. And I'm so tremendously grateful to them for their leadership. They are unbelievable enthusiasm and creativity, unbridled advocacy for IU Indianapolis and of course for their friendship. This year, we are excited to bring you words of wisdom from an esteemed colleague and friend of the university as well as friend of mine, Dr. Sherry cleaner from the graduate office and from the school of medicine. You'll hear more about her amazing career and her reflections very shortly. Let me close by once again, thanking the members of the IU Indianapolis senior academy for their efforts and efforts in translating an idea into a lasting legacy for the campus. And to tell you more about the senior academy, please join me in welcoming President if IU Indianapolis senior academy, Georgia Miller.
Thank you. Kathy on behalf of the senior academy, I'm too I'm delighted to welcome you today. I'm like so many of you I've known sharing a long time and I'm really looking forward to this presentation. The senior academy for those of you who might not know, is an independent association of retired faculty and staff whose members continue to create and give their expertise and experience to support educational, research and service missions of IU Indianapolis. The last lecture series is inspired by the idea of having distinguished senior colleagues share their wisdom gleaned from their long and productive careers. You can take that lung carefully. What? The productive careers, speaking from their hearts and heads as if this were truly their last lecture. The last lecture here at IU Indianapolis was initiated in 2009, just a couple of years after the original by Dr. James East. Jam was a professor of Communication Studies, associate Dean of the School of Liberal Arts, and was a former member and president of the senior academy. Since its inception, the academy has taken the leadership in selecting and inviting the guest lecture. So I want to thank Jean Robertson and her committee who have done all the work in making this happen. Thank you, Jean. It now gives me great pleasure to ask Janice Blum, Dean of the IU Indianapolis Graduate School, Associate Vice Chancellor for graduate education. And chancellors presidents of microbiology and immunology, to introduce this year's speaker.
Thank you everyone for joining us today. It's my pleasure to introduce our speaker for this year's last lecture. Dr. Sherry queen or Professor Emerita from the School of Medicine. And our esteemed former Director and Associate Dean and the IU Indianapolis graduate office, dr. Queen, are embodied the spirit of the last lecture as a true scholar of merit with contributions to her discipline, teaching, and efforts to improve the campus. Her impact in 40 years can be seen by the growth in the number and the increased quality of our graduate and professional programs across Indianapolis. Her advocacy for students and the advancement of women to positions of influence on our campus, as well as hurts the same contributions to mentoring, research and academic excellence. Sherry queen or began her career in the Department of Pharmacology in 1971. Over many years, she's garnered 30 external research grants, as well as gathered 170 research publications with many trainees. While also developing an extensive portfolio of teaching materials and research patents. Her research was focused on the interaction of drugs with pathogenic organisms, including studies to identify therapeutics for opportunistic pathogens that impacted the lives of individuals with HIV AIDS. Thus, Dr. Cleaners research and her investigations touched the lives of individuals and families around the globe. She long championed the inclusion of students and research on our campus. And she worked to advance students professional development. I'm delighted to say she continues to. Assist our students with their career advancement. And she is a regular volunteer helping us in the graduate school to work with students on their resumes and applications. For professional and graduate studies. She adeptly navigated working across campuses. No small feat and across institutions to advance IU Indianapolis and our graduate office. Dr. Queener was an advocate for program assessment, contributing to streamlining this process at IU Indianapolis, she provided mentorship and encouragement to countless women, including myself and other underrepresented individuals on our campus. That includes staff, faculty, and students. Sharing queen or long recognized the need for a diversity of voices and thoughts as necessary to building an inclusive and thriving campus. I hope you'll join me today in welcoming Dr. cleaner. Her talk is entitled Fighting fair. And I want to thank the senior academy, the Office of Academic Affairs, and the IU Foundation for sponsoring this event. Dr. cleaner. Can you hear me? Yes, it works. Alright. Good. Well, the tell you the truth. I don't know what an introvert like me is doing up here. But I think you expect to hear some lessons learned in a long life and a long career. And it's true I've been around for a long time. I first came on this campus in 1970, just six months or so after IU Indianapolis was founded. That's what campus looked like when I first saw