San Diego Business Journal

Mary Walshok

EDUCATION: Scholar, Author and Innovator Honored by Business Journal

■ By KAREN PEARLMAN

Dr. Mary Lindenstein Walshok, who in June retired as University of California San Diego Associate Vice Chancellor for Public Programs, says her rather unconventional childhood may have paved the way to her distinctive career path − and a very unique life.

The child of parents who immigrated in the 1920s from Sweden, Walshok was born in Santa Monica but grew up in Palm Springs near celebrities like Bob Hope, Elizabeth Taylor and Kirk Douglas. In the 1950s, she and other neighborhood children sang Christmas carols inside the home of actor Cary Grant.

“Having Bob Hope on one end of your street and Cary Grant at the other was definitely unique,” said Walshok, a longtime Del Mar resident. “I had some unusual childhood experiences that led to some interesting adult adventures” – like being decorated in 2002 with the rank of Knighthood, First Class, of the Royal Order of the Polar Star by King Gustaf of Sweden.

Walshok grew up bilingual, speaking Swedish with her parents at home. Her father owned a restaurant in Palm Springs and she recalls rolling meatballs and clearing plates just hours before she was crowned prom queen at Palm Springs High.

Likely as a result of a childhood spent living in both California and Europe in the years after World War II, Walshok is highly tuned into world affairs. It was during time spent in Europe, she said, that she developed “sensitive points of view” after witnessing everything from bombedout buildings in England to starving families in Italy. “The contrast of affluence in California and the poverty and wreckage across Europe deeply affected me,” she said.

An aspiring singer as a child and at one time planning a career in opera, Walshok switched gears in the 1960s at Pomona College, earning a bachelor's degree in sociology in 1964, and then both a master's and Ph.D. in sociology from Indiana University, in the late 1960s.

A Workforce Development Thought Leader

In the decades since, she has worked to open the minds and change the lives of thousands of people through her efforts at UC San Diego and in the community as an educator, author and visionary.

A thought leader in workforce development and regional growth, Walshok began her tenure not long after UC San Diego was founded in 1960. She started her career at the university as a research sociologist, then starting in 1972 joined UC San Diego's Division of Extended Studies. She was appointed associate dean in 1975 and dean in 1980.

She called San Diego of the 1970s and early ‘80s “a Navy town with a zoo.”

“We had a real estate crisis, a savings and loan crisis, we had General Dynamics with layoffs,” Walshok said. “We had lots of interesting research going on in engineering tech and life sciences but virtually no companies. And (UC San Diego) was isolated. It was a difficult time.”

An adjunct professor of sociology, Walshok has authored six books and written more than 100 articles, reports and book chapters on regional innovation, workforce development and the role of research institutions in regional economies.

Her books on the economy, entrepreneurship and the workforce include “Blue Collar Women: Pioneers on the Male Frontier” (1981); “Knowledge Without Boundaries: What America's Research Universities Can Do for the Economy, the Workplace and the Community” (1995); and “Closing America's Job Gap” (2011). She considers two of he rmost recent books - "Invention and Reinvention: The Evolution of San Diego's Innovation Economy (Stanford University Press) and "The Handbook on Regional Competitiveness (Oxford University Press) – .among her "most significant."

Launching UCSD-TV and the Park & Market Center

While at UCSD, Walshok oversaw exponential growth in the university's continuing education and public programming, with that division's enrollment now including more than 27,000 students taking nearly 4,500 courses.

In 1993, Walshok co-founded and helped launch UCSDTV, which today has more than a million YouTube subscribers. “I knew people at PBS and C-SPAN, and this was right after the Anita Hill hearings, and everybody watched that,” she said. “We were discovering that people loved talk radio and talk television, not just movies and documentaries. So we adopted a C-SPAN model and developed content and started broadcasting. We had Danny Glover, poetry readings, famous economists and historians and were broadcasting them way before Google and YouTube.”

