Dr. Kenny is a favorite amongst the student body, well-known for her popular psychology courses and as a teacher advisor for Best Buddies, a club in which every Wednesday, BCA students visit a local elementary school and volunteer in its aftercare program. Over her career, she has done research at Columbia University’s New York State Psychiatric Institute and has taught at Hunter College and Barnard College before coming to BCA in 2005. Dr. Kenny is also an avid movie-watcher and cyclist, and this month, the Academy Chronicle had a chance to speak with her about her professional career, the importance of psychology, and her insight on how to solve societal problems such as prejudice and discrimination.
ACADEMY CHRONICLE: Where did you grow up?
I grew up in Florida for my first five years. From six weeks to five years [old] I lived in Jacksonville, Florida. Some people claim they can hear a hint of southern accent in my speech. And then I moved to Clifton, and I lived in Clifton for 22 years and then I moved to Manhattan shortly after. And then I moved back 15 years later.
And you said you went to Catholic School growing up?
I sure did. My parents were very Catholic, and you absolutely went to Catholic School, period. There was no choice. And so eight years in elementary school and then four years in a private all girls high school in Montclair.
When did you start to realize that you wanted to study psychology?
Extremely late. Well, I wouldn’t say late in life, but I was a biology major at Montclair State when it was a college not a university. Then I thought that I should add something to that, not for any particular reason except I thought that psychology was interesting. I was taking some psychology courses and I said, “Might as well double-major in it.” So I did.
Where did you go for your graduate education?
I went to City University of New York. They had a program called biopsychology. There weren’t a lot of them in those days, and biopsychology was the name then – it’s still in existence but most schools call it neuroscience or behavioral neuroscience now.
Did you go into the Ph.D. program thinking that you would go more into academia or research?
I wish I could say that I had some clear plan as you are suggesting, but I wanted to become an academic, I guess. I have to admit I wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to do research; I wanted to be an academic. I had very little guidance I have to say, and I just thought this was the thing to do. It just sounded like a really interesting program, which it was.
Were you involved in any research?
During your Ph.D. career you investigate a couple of different labs, and as a Ph.D. student you must do research. So, I was doing research on chinchillas and rats when I was in that program.
What were your studies about?
Chinchillas and rats are very similar in some important ways. They’re both rodents, for example, and they are very different in one important way which is that rats are what are altricial and chinchillas are precocial, and altricial means very underdeveloped when they are born: their eyes are closed; their ears are closed; they’re incredibly dependent on their mothers; they’re hairless.
Chinchillas on the other hand are precocial: their eyes are open, and they hear well and so on. They are a little bit more like humans when they are born. Humans are motorically very dependent, but sensorially they’re fairly well-developed. I was just doing a study on the development of them.
If you really want to know, I was doing a study for my dissertation, ultimately, that was [about] the development of the interaction between senses, between vision and olfaction, [or smell]. Rat pups use olfaction to get back to the nest. If they get separated from their mom they use olfaction to get back to the nest because they can’t see, and chinchillas don’t do that. They just walk around and look at things.
So anyway, preliminary stuff I was doing was on chinchillas versus rats and how they behaved in this experiment that I designed.
Did you go into teaching right after your Ph.D. program?
After my Ph.D., I was in New York, and I got a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University’s New York State Psychiatric Institute, which I think is still called the NYSPI. It was a lovely lab, and the department was called “Developmental Psychobiology,” and my advisor in that – I mean I was a Ph.D. so he was my postdoctoral advisor – was working on sensory systems in rat pups. Specifically we were just looking at rats and how well-developed was their gustation, [or taste], and how well-developed was their olfaction, [or smell]: are newborns just like older ones in terms of what they do? And, we looked at what they do when they are attached to their mom while nursing.
[In the experiment, we] could deliver any flavored milk to [the newborn rat pups] while their mom was nursing them. The mom wasn’t actually delivering milk… so instead, pups would be attached to her and we would be delivering milk of different flavors and we could see whether they could tell bitterness versus sweetness and so on, and it turns out that they could. If you give them something bitter, they tend to come right off the nipple because it is so aversive to them. If it is sweet, they just dive in there and start sucking harder and harder and longer and longer, so I guess we asked and answered that question.