it in 1969 coming for job hunting. You can see a few places that you might recognize. Cavanaugh Hall is in their university hospitals in there. But basically campus was blank slate. So my remarks today are going to cover a very long period of time from actually before I came to IU Indianapolis until my retirement in 2014. Call this talk fighting, fair. But it's not a talk about anger. It's about having obvious goals so that people know what you're about. It's about using data to avoid or to resolve conflict. And it's about being visible in order to effect change. If I were to give this presentation to subtitle, I might select getting better. Because a lot of the stories I'm going to tell are about getting better, how we as a campus and as individuals get better. Along the way, you're going to hear about mentors, role models, allies, and a few adversaries, all of whom helped me get better and achieve my goals. So here we go. After considering a couple of early career options growing up in Oklahoma, I discovered that I was a scientist. And my first laboratory was the riverbed of the Illinois River in North Eastern Oklahoma. I share that space with a lot of different kinds of creatures and that included, however mites shown on the right here. These guys can deliver a painful bite on bare feet, but there's no venom. On the other hand, water moccasins shown on the left also inhabited that river and they're both aggressive and poisonous. So as I reflect back on this experience, not only was it fun, but I think it was good preparation for professional life. It's good to know what hurts and what can kill you. So that brings me to my first specific lesson, which is that you need to define yourself. It's critical that you do the defining and not let somebody else step in and do the defining for you. Then I was lucky. I figured things out in that department. Early on. I was born to be a scientist, but not everyone took me seriously in that day and time. So I found out that in high school I could take classes in science, but I couldn't work my way into working laboratories and get chances as an intern or volunteer. Same was true in college. I can take an academic laboratory classes. But getting actual experience in a laboratory, it turned out to be very difficult. Then in 1964, when I was a junior in college, I thought I figured out a way to get in. I discovered that there was a research project on my small campus that worked on the desalinization of seawater. And they hired students as technicians in that laboratory. Great. I'm the top student in the chemistry program. I'll be a shoe in for that job. So I applied and was turned down. So I asked my senior or my major professor why I was denied the chance to work in that laboratory. And he replied that it was considered improper for me to work in an unsupervised student run laboratory, only male students as coworkers. So I was turned down. Do I need to tell you this was a Baptist University? Well, my professor had the decency to look embarrassed, but there was no give on the point. Being a girl trumped any accomplishments. And those decision makers had defined me and placed limits. I was to experience to know how to deal with a situation like this. So I failed and I only know of one thing good that comes out of a failure and that is if you learn from it. Well, as an older and better prepared woman, I would have suggested one woman in the lab is a problem. How about too? But that didn't happen. Well, graduate school was a different matter. Laboratory work. There was 12 h a day, seven days a week. I expected to love it and I did. I found a home in the laboratory where I could work hard and find it a joy. Just what you need when you're going to be expecting to work hard for a long career. Early on. Early on I found something else in the laboratory. This guy right here, more about him later. Our mentoring graduate school was a brilliant and unconventional scientist by the name of IC Gonzalez, but he was universally addressed as gunny. Gunny was a member of the National Academy of Science and he'd been considered for the Nobel Prize because of his early work on vitamin metabolism. And from the beginning, gunny placed this with top scientists at Cold Spring Harbor National Laboratory, where we worked during our first summer in graduate school. We had Nobel Prize winner Al Hershey and the lamb above us. We also had future Nobel Prize winner Barbara McClintock on campus to all summer long. And other eminent scientists, spike volley balls that our heads in the evenings before dinner. So it was a good place. And occasionally these scientists would also get formal enough to give seminars. Gun, he always pushed us. He pushed us to have a deeper understanding of systems. They pushed us to design more rigorous experiments. He pushed us to do better, pushed us to be better. And he was a master of the pungent comment. One of the comments that has stuck with me a long time is quoted on the slide. If what you say does not earn respect than no title will make up, the deficit will come back to title is later in the talk. Well, in due course, Stephen, I both earned our PhDs in biochemistry at the same time, from the same institution, from the same