Matt Davenport: Welcome to the Michigan Minds Podcast, where we explore the wealth of knowledge from faculty experts at the University of Michigan. I’m Matt Davenport, a science writer and public relations representative with Michigan News.

Just about a year ago, the university was formally announcing its strategic plan and guiding principles for the next 10 years to be the defining public university. Around these parts, that strategy is better known as Vision 2034. Sustainability and climate action are one of the impact areas of this vision, and to help realize our goals around these, the university created a new position, the Vice Provost of Sustainability and Climate Action.

Today, we have the first person to ever hold that title, Professor Shalanda Baker, to talk about the progress our community has made over the last year and about her outlook for the future. Thank you so much for joining us, vice provost Baker.

Shalanda Baker: I’m so happy to be here. Thank you.

Matt Davenport: Can you take us back to last summer, you’re getting ready to start here? For context, you were previously serving as the director of the Office of Energy Justice and Equity at the U.S. Department of Energy. What did you see happening at the university that made you decide that this was the next step you wanted to take in your career?

Shalanda Baker: Yeah. So if I take you back to last summer, I was sleeping a lot, having held that job at the Department of Energy for about 42 months. So, I was there on day one, and prior to that, I was at Northeastern University, I was a professor of law and public policy. And so, in the administration I had the opportunity to really build out the nation’s architecture for energy justice. And the question I grappled with every day was, “How do we make our energy transition just and equitable?”

And so, when I was thinking about what might be next, I thought, “Surely returning to academia sounds great, and sounds very relaxing after this job, but academia also just holds such promise in terms of its reach.” And we encounter hundreds and thousands of students in academia every single day. We have the opportunity to leverage that contact to really impact the world and the trajectory of our planet.
It was a natural continuation for me to leverage the potential impact I could have through the classroom, through working with the best researchers in the world, and to be at a university that is willing to experiment, and has stated its ambition as being out front on issues of climate and sustainability. The more I learned about this place, the more I realized, “Oh wow, Michigan has some history in these areas and also wants to do more, and wants to really put its mark on this moment.”

Matt Davenport: What were your top priorities coming in? Obviously, you have to get settled and learn about the organization, but as far as your responsibilities as vice provost, what were you wanting to accomplish as your top priorities?

Shalanda Baker: This is interesting, because coming in, I read the multipage job description. I think it’s like seven or eight pages, and there are three main categories. One is around curriculum, the second is around research, and the third is around community impact. So, on the curricular side, I really wanted to begin to create frameworks for students to understand curricular offerings around sustainability and climate. And so one key goal is to create a navigator so students can navigate all the course offerings across campus and understand how much of a sustainability education they’re getting. That’s a near term goal.

The longer range goal though is to think about requirements and how we have a campus wide requirement. This is sacrilegious here at University of Michigan, but what would it look like to create a climate or sustainability requirement for every single student so that we know when every student graduates, they’re prepared to operate in a climate change world? In the research space, my goal is to accelerate our impact in the world. You come in as a professor, junior professor or postdoc, your head is down, you’re working on a project for five to seven years.

You pop up after having done the peer reviewed research, you start your next five to seven year project, and then again and again, and you do that for your entire career. A lot of times, that work doesn’t really make it into the hands of policymakers, into the hands of community organizations. So the question is, how do you kind of rewire how we do research to both incentivize folks to work with community members, to work with policymakers, and to make sure that work is making an impact in real time?

In the community impact side, I was really interested in, again, sort of lowering the walls of the academy to make the academy more accessible to community members. We have a lot of folks on campus who do great work with community members. We have the Ginsburg Institute, we have our Tishman Center for Environmental Justice, we have our sustainability clinic in Detroit. We have a lot of nodes of community-based work. We have the Erb Institute, Ross is doing great work with the business community.

