Meet Manjula Salomon | Head of Academics/Global and Experiential

We had the good fortune of connecting with Manjula Salomon and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Manjula, can you tell us more about your background and the role it’s played in shaping who you are today?
I’m from Madras, now known as Chennai in Southern India. My mother worked for the British Medical Corps and my father returned form the UK to join Gandhi’s QUIT INDIA movement.
He was jailed 9 times and beaten badly. She came in to dress the prisoners’ wounds. They fell in love and she found it easier to marry him and lock him up whenever there were anti-British riots.

They were part of the interreligious/cross cast marriages that Gandhi encouraged.
My mother’s wedding sari was spun by Gandhi when he was in jail at the same time as my father..
It is my family’s strongest pride to have this.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
I don’t know if I can claim to be anything apart from my colleagues. My strength, I think, is that I never feel sorry for myself. Why should anything be easy, why should I consider these challenges ‘special’?

I think I had a lot of good luck, in meeting the right people to be guided by. I also had doors open for me-partly because this was America, and partly because I absorbed everything-like a sponge.. I had a few setbacks but I always recovered swiftly and never held grudges. ( I think that is important.

The third strength is that I have a wide and reaching sense of humour and wit. That helps above all- it makes the days lighter, it brings people around you closer, because they know they will laugh around you, and it lightens the burdens you all share.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
* I would go to Vizcaya(to look at the combination of an industrialist who loved beauty of building and land) – and Coral Gables( to see a garden city)
– and to Palmer Trinity School( to visit the peacocks and see children smiling and adults who will greet you.
* Next I would go to
– Calle Ocho – where the Cuban experience is bound up with Miami
– and then to Little Haiti -to eat street food and hear the Creole that makes Miami a multilingual city
* Next, I would spend time in the Everglades. I would ask Luca Martinez, a Senior . is Palmer Trinity School if he would
accompany me. He spends every weekend in the Everglades, and it is his life-mission.
* Finally, I would go down to the Keys- probably to Islamorada or even down to Key West.
I would go a boat ride with a small boat, eat gulf shrimp and stone crab and beans and rice..

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I’d like to dedicate this to the Global Education Benchmark Group (GEBG), who members are so important to my coming to Miami where my professional and personal enlarged so very greatly.

I’d especially like to dedicate this to Danny Reynolds, founder-member of GEBG ,who insisted on a friendship with me- a white man from Jackson, Mississippi and Manjula, a dark skinned woman from Southern India.. We wrote the Manual on intercultural friendship!

Image Credits
Dr. Manjula Salomon, Mr. Danny Reynolds, Ms. Brook DemeloGomez and students ( Palmer Trinity Private School.,Inc)