And then you eventually went on to teach?
So after two years I had to do something. At that point, I had my first child. I had married in graduate school, [and] I had to decide what I was going to do, and I wanted to be a full-time mom and a part-time something. I was an adjunct assistant professor at Hunter [College] and then at Barnard [College], and I could teach at night that way and my husband could take care of [the kids].
It’s funny how Mr. Liva’s discussion of his history is so different from mine: I am struck by how my discussion of my professional history is very much affected by what I was doing with my babies – who is taking care of them and so on. At no point did I resent it, by the way – I want to make that clear. But, it’s so true that a woman – if she is the full-time caretaker, that is a big part of what she can do.
Anyway, what I could do professionally was teach. I couldn’t really do research, or at least I couldn’t see a way to do research, but I could teach because I could do that in the evenings and work around my kids that way.
So that’s what I did and somehow 19 years passed, and you know I was done with the whole baby thing, and I had a child in college by that point. I had worked my way up all the way to adjunct full professor at Barnard [College], which is a lovely, luxurious place to be, with a great student body. You don’t have a whole lot of requirements. You get paid fairly well.
But I couldn’t do that anymore because I needed a full-time position, so I decided to look into a high school to teach in the biology department. And there I see this “vo-tech something school,” and it happened to be this one, so I was “Oh, I know I don’t want to work at a place like that, but I’ll just practice. I’ll just go there to practice.” I had not interviewed for a job in forever since my postdoc, so I just came here, and I said, “Wow, this is an incredible school!”
And I came, and I auditioned with a demo lesson and the rest is history. The school was incredible. Dr. DeWitt apparently had some ulterior motives because he knew that I was a biopsychologist by training, and I think he knew that he wanted AP Psychology taught here. I had no idea that was what he was thinking, and he suggested it, and I said, “Right,” because I had already taught Intro Psychology at college, so I said “I could do it, yeah,” but I wanted to teach it with a biological bent, and he said “Yeah, sure – the more biology the better.”
So that’s what we have now. We have an AP Psychology course that is more like an AP Biopsychology course, and it is all thanks to him.
So when did you come to BCA?
I came eight years ago – it was December of 2005. I didn’t teach my first full year until 2006. I think I probably taught AP Psychology that year for the first time.
So you started out as a biology teacher?
I did, and I had never taught a bio lab, for example, and they were like, “Here, teach a bio lab.” And I did, and it was really, really gratifying and satisfying, and I loved it, but I don’t do that right now.
Going off what you said earlier, at BCA we consider psychology as a biology course but in many other schools they consider it as a humanities or social studies course.
Yes, it’s true. I hesitate to say this out loud because it will ultimately be in print I assume, but AP Psychology is technically a social science course. Here we teach it as a biology course. Which do I think it should be? Is that what you were going to ask me?
Yes.
First of all, it’s not social science. I mean yes aspects of it are social, but it is more and more biology. I mean I think that it’s a biology course, but that’s because of my bias. But big chunks of psychology are biological now, so to disregard that to me is short-sighted. I suspect that the AP people are going to morph [the course] into an AP Psychology-Social and an AP Psychology-Biology, especially if I request it.
I always toy with the idea of suggesting a new course, but I haven’t yet found that chunk of time to do that; I might do that some year.
Are there any other courses that you would like to see at BCA besides those?
I’d love to do some kind of linguistics course – I’m not quite prepared to do that now – but I would love to do that or a psychopharmacology course. I know that we have a pharmacology course that Dr. Pinto teaches, but I would love to do a psychopharmacology course. I just haven’t, again, gotten around to that yet, but I would like to do that.
And ultimately, when we get our EEG (Electroencephalography) recording device, which we’re getting someday soon, we can do all kinds of [studies on] brain function.
I remember in class you said that you believe everyone should take a psychology course. Why do you think that is?
From my perspective, since we are all behaving organisms – we are all behaving humans – a psychology course does give you a little bit of perspective on behavior. I hope it gives you a lot, but minimally I think taking a psychology course gives you a perspective on the “you,” the behaving “you.”
Some people take psychology, specifically, because they want to understand themselves. I think that may not be a good idea, because usually you have some issue that you are trying to work out when you do that. But, I think as a way to understand human behavior, taking a well-taught psychology course is not a bad thing to do.