laboratory. Because it was the end of our graduate work, was time for us to think about choosing our first jobs, which leads to less than to pick work that is worth your effort and reach as high as you can and then reach higher. We each had high aspirations. We were eager to test our limits. We expected to work hard. Nobody in this era ever heard of quiet quitting. And we wanted work that was worth our effort. And importantly, Steve considered my career as important as his own and when equal credentials, same lab, same institution and so forth. We had expectations, but we committed a huge Rookie error. We interviewed together, jointly. And here are a couple of the best offers that we got. Monsanto said, we have a job for you, Steve and our St. Louis facility and one for her and Pearl River in New York, or vice versa. It was the vice versa that made us feel real special. Colgate-palmolive said, we have a job which we would be happy for you to, to share. One job, to make shaving cream, get warm when it comes out of the can. That offer and none of the other early ones really fit my idea of a career worthy of my effort. Now I'm not dismissing industrial science, but I lack the imagination to see how warm shaving cream mattered. Maybe it was my gender. But it was definitely time to rethink our strategy. So we decided we would hunt jobs independently. He would end with industry and I within academia. So when Steve opted for his dream job at Eli Lilly and Company, I very naturally looked to the School of Medicine and its young partner IU Indianapolis to find my place. Now let me recap the scene for you. When I came to the School of Medicine in 1969 seeking a position, I held a PhD from one of the top five biochemistry programs in the country. And my husband, who is a graduate of exactly the same program, had been offered the job is a senior scientist at Eli Lilly and Company, even though he had not had postdoctoral training. So we thought I would be a hot commodity. And therefore, I approached the biochemistry program at the School of Medicine and presented my credentials. I asked for an interview with the chair of the department. I never made it past his secretary. She informed me that the chair would not see me because this is a direct quote. The department has all the women it needs. The department has all the women it needs. Upon later investigation, I found out that they're female quota turned out to be one unpaid post-doctoral level volunteer. The Department of Microbiology did interview me, but offered only a part-time position with their most junior faculty person. And I'm going to say I was not impressed with that research program. So no one seemed to be seeing the same future that I saw for myself. The message theme to be, girls can't do this job. Well, so here I was again, just like in 1964 when the Baptist put me in my place. But in 1969 I was five-years aren't rare. And I was not going to take no for an answer. I was going to define myself. Now in 1969, I have to say I didn't know who this woman was. But in retrospect, she summarizes my situation in 1969 rather well. I had found out who I was. I was a scientist. I'd worked hard to create a career for myself as a scientist. I did it on purpose, but I was not getting where I needed to be. It was time to start paving a new road. It was time to look beyond biochemistry and microbiology, which were my major and minor fields in graduate school. So I turned to pharmacology, which after all is just applied biochemistry. The man who made the difference for me was James ash borer, Chair of the Department of Pharmacology. Ash Moore was interested in my credentials and he invited me to come in for an interview. And as we talked, he didn't bring up the gender issue. So eventually I did. And his response to my query was this, gender doesn't matter to me. You are statistically more likely to become pregnant than I am, but I am statistically more likely to have a heart attack, so it's a wash. So James Watt ash borer hired me and after a year as a post-doctoral fellow, he put me on the tenure track in 1971. This woody and urbane man was a mentor to me. He dropped by my office every morning about 07:15 and he would talk about anything scientific or academic that was on his mind. He's the one who taught me how to be an academic scientist. One of his best lessons is quoted on the slide. Work hard and document everything. Don't forget about teaching. And don't forget the document teaching, folks. It's all about the data. So now the opportunity was there. I was embedded into the medical school faculty. Now admittedly, they did not seem altogether interested in mind being there, but I was there. I knew that in order to succeed in academic science, you need a network of colleagues. Colleagues who can serve as sounding boards, can give you advice on techniques, can critique experiments and so forth. I needed friends in biochemistry, several of whom are here today. So I cultivated them. And this leads to less than three. Don't burn bridges and don't hold grudges. I couldn't afford to burn bridges or hold grudges. And remember that at the time, no one in biochemistry had ever interviewed me. So there was no history to overcome to the biochemists.