But there isn’t always a front door and a clear front door, so one of the goals is to kind of make that front door legible. And the other door is to welcome, or the other goal is to welcome people in and say, “We’re here in service of communities and we’re a public institution.” That’s one of the great things about the University of Michigan. We’re a flagship public university with a public mission, and so we should break down those barriers to make this place more accessible. So just a few goals.

Matt Davenport: Yeah, yeah. Just thinking about it, it’s a new position and you spoke how Michigan is willing to experiment, but people have been doing things a certain way for a while before you came here. What’s the response been? How have people been engaging with you and trying to reach these goals?

Shalanda Baker: Yeah. So, people don’t really hire me to maintain the status quo. It’s not really what I do. I love excitement. I love to sort of break things, build new things, I love to build things from scratch. One thing I have learned throughout my career though, is that even when I’m invited in for transformation and everyone’s like, “Yes, we want to do transformation. We’re excited about transformation, but we don’t want to change. So if you make us change, then we’re out.”

So, the response here though has been a mix. And just sort of going back to my last response about curriculum, we don’t do core requirements here., And so if we want to educate every single student at the University of Michigan to have a climate education, climate literacy, some of the way we do things has to change, right? There has to be some flex in our programming at the first year, in our way we think about curriculum, in the ways we think about community-engaged learning, engaged learning period.

So, there will need to be changes. I have gotten a lot of great reception. There is an army of people here that has been working on climate sustainability for a couple of decades. Michigan itself was one of the first universities in the country to have a sustainability school. A few years ago, a group of, gosh, a large working group developed the President’s Commission on Carbon Neutrality. We have Vision 2034, which is very much a product of a lot of conversations that have been happening on this campus for many years around things like environmental justice, sustainability and climate.

So, there are folks who were like, “Yeah, we’re glad you’re here,” and my calendar reflects that. There was a lot of pent-up demand. The question as a leader is, “Okay, how do I take all of this demand and how do I move us in structures that people may not always be comfortable moving within, but those are structures that will facilitate high impact and actually accelerate our impact in the world?” So, lots of positive response, lots of pent-up demand. The question is, is there an appetite to do the transformational and transformative work that we really need to do?

Matt Davenport: I know you haven’t been here a full year yet, and a year isn’t a lot of time to begin with, but have there been areas where you’ve seen where you’re either most excited about what’s happening, there’s a lot of promise where it’s happening, or there’s stuff happening already that you’re excited about?

Shalanda Baker: I just think about the ways I get fed here. I go to meetings with students and they’re just so enthused and ready to rock and roll, and those are really energizing meetings. The Matthaei Botanical Gardens and the Graham Institute for Sustainability are both within this portfolio that I have. And the folks at each of those units are just ready to work, and very excited to amplify and elevate what they’re doing to move the entire university forward.

So, there’s just so much excitement. There’s MI Hydrogen, which is a node of scholars doing work around hydrogen, but in response in some ways to what was happening in the Biden administration. But they’re still continuing that work, and they are thinking about how to engage with the state.

President Ono is also really excited about the university research corridor. And I’ve been working closely with Skip Lupia who is the interim vice president for research, and he and I have been working with researchers within the University of Michigan as well as the URC, as it’s called, to think about a Michigan-wide research effort that could move us into a set of livable futures and a thriving economy for the state.

So, there’s just so much going on already, and again, the question is, “How do we move toward a common vision? Where are we going? What are we trying to achieve?” Climate, it’s everything. It touches on every area of life. Sustainability is also something that touches on every area of life.

And so, the question always is how do you measure progress? Obviously, there are net-zero goals, there are carbon neutrality goals in the climate space, but it can be hard to measure progress at an incremental level. And so, one of the things I’m also trying to work on is, what are the metrics that we can use to measure our progress over time?

Matt Davenport: So, we’ve alluded to your service in the Biden administration. It was still the Biden administration when you started. It is now the second Trump administration, where the messaging around climate is very different. The leadership is telling us that concerns about climate were overblown, and a lot of our efforts around climate mitigation were, at best, unnecessary. That said, Vision 2034 has outlined climate action and sustainability as these key components. Does the current political climate affect what we’re doing here at the University of Michigan at all?