I also despise pop-psychology, and I think it’s done bad things to the reputation of psychology, so I like to be slightly disrespectful and dismissive of a lot of that by injecting skepticism into my students about [it].
I think one thing that I really like about AP Psychology is that it brings more awareness to certain human truths like how you said “if you have a brain, then you stereotype,” and other aspects such as sociobiology. Because of your background in psychology, do you think that there are some societal problems that will be very tough or difficult to fix?
I remember when I said that in class, and I think this might be the first year that I actually came out and said that, and I wasn’t really planning on saying it so much but when I thought about it later it is absolutely true: if you have a functioning brain, your brain by its very nature categorizes things. Otherwise, you would not be able to function.
Stereotyping seems so impossible to escape as a human because it is impossible to escape: it’s what you do. The next level beyond that, though, prejudice, is escapable, or minimally it is something that you can be educated against developing. But for the most part we have prejudices. The next level, however, discrimination, which is a behavior, is something you can avoid, and I think that if you are aware of this as a human or as a society or as a commenter on society or somebody who is trying to modify behavior, if you are aware of the fact that everybody stereotypes, you can attempt to educate people about that and say, “Look at and say how you feel about people. You have developed this kind of stereotype.” You can learn to not act on it. You can learn to not be prejudiced or minimally you can learn to not discriminate.
I think it’s a really valuable thing – this is not original with me, this idea – but I think if you tell people, “Of course you are going to stereotype – but you don’t have to discriminate,” that’s sort of, I hope, liberating. Look at how you’re thinking: but do not act on that.
Sociobiology, or evolutionary psychology, points out that the state of monogamy is not necessarily a natural state for primates. It happens to work very well in human societies for the most part, especially if you are raising children: having a pair of parents is a good thing for children. I mean it could be group-raising of children as well. But monogamy doesn’t necessarily come easily to people, and I think some people when they experience the fact that it doesn’t feel easy [and] it suddenly feels challenging they say, “Oh my god I think I’m not supposed to be married to this person,” instead of saying, “Oh wait a minute, that’s right. I’m not a natural monogamist because I’m a primate – maybe I can work this out.”
I know that it is not a perfect analog to what we were just talking about, but it’s one of those things that when you recognize the fact that monogamy is sometimes a challenge, and it may be more of a challenge for males versus females which is what evolutionary psychology would say, that you can sort of rise above it – that you might be able to say, “Oh yeah, it doesn’t have to feel good all the time, and there’s probably some higher purpose in staying monogamous,” and then maybe you will.
Because I think it’s been pretty well-established that for children’s sake, monogamy and fidelity in marriage are better, but what evolutionary psychology by the way would also say is that men might be able to be monogamous, but they might want to be serial monogamists so that they’ll stay with one wife, divorce, stay with another wife, get divorced, so they might be “faithful,” but they’re being “faithful” in a serial way.
And evolutionary psychology sort of predicts that. That doesn’t mean we have to do that, but it predicts that that’s how you might feel – that [it] might be easier for you. Whereas a woman might be perfectly happy being “faithful.”
So the solution is more in awareness.
Exactly, thank you. It’s awareness about how humans really are. Humans are not just like other primates – it’s true. But we are not unlike other primates in many ways.
But I guess what you’re saying is that we do have the power to escape from certain predictable qualities.
Exactly, exactly. I think that would be very beneficial for society to recognize that.
Where do you think the field of psychology is progressing now?
That’s a really good question. It’s becoming essentially brain science now. Brain imaging has progressed to the point where – we were making a lot of mistakes looking at brain function and saying that it means this and it means that when in fact nobody can replicate those results and you have to redo it and so on – but at some point we will probably be looking at brain function and answering questions like “How does learning best occur? What’s the difference between a four year old brain and a three year old brain?” [Also,] looking at language function as well as therapies that could be developed – there’s some problem with the connections between these two brain areas: how can we fix that?
Unfortunately, psychotherapy has largely gone the way of psychopharmacology, which is brain-related obviously, but [I hope] that we’d be able to see brain dysfunction in psychiatric disorders more easily and maybe correct them or maybe pinpoint a treatment for that.