I was just the new girl in pharmacology. So I attended seminars, counts of graduate students and help colleagues with technical issues, whatever came up. I made myself known over time and I made myself useful to my colleagues in any way that I could. You remember that Chairman of biochemistry who wouldn't interview me. Well, over the years, I established a strong professional relationship with him and he called upon me to sit on student dissertation committees. The judge poster presentations and other sorts of things. An incident involving him reminded me to have some compassion for the struggles facing others during that rapidly changing time. On a particular morning, I'm thinking now, I saw the chairman approaching your medical sciences building from the north as I was approaching from South. So happened that we arrived at the door at exactly the same time. Being a gentleman, he grabbed for the door handle. Being an independent woman. I also grabbed for the door handle. A short tussle ensued, but it began to feel unseemly to be arm wrestling with an elderly gentleman first thing in the morning. So I released my grip. And just at that instant, he increased the energy and his own efforts. And he succeeded in smacking themselves in the head with the door. Well, it was too loud thump to ignore. So I just stood there speechless and not knowing what to do. The chairman leaned his head against the door and lamented half the women I know expect me to open the door for them and the other half get mad at me if I do. So when people express themselves, so honestly, I find it hard to get mad at them or hold grudges. Another situation early in my career growth home, the wisdom of not burning bridges and not only graduates. It so happened that I came up for promotion to full professor in 1980, 82, which was the year that my second child, Kelly was born, also happened to be the year that my first book came out. The book was a textbook of nursing pharmacology. It was put out by a large publishing house and was adopted by nursing schools around the country. So the book figured prominently in my promotion while CA well, as it turned out, the departmental promotion and tenure committee was unimpressed. They decline the support me for promotion. Now at this time, James lash more had been passed on. The department had a relatively new chairman. This new man called me into his office to explain the decisions of the departmental committee. In fact, he read the letter from the Department of Health promotion and tenure committee that later said that the departmental committee declined to vote for promotion because again, direct quote. She has written her last friend and her last research paper. She has written her last grant and last research paper. I saw red stormed out of the office. Uncharacteristic for me, but I did. An hour or so later, the departmental secretary appeared at my door and she rather cautiously offered me a letter from the chairman. That letter said that he would support me for promotion the following year. He advised me not to retreat in high dudgeon. Digit. I had to look it up. It means I was blazing man and I really was. It was the same old problem. A group of men who did not know me well. I was trying to define who I was. Somehow motherhood and teaching nursing students who at this time were mostly 19 year-old girls, disqualified me in their eyes for work as an academic scientists. Spirits. Are we getting it? Alright. This experience has deep meaning for me in that it reminds me that his faculty members were supposed to be mentors and advisors, not fortune tellers. If the letterhead said the dossier will be stronger next year when she has more research publications that would have been mentoring. And I wouldn't have had to look up the word dudgeon. But the group engaged in fortune telling and we're not very good at that. They were dead wrong. From 1982 when this occurred through my retirement in 2014, I was either Principal Investigator, co-investigator, or subcontractor on 19 grants and contracts. The National Institutes of Health. And I published 149 research papers in that same period. I had not written my last proposal for my last research paper. Well, it turned out that I was promoted the next year. So this turned out to be the bite of a hell of a light and not a water moccasin. But what do you do with that experience like that? Well, you need to remember less than three. Don't burn bridges and don't hold grudges. All right. Cut out again. See if this works. Okay, good. So I needed to work with the same faculty members who sat on that promotion and tenure committee. And a needed them to take me seriously. My strategy was to pocket the insult as Mahatma Gandhi expressed it. Or maybe the quote from Tom Hanks and a League of Their Own is better. There's no crying and baseball. Well, there's no crying in promotion and tenure either. You just pull up your socks and you do the job. But it's not enough just to do the job. You have to be seen doing the job. If you're going to make things better for yourself and for those who