Shalanda Baker: Yeah. I am so laser focused on climate and sustainability, climate action and sustainability. I think the science is clear. We’re in an emergency. We are in the last decade of action. We only get one life, and so in my life, I’ve decided to be of service, whether that be as a military officer, which I’ve done, as a professor, or a civil servant, which I also did, and now here.

And so, my mission in life is to be of service in connection with some of the urgent issues of our time. I’m very blessed and privileged to hold this job, which is a phenomenal job in a phenomenal university, and I think my job is to stay clear on the urgency of the moment and to stay clear on our goals. And so, as of today, we’re still very clear. We’re still very focused. We’re doubling down on making clear what the science is and what the urgency is.

Now, as we communicate that more broadly, we absolutely have to connect the dots. I think one of the reasons why the arguments being made by the current administration have been so powerful and connected with people is that the investments that we were making to mitigate climate change were not being felt yet. We were talking about an industrial revolution, essentially. Another industrial revolution to transform communities, but the lag on that is at least five to seven years. Folks were never going to feel that during the administration.

And so what we have to do, I think as a community of folks who care about the climate, is help people understand why it’s urgent, the types of investments that are required to actually mitigate climate change and eventually adapt, and how they fit within it. Is there prosperity for those communities? I don’t think the Biden administration did enough to convince Americans that there would be prosperity in the investments, that there would be shared prosperity.

My job at the Department of Energy was to tell that story, and to make it true and real. I think that’s another piece of the picture. We haven’t been able to make all those promises true, because there’s such a counterbalance weighing against justice, frankly, which says, “Folks who are on the margins, folks who are the poorest folks who have always been left behind, we’re going to continue to leave them behind even as we’re making these investments to save the climate.” So we have to be able to do all of that.

For now, in my role, I’m very focused. I’m very interested in convening leaders across the university campus and researchers and students to begin to say, “Okay, what is our strategy? How are we going to continue to do this work? What are our action plans?” Understanding the seriousness of this moment and the stakes of this moment.

I got to tell you, it doesn’t matter what’s happening in Washington. It doesn’t matter what’s happening even here in Michigan in the halls of government, every student here comes from a community that has been impacted by climate change. So this generation gets it, and they expect us to be good stewards of their tuition dollars, and to make sure they’re prepared for that world. So that is my job, to make sure they’re prepared to live in that world.

Matt Davenport: We’ve talked about energy justice, environmental justice, which is another impact area of Vision 2034. Not officially part of your title, but it’s always been part of what you do. How is that influencing how we’re living our values at the University of Michigan? How are the ideas around energy equity helping us forge our path?

Shalanda Baker: The School for Environmental Sustainability has such a strong kind of root in environmental justice. We were the first university in the country to offer an environmental justice curriculum. We have some of the biggest leaders in that movement and in that area of research and scholarship on this campus. And so, I’ve been convening a lot of those leaders in what I’m calling an environmental justice community of practice, to think about what that agenda should look like and how we continue the work on this campus, given its historic role in stewarding that research for our colleagues around the country.

So, we’re still very focused on environmental justice. We also have Dr. Tony Reames, who is a dear colleague of mine at the Department of Energy, who is a leader, an international leader in the field of energy justice and energy equity. And so he and I are still collaborators and friends, and so we’re always ideating on how to make sure we continue to elevate and do that work.

Environmental justice is absolutely woven into all of our sustainability and climate work. I know it’s something that’s on the minds of many people I talk to. It’s definitely on the minds of students. So it’s there, and because of my lens, because of my life experience, I’m always bringing that into conversations. It’s always there. It’s always a part of the conversation.
And I think, again, if we’re trying to create a world in which everyone thrives, we have to be thinking about the justice elements, and we have to be thinking about how we bring everybody with us in a world where there are economic disparities, where we already know there are a lot of environmental disparities. And we’re going to be changing the landscape in the years to come, and so let’s, again, bring everybody with this.

