Director's Corner: Five themes for MESA’s work

In this, my first MESA Connect column as the new Executive Director, I want to share the five themes that will be the focus of MESA’s work for the next three years. Each is intended to address an issue MESA must face to move to the next level of service, performance and recognition.

Matching our rhetoric and our practice. Remember the story of the blind men and the elephant? Each came to understand what an elephant is by the point at which he touched it. None of them truly understood the whole animal. Too often MESA is like that elephant. Where you touch us is what you believe us to be. Yet we are actually something more.

MESA is one of the few student academic development programs that serves students wherever they are in the educational process. Students move in and out of the program as their needs and MESA’s offerings coincide. It is not a pipeline where the same students are shepherded from one end to the other. It is a latticework that provides support to all students while allowing each to have her or his own point of entry and exit.

Consequently, we must not view MESA as three separate programs that operate at the pre-college, community college and university levels, respectively. Rather, we must adopt the orientation that MESA operates three initiatives to carry out the goal of the broader MESA program.

Who we are depends on where we sit. MESA is a California program but it is also a national program. It is essential that we embrace both roles. They are mutually supportive, not mutually exclusive.

We must continue to hold our position as the best science, math, and engineering program in the state. The eight MESA USA states propagate the model and our two-year-old joint effort with HP has seeded the MESA Community College Program in six more states. Our national efforts provide an additional source of resources and exert added pressure on California to support this nationally respected program.

No permanent partners or non-partners, just permanent interests. MESA’s mission must drive its work and its relationships with other programs. Because we invest so much of ourselves in our students, we sometimes resist fully partnering with other programs that provide related services when they also take credit for our students. We must recognize that ownership is less important than the outcomes for the students. The immense issues of inequality that we are addressing will not be solved by MESA alone. Yesterday’s competitors may be tomorrow’s partners.

Cachet is good; cash is better. It must be spring because MESA once again is not in the governor’s budget. For the last three years, we have risen to the challenge and with the support of our friends, found our way back into the final state budget. However, it has taken time and resources that could be better spent on serving students, parents, teachers and schools.

We need to advocate for the program throughout the year. This would allow us to plan better and become a perennial rather than an annual in the political arena.

We must not simply be refunded at the current level, but at the level of our heyday in the late 1990s. To accomplish this, looking to the state is not enough. We must expand our work with the federal government and its agencies, our corporate friends and private foundations.

Is there more, sir? MESA ’s advisory board, including representatives from industry and all segments of California education, has been a constant source of intelligent advice, ardent support, and yes, cash too. However, we must ask them for more. They must be tougher on us. Ask the hard question. Push us to think in new ways.

They must also engage more with the program in process. We need board members at MESA Days, as mentors, and using their influence and their employer’s influence to make the MESA case.

Trust me is out; show me is in. When MESA first began, we were the only game in town and we could say to friends and funders, “Don’t worry. We know what needs to be done. Trust us.” That attitude has gone the way of Nehru jackets and disco. Every day we must prove that we make a difference.

We must meet higher standards of delivery, content and evaluation. We must be what we claim we are—the best math, science and engineering program in the country. If we can use the themes outlined here, we can continue not only to be the best, but to improve continuously.

To be the MESA Executive Director is a privilege afforded to very few in the 37 years since co-founders Mary Perry Smith and Bill Somerton acted on their good idea. I look forward to the challenge of living up to my predecessors and to working with our partners to continue the success that is the MESA way.

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