will follow. Even the queen said she had to be seen to be believed. Remember that senior decision-makers may not have seen many examples like you. In my case, I had to say, you don't know what a female scientists looks like. Well, here I am walking data point for you to consider. So in my case the issue was gender, but I think this strategy works whatever flavor of different UR. So now what can I do about this situation? Well, I told people about every book I put out, every grant I earned, and every paper I published. Because these are the agreed upon milestones for academic success. I hit them with the data. I even posted the papers on a bulletin board in the hallway outside my office. A male colleague took note of the string of papers and suggested a bet. A play fight, a play fight, a six pack of beer to the one who published the most papers in a year. Well, why not? Sounded like fun. So I took him up on the offer. Well, I never lost that bet year after year, and he finally backed off. But during the years of our play fight, we became good friends. I always shared the beer with him. Several of the stories I've shared show the value of seeing both sides of a conflict. And this may be the most important lesson I have to share. Seeing both sides helps pull anger out of the mix and enables you to work with those who have opposed you in one way or another. I think the strategy applies to conflicts both great and small. But the real power in seeing both sides is that it enables you to look for a way to reframe the conflict in a way that could enable resolution. So re-framing the conflict is, I think, the really creative way to approach this. And let me illustrate with an example from later in my career. To set the stage. In 1999, I decided to take my own advice and to reach higher keeping my research laboratory. But adding the half-time appointment to be Director of the Graduate office and Associate Dean of the Graduate School. The conflict I had to deal with almost immediately was part of a larger, persistent argument about whether everything at IU Indianapolis has to be controlled by IU Bloomington. Sounds like this might be familiar. The element of this argument I had to deal with was the restricting of degree programs offered at IU Indianapolis.
In 1999 when I became director of the IU Indianapolis graduate office, first thing I did was to go speak to faculty in all the different schools around campus and ask how I can help them achieve their goals. Became very clear to me that there were pockets of excellence all around campus with distinguished and talented faculty who had need of graduate students to further their research programs. But in many cases there was no graduate program in place. So why not? Well, one reason turned out to be that the approval of graduate degrees at IU Indianapolis was an arduous, arcane and frustrating process. Proposals had to make it through at least six different levels of committees, including committees at IU Indianapolis, committees that IU Bloomington, university-wide committees that were mostly comprised of faculty from IU Bloomington. And even once those were achieved, the proposal had to go to the Indiana Commission for Higher Education and get its final approval. I knew of one master's degree program at IU Indianapolis that had languished in this approval process for ten years. So what was the big snag? Well, a big snag was that faculty at IU Bloomington were placed in the uncomfortable position of having to try to judge degrees and areas they were unfamiliar with being delivered by faculty. They did not know where the resources and facilities they had never seen. So into this environment, proposals would bounce back-and-forth between the two campuses as queries were registered and responses were drafted. I noticed that comments from IU Bloomington reviewers often contain the version of this statement. I don't see why you need that degree. Graduate students can come to Bloomington. Now there was an element of unstated expectations in that statement. But in fact, that expectation did get very explicitly stated to me by the dean of a prominent academic college in Bloomington. He left the telephone message for me, first of all, expressing irritation that my continual barrage of degree proposals from IU Indianapolis. And then he ended with this advice. Direct quote, you people need to remember that you should do all your teaching after 05:00. In other words, we should not be worrying about full-time students, like graduate students. Well, many I was on both campuses felt this was not right, that talented researchers at IU Indianapolis deserved better. So I began to explore how to overcome the impasse. My personal breakthrough came when I tried to put myself in the shoes of the IU, Bloomington faculty and administrators. What would be my biggest worry if I were trying to do their jobs? Well, I imagined that my biggest worry would be that the degrees offered at IU Indianapolis would not be of the same quality as those at IU Bloomington and would damage the reputation of the university. Now