The Michigan Daily sat down with University first spouse Wendy Yip to discuss her involvement on campus, her academic background and the importance of Women’s History Month. The Daily provided Yip with questions prior to the interview. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
The Michigan Daily: Could you describe your primary duties and responsibilities as first spouse of the University of Michigan?
Wendy Yip: There is no job description. I jokingly call being the first spouse my license to meddle, and I take it as an opportunity to engage with the community. University President Santa Ono and I grew up as children of professors who were immigrants, and I realized later that my father was a first-generation Western university student. They came in an era where it was more difficult and they were definitely seen as “other,” and yet they managed to carve their way into the mainstream of North American university life. So we grew up on campuses, and I love being around campus and meeting students. There’s a lot of community engagement where we meet students, faculty, alumni, donors and visitors. You get to have a lot of conversations. So I would say the main thing is I get to meet people and talk to them and hear their stories.
TMD: You received degrees in immunology and law, with years of professional experience in patent law. What led to your interest in these fields, and how do you find yourself incorporating those academic interests and experiences into your life as first spouse?
WY: As an immigrant child of an engineering professor and a pediatrician, science was always going to be the root of my education. But my father did a lot of studies in classics, and my mom in music, so all knowledge was well received. But practically, you should go into some field where you can be productive and get a job. Medicine was one of those fields, and I had a lot of fun in school and I enjoyed the science background. I met Santa in grad school, and then I pivoted into law school.
Part of the reason I decided to go to law school is because I like to argue with my father, and also because of policy. I used my background in science when I went to a law firm, and I found that the people in the patent area, we’re the nerds of the firm, and there’s a certain amount of pleasure being able to talk to people who have similar backgrounds. Science and law are really good for analytical thinking, but you need the arts because you have to understand the context of people. You’re working with people in law, everywhere, every day, so you have to understand people from all sorts of backgrounds.
I really love going to different classes as first spouse. I’ve attended U-M classes on Asian American civil rights because I was introduced by a friend to Prof. Roland Hwang, and I was going to law school at the time when the Asian American civil rights movement was coming into its own. I’ve also enjoyed attending Native American Studies symposiums, and a Black History Month event I attended was interesting because it was about learning about the history of how African American students came here and how everybody has come to find a role in the University. That’s why any type of history class is so important for me to try to understand the context of the University so that I can be better at welcoming people and making them feel that they belong, because they all belong here.
TMD: Throughout your career, you have engaged with issues affecting Asian diaspora communities through work at the Asian American Justice Center in Washington, D.C., and your previous tenure as president of the Board of the Pacific Canada Heritage Centre – Museum of Migration Society. Why have these issues been a primary focus of your advocacy work? And do you engage with similar advocacy and issues at the University? If so, how?
WY: I start from there because I understand it. I’ve got one foot in the immigrant generation, having been born and raised and attended universities in North America, but I still speak Chinese, because I lived with my grandparents for a few years in Hong Kong. So I feel that I have a certain responsibility to show up and at least help if there’s a divide, a lack of understanding and try to help point out some of the differences or past practices that may have resulted in othering of that community. But it’s not only about what I can do, it’s also what I can learn, and in such a way that I can improve. It’s good for self-education, and if something presents an opportunity, then maybe I can help connect or bring attention to some need that has not been met yet.
I’ve worked on legal services when I was in law school and was involved in the Asian American community because I was able to help somebody who is primarily Chinese-speaking with getting a divorce. I’m inspired partly by my parents because my mother as a pediatrician ended up serving a lot of Chinese Canadians. She could understand the language, and then she actually looked at her data, and she realized that there were certain needs because of the cultural context. Hopefully, you find other people from other communities that are underserved, and you can figure out there’s a commonality, and we can work together to advocate for a solution that would actually then benefit quite a lot of people, and then build a more inclusive and just society that America is aspiring to.
TMD: Since March is Women’s History Month, why is it important to bring women to the table for conversations in academic and professional circles?
WY: Even though my mother was a clinician, she was thinking about research and going into academia. I saw her make her way determinedly despite the barriers and she continued to do her public health and epidemiology research in her practice, and was later able to become an associate professor. But she brought something to the table. She was observing things in the community that perhaps somebody who was not a woman or a mother would not have. One of her papers was on iron deficiency anemia, and she realized that in her Chinese Canadian patient base, a problem was perhaps diet and realizing that the way that when women were giving birth in the hospital, the cuisine was a bit different. Also, in terms of how they fed their kids, there was a higher incidence of iron deficiency anemia. But I don’t necessarily think that a man in those days would not have been thinking about how they were feeding kids and things like that. Because that’s a woman’s perspective, who’s feeding and raising the children.
When looking at the statistics, you see there is some disparate impact. So when you ask, why is that, then you may see that there are barriers for women. I think it may not be quite as different now, because there’s been a lot of work over the last 50 or 60 years to create more opportunities for women. So when we say it’s for women’s issues, it’s recognizing that there have been barriers in the past. It’s not about saying that women are special, but it is saying, let’s try to remove this really universal design of our systems, so that it can enable both men and women to participate equally in the workforce and participate equally in other areas of life. It’s just that at this point, we know that it’s been framed more from one perspective, and it’s taken time to redesign it, so that each human being of any gender can reach their full potential.
TMD: Since Ono took office at the University in 2022, what has been the greatest challenge for the both of you as you settled into your new lives here?
WY: Never enough time. There’s so much going on here. We like to support what we can, and show up as much as we can, but it’s really hard, because sports here are a big thing. It’s not as big in Canadian universities, and sports was big at the University of Cincinnati but not as big as here. You could just only do sports and we tend to go to a lot of the football and men’s basketball games, but we try to get out to different sports, like women’s basketball. There are wonderful arts programs here as well as lectures. There are certain things that engage alumni more like football games, and there’s a lot of big impact there that you can do, but it takes a lot of time.
TMD: As someone who attends various events around campus, is there an event you recently went to that stuck out to you?
WY: I went to “assess.masses” because I’m on the board for the University Musical Society. Our daughter was here, so I brought her for a couple hours. People from UMS were saying, “Oh, it’s brought out a whole bunch of different people who don’t usually attend UMS events.” So this is good because it’s out of the box, even if it was outside of my taste. This is about challenging what we’re used to, and so I really appreciate that about UMS and that they’re trying very hard to bring music, theatre, dance from different cultures. It is certainly challenging your comfort zone, and I think that’s very important because I think one of the most important things is not to be so comfortable, because then you think everybody thinks like this in your little bubble, and it’s actually not.
TMD: As a tradition at the end of interviews with Ono, The Daily always asks a fun question — we’d love to continue that custom with you. If you had to give a 10-minute presentation about something non-work related, what would it be about?
WY: I might do origami, because I used to do a lot of origami as a kid. My father would have these postdoctoral students who would bring us these books in mostly Japanese with a lot of black-and-white photos, and it was really hard to see exactly what they’re doing. I liked doing origami and I think it’s very therapeutic. Also, I remember doing a psychology project when I was in college and taking a $1 bill and folding it into a frog and that sort of thing. This is, I think, the psychology of the artistic experience, and it was again trying to see things from a different light.
Daily News Contributor Eilene Koo can be reached at ekoo@umich.edu.
