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My mom, Dr. Lisa Bradley, retired this week after 35 years at the U. of Maryland. A veterinarian, she started as an instructor and was soon elevated to pre-med advisor for all medical tracts. She later led that office, then became assistant dean for life sciences.
My mom, Dr. Lisa Bradley, retired this week after 35 years at the U. of Maryland. A veterinarian, she started as an instructor and was soon elevated to pre-med advisor for all medical tracts. She later led that office, then became assistant dean for life sciences.
She personally advised over 5,000 students who went on to become doctors. She forged relationships with HBCUs across the country, eventually elevating Maryland into a Top 10 public institution in the country in sending African Americans to med schools.
The hardest part of the job: Painful conversations with aspiring doctors who couldn't pass Organic Chemistry no matter how many times they tried. She had to tell 1,500 undergraduate students that a path to med school through the college of Life Sciences was not in the cards.
About 200 of those students expressed suicidal or violent thoughts in those somber moments alone in her office. Calmly, firmly, she talked every one of them off the ledge. Of those 1,500, about 90% went on to graduate from UMD with a different degree.
About a dozen of my mom's students invited her to their weddings. A dozen more employees did the same. The college's Facebook announcement about her retirement is littered with comments like this:
She did all of this as a black girl from East Oakland, who was told by a white male classmate on her first day of med school at UC Davis in 1978, "there's no way I'm sharing a locker with a nigger." Every student in the class shared a locker that year but her.
She remained a veterinarian at heart, if not in practice. In 1999 she inherited a second-floor corner office in Symons Hall. On the first day, a gray squirrel climbed a tree to her window sill looking for food. She established squirrel dinner time at 5 pm daily.
At the time, gray squirrels dominated campus, until the early 2000s when a graduate student began selectively feeding nuts to black squirrels only, strengthening the minority group and creating an annual springtime war between young males in the two groups.
Mom literally ended the war, brokering peace in the squirrel community in College Park by implementing a reward system for non-violence. Squirrels who fought in her presence were hand-fed only slivers of walnuts at dinner time. Peaceful squirrels earned a whole walnut.
The violence ended in the Spring of 2003. At the end of every day since, about a dozen squirrels escorted my mom, their Venus, from the steps of her office to her car, shielding her from any threats.
Like 10 years ago, the school planned to cut down the tree the squirrels used to get to her window sill every day. My mom threatened to retire, on the spot, the day a chainsaw touched the tree. The university backed down.
She went to over 400 Maryland basketball games, and every one of her three sons' youth football games, pacing back and forth behind the end zone at the latter, screaming at our defense: "Don't you f------ let them score!"
She's the reason my middle brother works for Sirius XM NFL radio, my youngest brother works for an NFL training staff, and why I cover the NFL.
On her last day, her staff gave her this:
If I know my mom, her last words at her retirement party later this month will quote Scarface: "Say good night to the bad guy, because you're never gonna see another one like this, let me tell you."
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