speaking from my point of view, if I had to do battle with every degree program at Bloomington for every degree we wanted approved. I didn't have good odds. Are just too many battles. If I could focus on that more global question of degree quality, then I can address many opponents at one time. So in consultation with the support of the University graduate school, we wrote guidelines for approving new degrees. We ask outside experts in the discipline to be reviewers of a new proposal and to submit written comments that would be included with their proposal as it went through the approval process. We consulted with the Higher Education Commission and others to create a template for the degree proposal so that all the information needed for approval was always included before the proposal. If the originating school. We got approval for the Graduate Affairs Committee at IU Indianapolis to act as agent for the graduate school to approve degrees, which eliminated one step in the approval process, but maintain the rigor of the review. These efforts bore fruit. I'm so excited, I get to sneak in one data slide. These data come from the Higher Education Commission and they show the approval of degree programs around the state between July 2007 and June 2012. It shows that IU Indianapolis, after it hit its stride, had more degrees approved than any other campus in the state. That includes ten masters programs and eight doctoral programs. Now, many people deserve credit for this success, not the least of whom are the talented faculty who created the content for these degrees. But I'd also single out the contribution made by the excellent program reviews conducted by treaty Montoya, Founder of the IU Indianapolis Office of Planning and institutional improvement. These reviews always included strong external reviewers who could comment authoritatively on the quality of the faculty and the degrees already offered by a school or department. She had the data. The end result was that we had better documentation, degree quality in our proposals for existing degrees than anywhere else in the university at that time. We had the data. We definitively answered the question of quality. Yes. Our degrees will be as strong as degrees anywhere in the university. You can trust us to maintain quality. Now I know several of you are sitting out there going, yeah, what was that really the reason? Well, I don't know if it was really the reason. But what I do know is that it's difficult to argue with hard data. I will also reflect that we did have many adversaries in this fight for graduate degrees at IU Indianapolis. But I've come to value every one of the adversaries. Consider this. As a result of resistance to our proposals. We became better. We developed a better process for approving degrees. We wrote better proposals using templates and guidelines, and we assessed graduate degrees more thoroughly. We fought using data, not anger. Our adversaries made us better. My last lesson just share, incorporates elements of several things we've talked about today. This lesson centers around a title and what it means being around a university. As long as I have, I've seen titles evaporate like a mist in the wind when a distant Administrator gets the urge to reorganize. Worse yet, I've seen titles remain when all authority to do the job is lost in a reorganization scheme. This ladder is what happened to the job I held as Director of the Graduate Office of the Associate Dean in the Graduate School. In 2013. In that year, a reorganization occurred without notice and the budget and reporting line for the IU Indianapolis graduate office moved from IU Indianapolis to Bloomington. Now, I retain both my titles, but all meaningful responsibility for the job slipped away to Bloomington. It meant that staff in the graduate office sitting not 20 ft from my desk could not come to me for instructions but had to try to find their supervisor in Bloomington for guidance staff members. I was meant to supervise where? In Bloomington as well as IU Indianapolis. But the routine task of student admission, which was my assignment, really needed very little supervision. This situation became another take on that earlier quotation from IC Gonzalez. And to paraphrase him. If you don't have the authority to do the job, no title makes up the deficit. So I did the only thing I thought I could ethically do, I tendered my letter of resignation stating clearly my goals for the job and documenting how reorganization had placed insurmountable barriers to achieving those goals. I submitted this letter only after trying diligently to make the scheme work. Well, it turned out that my detailed letter express difficulties others were encountering with this reorganization. So the decision of administration was to ask me to stay and run a full review of the structure of the graduate office. Now, those of you who've been involved with such a review know that it depends upon data, reams and reams of data. You have to clearly state your goals and then you have to prove how well you met those goals with data.