I think essentially it is going to become brain science.
Now that you’ve been at BCA for eight years, are there any other activities or programs that you are involved in here at school besides teaching psychology?
I am always trying to have an independent research student, at least one at a time, and I find that the students here are just overly eager to do one more thing, and so I try to meet with one or two students twice a week to help them develop a project. I’ve had some success with submitting to science fairs or competitions. I haven’t had that lately – it’s true – but I guess independent research is something that I welcome, and I find students always eager to do it.
It’s challenging to do because if you are doing cellular research it’s just cells in a dish in a laboratory but with humans – they’re tricky. Plus, we don’t have access to them easily except high school humans; I know they count. Plus, we have to get all kinds of permission to work with subjects, so we’re sort of struggling – we have this nascent independent research program.
What do you find different between teaching at the university level and teaching at BCA?
Well that’s a good question because when I came here I had only taught college students forever, and I expected massive differences. Instead I found that the students who I was teaching – they were seniors – they were more challenging than probably my most challenging college students. That is, they expected more out of me. I had to prepare all this stuff for them.
So I would say other than [that] – I’d say that with seniors, I find no differences, and 9th graders, they need some shepherding [and] some nurturing, but there is very little difference between 11th and 12th graders [here] and college students.
What do you enjoy about teaching at BCA?
Well I only know this. I don’t know what other high schools are like, but I expected discipline issues. I expected to have to convince students that this is important. What I like is that students are always, “Could you tell me more about that please?”
Teaching electives especially – I don’t mean to disparage seniors by the way – but by this point of the year seniors are like, “Just tell me: is this going to be on the test?” In my electives, even my – no I don’t have seniors in my electives – [students are] literally eager [and] bright-eyed. [It’s] four o’clock in the afternoon and their eyes are open; that is what I find most amazing because I know that if I were sitting still, I’d be sleeping at that point.
I really appreciate their intense motivation to learn, to challenge, to find out new things, and I learn from them all the time.
What do you like to do when you’re not teaching?
I seem to have fewer and fewer things that I do, but I do read and I do ride a bike – I’m a fair-weather cyclist. In fact, I’m about to do the [New York City] Five Boro Bike Tour [on] May 4th, so look for me on TV.
This is boring, but I do go to a gym as well. But, more interestingly I do garden; I have a small interest in gardening.
That is the most boring person in the world that I just described there.
I don’t think so.
I like to cook, and I’m a big movie fan. I go to as many movies as I can, and I often ask my students, “Did you see this? Did you see that?” And nobody does. I have a son who is a senior, and he tells me, “Nobody goes to serious movies, Mom. That’s not what high school kids do.” I drag him to all of them of course.
You’ve been doing the Five Boro Bike Tour every year?
I have for a long time actually.
It’s a fun tradition?
It is. And my whole family, well, not my whole family – there’s my daughter who lives in Manhattan, and she comes. My other daughter sometimes comes. My husband, and of course because I have direct control over him, my son does it too. My brother does it; we have a large group.
Finally, what do you hope to convey to your students in your classes?
I guess the take-home message from really any course I teach is that I want my students to be skeptical when somebody is presenting information to them, including me, and they should want to know where it came from, has it been validated, and find out who the people are who are presenting that information in the literature, for example.
But once it has been validated, and it is as close to fact as we get in natural science, to accept it as fact and not consider it as an opinion after that. I think there is this dangerous thing that is happening in our world, at least in the United States, that people are really mistakenly considering some facts as, “Well that’s just your opinion,” but in fact I know you know the difference between fact and opinion – you probably learned it in 2nd grade. It’s become important now because some people are doubting facts and saying, “Well what about this competing ‘theory.’”
There are certain things that don’t have any competition in the science department that are being presented as “other opinions,” and there is a big difference there.
So I guess it is, “Be skeptical, but also be accepting.”
Exactly, thank you. That is what I meant to say. Skepticism is good, but at some point you say, “Okay we’ve asked that, and we’ve answered that. Let’s move on.” If you don’t, science can’t move forward. If you keep entertaining “opinion, opinion, opinion,” you don’t move forward. You ask. You answer. You replicate. And then you move on.