Most recently, Walshok has championed the creation and rollout of the downtown San Diego multipurpose meeting and event center UC San Diego Park & Market, which opened in 2022. The 66,000-square-foot building adjacent to the Blue Line San Diego Trolley is a state-of-the-art facility that includes conference rooms, event spaces and an outdoor terrace. Mark Cafferty, CEO of the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation, has been a friend and colleague of Walshok since the two first met in the 1990s. Last month, at Walshok's urging, the San Diego Regional EDC moved its headquarters to the Park & Market building.

“Mary has partnered with many of us and with stunning results,” Cafferty said. “She is truly a reflective practitioner — meaning she doesn't just develop programs — she analyzes trends, outcomes and challenges through research and writing, which allows for continuous improvement in practice.” Walshok has spent her career “trying to be a bridge between academic knowledge and practical everyday knowledge,” Cafferty added.

Forging Partnerships

Throughout her career, Walshok has forged partnerships on campus and with

regional business leaders, creating innovative programs that continue to thrive to this day, including UC San Diego CONNECT, now known as CONNECT San Diego, one of the nation's first startup accelerators. That organization was launched in 1985 by Walshok, Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Jacobs, Richard Atkinson, president emeritus of the University of California and a group of other prominent San Diegans.

CONNECT initially connected UC San Diego scientists with private individuals and companies working in technology along with support communities that serve technology, including accountants, attorneys, bankers, venture capitalists, marketing consultants, advertising agencies and public relations firms.

Walshok said working with leaders like Jacobs and Atkinson taught her that “success is the reward of good performance. If you make success your goal, it is much harder to achieve. If instead you focus on solving a problem, getting the job done and performing well, your reward is profit, your reward is success, your reward is a good reputation.”

Walshok also said she believes that “too many young people today, and people in general, say they want to be rich and successful. But they're not passionate enough. Passion and confidence are the essential requirements of success and reward,” she said.

Walshok also co-founded Global CONNECT in 2003, a sister organization to the regionally focused CONNECT program. In 2005, CONNECT spun out of the university as an independent nonprofit while Global CONNECT remains a part of UC San Diego.

A strong advocate for working women throughout her career, in 1998, Walshok leveraged CONNECT to help start Athena, a nonprofit professional networking group for executive women in STEM fields. Later, she was a founder of San Diego Dialogue − since 2007 known as the Smart Border Coalition − which analyzes cross-border issues and policy initiatives.

A self-described “sparkplug,” Walshok has played a key role in accelerating the San Diego region's economic vitality for half a century. She says today that she clearly didn't do it alone. “You don't run a car with just a sparkplug, there are all those moving parts,” she said. “But without a sparkplug, you can't get the whole machine to start moving.”

She calls herself “an academic entrepreneur. What does an entrepreneur do?” Walshok asked, rhetorically. “He or she sees a problem that needs to be solved, a problem that others often don't see and he or she comes up with a solution. He or she mobilizes people and resources so that the problem can be solved. That's the big picture.”

In addition to her knighthood, Walshok has been recognized with a plethora of prestigious awards during her eventful, 50year career, including the Bynum Tudor Honorary Lectureship at Oxford University. She holds an honorary doctorate from the Stockholm School of Economics and is the recipient of the highest award for service to the society and the economy presented by the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering and Economic Sciences, of which she is an elected member.

She also serves on the board of the La Jolla Playhouse, the San Diego Opera, the United States-Mexico Foundation for Science, ACCESS Academy, the Kyoto Symposium Organization and the Girard Foundation.

In helping present Walshok with her Lifetime Achievement Award at this year's Business Women of the Year event, Mark Cafferty said he is “proud” to be Walshok's friend. Then he praised the visionary business leader with her own words: “I remember that Mary once told me that friendship is wonderful but friendship in a cause is powerful. So I just want to thank you, Mary, on behalf of lots of people for these wonderfully powerful years.”

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2022-11-28T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-11-28T08:00:00.0000000Z

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