This full review is supported by the Dean of the University graduate school and included faculty from IU Indianapolis, IU Bloomington, and from an external peer institution. The end result was that the reporting line for the graduate office was brought back to IU Indianapolis to the campus it serves. This was a viable structure that I could have stayed with for very long time. This was still my dream job. But a new territory was about to be heard from. This is the left hand of the grandchild who would be born at the end of August in 2014. Now, Stephen, I raised our children while we were engaged in our dream jobs. His Lillian mine at IU Indianapolis, then our kids had a lot to put up with. We talk science incessantly over the dinner table. They know more science than an artist and a computer specialists ever needed to know. I think they forgave me. I hope they forgave me. It is true that as soon as they got independent, they each move to the east coast. And that was that location on the East Coast. That meant that our grandchild would be 10 h away. And so it was time to forsake two titles that I loved and take up a new one, the title of grandma. I retired July 1, 2014. Now, I enjoy being part of the lives of Wyatt, Lauren's children, Irene who's eight, and Levi who's now will be five at the end of this month. I read in Levi, I've never seen grandma in a white coat. But grandma is still a scientist. And through the senior academy, grandma chooses to work on projects for IU Indianapolis from time-to-time. Work is still very much worth my effort. And I hope my bridges to the academy are still very much intact. And I hope that some of the experiences that I share can help younger colleagues as they struggle with change and shifting titles. Hold onto who you are and to your goals. You've done marvelous things in the past and you will do marvelous things in the future. I consider it a privilege to have worked at IU Indianapolis for 44 years. As I look at this audience and I look at the ghosts hiding in the fringes here. I see the people with whom I've shared my professional life. I see friends, mentors, role models, allies, and a few adversaries. But I think each and every one of you, including the adversaries, for making me better. Thank you. Mike. Yeah. Hello. Yeah. Okay. We've got a few minutes for some questions. Anyone have one? Sorry. Yeah, I'll go that way. Sherry, Thank you so much. Wonderful insights, lessons that we can all use. One of the things you didn't talk about is your experiences with dealing with Purdue and graduate degrees. And it just seemed like now might be an opportunity if you had any insights that you might share them. Yes, I have some insights about Purdue. We worked long and hard to try to gain the respect of Purdue faculty partner. And this was Simon Rhodes, who was dean of the School of Science. We tried to use the data showing that PhD students had been trained at IU Indianapolis for years. And yet Purdue was slow and recognizing this. Eventually, after I retired, in fact, Simon took the data and was able to get an audience with the trustees at Purdue, earn a degree of recognition. So that faculty here at IU Indianapolis could train PhD students without supervision from Purdue. So that was a victory and we considered a major victory at the time. In today's environment. I think again, you just have to push the data. Here's what we have done. Don't be ashamed of what you've done. We've done wonderful things in Purdue programs on this campus that needs to be documented and that needs to be right up front with everything that we do. Thank you. Sorry. Another question.