So, I feel like every now and then I lapse into my sort of political lens and role, but there’s a continuum and there’s definitely a continued kind of, for me, emphasis on the justice and equity and the righteousness of this flight into this particular role. And the history of this place is what drew me here, the history on EJ, the history on sustainability, the history of fighting back, taking cases to the Supreme Court on issues of diversity.

That’s what drew me to this place, because I said, “If anywhere in the country is going to hold the line, it’s going to be the University of Michigan.” So I’m here for that. I’m here for the work. I’m here to help organize, I’m here to lead, break barriers, to be the tip of the spear as I like to say, so that everyone can come with me in the work.

Matt Davenport: You visited the School for Environment and Sustainability and gave a talk while you were still with DOE, and it’s fantastic. And there’s a really powerful moment where you’re talking to the audience and remind them that they have a role to play in all of this. I’m curious, as people think about that now, what advice do you have for people who are thinking about what is their role to meet this moment?

Shalanda Baker: Yeah. I think there are two things. One, is to not put your head down and bury it in the sand. We’re getting flooded right now with a lot of negative information around climate and negative information around democracy, and there’s a lot of hopelessness in the folks who are working on issues of the environment. This is the time though when we fight, this is the time when we check in with our values and find our people. I’ll tell you a story about that.

So, a couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to go to Wisconsin. I was giving a keynote at a huge conference, and I was nervous because this was not my normal audience of the willing coalition of environmental people, environmental justice folks, justice, social justice related people. The people I was speaking to are the builders of the world. They’re the ones who are doing weatherization and retrofits in households. They’re in the building trades.

And I was invited to keynote this conference, but they were almost required to go because it’s a part of their continuing education plan. So it wasn’t necessarily the folks who were like, “We are here to see Shalanda Baker.” And I know the politics in Wisconsin. It’s complicated. It’s a mix of folks. And I thought, “How can I tell the story of what I did, but also tell a story that all of us can see ourselves within?”

Long story short, it was a successful keynote. I was moved by the audience’s response, and then afterwards folks came up to me, were just like, “Thank you for your remarks.” And then one guy in particular said, “I’m trying to organize my community. I want to stay involved. Who’s leading?” And he looked at me and he was like, “Who’s leading? Do you know anyone who’s leading in Wisconsin?”

And I was like, “I think it’s you. I think it’s you.” And he was just like, “Man, yeah, I think you’re right.” But the thing is, we all have to lead. You can look to your left and look to your right. We’re all here to lead, so no one’s going to come and save us. And I think that’s scary for some people, but if we put our heads down and say, “I’m just going to wait for this to blow over, we’re going to be in a bad place.” So everyone is a leader. Everyone has to show their own courage in their own space.

The second thing is to be joyful, because this work can kill you. I left the administration, and Tony, Dr. Reames was like, “Shalanda, don’t crawl out. I want you to walk out.” And I was almost to the point of crawling. The work is so grueling from a soul level, but it was the people that got me through, and not only my team, but people in communities who would embrace me, but also pray for me and hug me.

And there was joy in that. And I think we have to find the joyful moments. What is the role of the arts in this climate moment? What is the role of creativity? What is the role of gathering and breaking bread and cooking for each other? And what is the role of even crying together and finding that peace and comfort within community? We have to stay connected and find the joy. And so that’s really maybe even bigger than leadership. That is a big piece of advice, and that’s what I’m looking for here in Michigan as well.

Matt Davenport: Well, that’s awesome. Thank you so much for your time. It was wonderful speaking with you today.

Shalanda Baker: Yes. So great to be here. I appreciate it.

Matt Davenport: Thank you for listening to this episode of Michigan Minds, produced by Michigan News, a division of the university’s Office of the Vice President for Communications.