Lisa D Cook: Hope, promise, and mentors
Speech by Ms Lisa D Cook, Member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve
System, at the Samuel DuBois Cook Center Career Achievement Awards Ceremony,
the University Club, Washington DC, 1 April 2024.
* * *
Thank you, Dr. Darity, for your kind introduction. I am profoundly moved to be
surrounded by family and friends, and it gives me another opportunity to tell all of you
that I would not be where I am today without your support. I include in that circle my
fellow award recipients today, Drs. Cecilia Rouse and Peter Blair Henry.
I am beyond humbled and honored to receive this career achievement award from The
Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University, and I am inspired by
what it represents. Of course, to me, Samuel DuBois Cook was simply "Uncle Sam." My
Uncle Sam was a Korean War veteran, a political theorist, an activist, and the first
African American tenured professor at Duke and any major southern university. He then
went on to become president of Dillard University . . . the list goes on and on. Now that
was a lifetime of achievement.
At Morehouse College, Uncle Sam was a classmate of a young man named Martin
Luther King, Jr. Before that, they picked tobacco together during the summer to earn
the money they needed for their studies. Uncle Sam led the campus chapter of the
NAACP at Morehouse and went on to become student body president (twice) and
valedictorian. Along with my mother Mary Murray Cook, his brother and my dad Rev.
Payton Brailsford Cook, my cousin and civil rights leader Floyd McKissick, Sr., and a
host of other relatives, he instilled in me the deep belief of the Civil Rights Movement
that with faith, preparation, and great effort, things could and would be better. When I
was beaten and suffered verbal assaults while desegregating my schools in Georgia, I
drew strength from the example set by my uncle, my aunts, my parents, and by Dr. King
and their conviction that there is great hope and promise in the world. It was-and
remains-the duty of everyone in and who embraced and was inspired by the Civil Rights
Movement to make good on that hope and promise and to build a better future.
I mentioned great effort. That was always paramount for my Uncle Sam. The New York
Times quoted his advice: "Have a vision-a dream of success-and work like hell."
Uncle Sam believed people need guides, role models, and taskmasters to take
advantage of the greater opportunities he helped to make possible. We call those
guides, role models, and taskmasters "mentors" for short.
I found many mentors along my academic journey, and I would like to give special
thanks to those I met through the Diversity Initiative for Tenure in Economics, which
Sandy Darity started at Duke in 2008. The Initiative is a research mentoring workshop
that pairs junior faculty with mentors who can help them navigate the path to tenure. It
has seen 53 Initiative fellows being promoted and tenured at institutions of higher
learning.
I am grateful to all the mentors who took my ideas seriously, including Art Goldsmith
who was a DITE mentor, helped me sharpen the hypotheses that emerged from them,
and pressed me to think hard about the best data and methods to test these
hypotheses. Graduate and undergraduate students from many backgrounds ask me
how to find mentors that share their background. I tell them they will need more than
one mentor and to seek out mentors who have different backgrounds and expertise
such that they will be exposed to a wide range of views and experiences. For just one
paper on violence and patents, I had several mentors, among them George Akerlof,
Ken Arrow, Sandy Darity, Barry Eichengreen, Milton Friedman, Alan Krueger, Paul
Romer, and Jeff Wooldridge. Most importantly, make sure your mentors challenge you
and hold you accountable. And when the time comes, it is incumbent on you-on all of
us, really-to become a mentor. That is what Uncle Sam did. That is one reason I was
grateful to lead the American Economic Association's Summer Program, to receive the
AEA Mentoring Program's Impactful Mentor award for working with graduate students,
and to participate in and support other initiatives to train young economists. Mentors
help convert hope and promise into action, enabling those who come after us to build a
better future. As I learned from Uncle Sam, there is no higher calling.
In closing, let me express my hope that accepting this career achievement award does
not mean I am officially retired. But more seriously, I am very grateful to be recognized
and in the company of colleagues who have stood by me and fought with me to improve
our field. I accept this award in the spirit of challenge it represents. I am forever mindful
of Samuel DuBois Cook's belief that there is much work ahead of us as we seek to
build a world that is more just and offers more opportunity for all. Although this may be
called a career achievement award, I accept it with the conviction that I am just getting
started.