Sherry. That was fantastic. Thank you so much. I'm wondering if you think that this mentoring situation for women, faculty and staff, I guess I would say on the campus today, what, what ways do you think it's improved and what work is there is still to be done. There's always work to be done, I think. But I have lived long enough to see really a remarkable change. Look at the leadership structure. We have fine women leaders. That is something that would not have happened. When I first started my career. The medical school lagged behind IU Indianapolis. But even they did routine equity checks to see that female faculty were being paid appropriately for their level of training and professionalism. So these things were on an upward climb and I think they're still on an upward climb. And I think it is a better time and a better climate. There was a time when a woman who suffered sexual harassment on the job had no recourse, no realistic recourse. She does have recourse now, I think these things have changed. Thank you. Final question. Oh, could you tell us a little bit about how you help mentor scientist from industry to bring, help bring, accelerate the application of molecular biology here at IU Indianapolis and help the further the knowledge of penicillin and cephalosporin molecular biology. I was Director of Graduate Programs in the Department of Pharmacology for a number of years, about ten years. And that was in the period of time when the techniques of molecular biology we're just blossoming. It was something that everybody needed to learn, everybody needed to know. And our graduate students knew that they would have to be applying these techniques in their future careers. But we in the faculty were not trained in it. So it was a real dilemma. One way out that turned out to be very useful to take advantage of some of the more academically minded scientists at Eli Lilly and other places that were doing molecular biology in their laboratories. And we worked out agreements with the Vice President at Lilly and with the administration here on campus so that our graduate students could be placed in those laboratories to learn those techniques, bring them back to campus and also apply them in their future careers. It was a way to sort of jumpstart instead of waiting to hire all new faculty who knew enough to do it themselves. Thank you, Sherry. I would say thank you for the wonderful reflections, which is what's written here. But not all of them are wonderful. And it certainly brings back some of the parallel memories from the early days in the business school. So I'm, I'm sure many of you related in various ways to that as well. At this time. If you'll stay put for a while, I'd like to invite Dee Metaj to the stage. Dee serves as the Vice President for Development at IU Indianapolis for the IU Foundation. Thank you, Georgia.
Good afternoon, everyone. It's truly a pleasure to be here today because Sherry and I go back awhile, and so I'm delighted to be able to offer some brief comments. Dr. Queener, your reflections today have truly captured the spirit and the essence of the last lecture series. Your presentation, fighting fair, is insightful and provides a unique lesson and perspective for all of us. Frankly, I'm just sorry, I didn't learn this much earlier in my professional experience, I think there might've been some benefits. Thank you for your dedication, your energy, and your authenticity, which have played a vital role in making the IU Indianapolis campus what it is today and what it will continue to be a thriving urban research institution since the time you arrived at the IU School of Medicine in 1971, just two years after the merger that created IU Indianapolis, your research instruction and leadership in the School of Medicine and the IU graduate school and graduate office at IU Indianapolis have touched the lives of countless students, faculty, and staff throughout your distinguished career on our campus. Thank you for that. The Indiana University Foundation has been proud to support the IU Indianapolis last lecture for the past 13 years. On behalf of the foundation. I am honored to recognize this prestigious occasion with this honorarium. Congratulations. And the check. At this time, I asked Georgia to join Dr. Queener on the stage for a special recognition from the IU Indianapolis senior academy.
Thank you. Dee. Yeah. I think it's just perfectly fitting that the senior academy who has retired doesn't have a $3,000 sharing, but we do have a plaque that we hope you will enjoy and appreciate. Okay, Cool. Is there anything you want to say before I close this? Yeah. I'll just say thank you to everyone for coming. Appreciate it. Good to see you. This has just been absolutely wonderful. Thank you so much for being here and sharing your background. I knew you were amazing, but this really makes it more amazing. Before we leave, let me yeah, give you the date for next year's last lecture. It will be held on Friday, November 3rd. The nominations call will go out soon from Jane Robertson. So if you get something from jane, be sure you take a look at it carefully. And the senior academy would like to thank the Office of Academic Affairs and the IU Foundation for their support and participation in this gathering. As most of you know, maybe all of you know, organizing an event like this takes a lot of behind the scenes work. And Mansi who is not here today couldn't be with us and Olivia and Kathy's staff have just done a marvelous job working with the senior academy committee to make this successful. So we really appreciate all of those things. And we particularly appreciate all of you retirees, active faculty and staff, students, guests who have come here and been such an attentive and gracious audience. I hope that all of you can join Sherry, senior academy members and board. You can tell the board members by their name tags, which I couldn't find in my move. I apologize. Thanks to all of you. So join us just outside for refreshments and conversations. We appreciate your being here. Wait, wait. I forgot something. Is it okay if I tell them about the scholarship or do you want to do that? Sherry has has told us that she has decided to contribute her honorarium to the scholarship fund or the senior academy. So we really appreciate that.
