Story by Leslie Linthicum Photos by Roberto E. Rosales

In his memoir, “Running Dreams,” Servan recalls the moment on that patrol that his old life — young and on a path to a career in police work in his native Peru — abruptly ended and the long and difficult journey began to a new life he never would have imagined.
“My right boot brushed up against something. The object, about the size of my fist, felt different somehow, lighter than I would have thought for a rock. I picked it up. Its mud- encrusted, rusty surface looked as if it had been shot through by bullets. Suddenly, it exploded in my right hand.”

In the hospital, his head bandaged and on strong pain killers, Servan waited to be told the extent of his injuries. Every night he inched his aching left hand a little closer to his right until he finally could reach across his body and realize his worst fear. His right hand was gone.

Today, at 57, Servan remembers a moment he had as a 20-year-old, on vacation from the detective training academy. He was poolside, taking in the beautiful flowers and the beautiful girls.

“I’m thinking, ‘So OK, I’m getting ready to become a detective. I might be exposed to fighting and I might lose my legs. I could be okay. And then I could maybe lose my arms. I would be OK. And then I could become deaf. I’ll be fine; I can still do everything else. And then I thought, what if I become blind?’ And I didn’t want to think about it. No, no, that would be too bad. I don’t want to think about it.”

When the bandages came off his face, Servan was blind. He had lost his right eye, and surgery to restore the vision in his left eye was unsuccessful.

Servan is on the phone from Burlington, Vt., where he is attending a conference on the importance of data in vocational rehabilitation.

As the executive director of the Nebraska Commission for the Blind and Visually Impaired, Servan travels frequently.

He wonders whether his poolside ruminations about blindness were a foreshadowing of his destiny or just the idle thoughts of a young man about to embark on a life of adventure. But he realizes he was right about one thing — blindness has been harder to overcome than losing a hand.

“The misconceptions about blindness, the awkward way people would treat me even though I was the same person, that was the hardest to overcome, especially at the beginning,” Servan says.

His career in policing came to an end, as did the hobby he was passionate about — running. His girlfriend left him. It was a depressing time, especially for a young man who was intent on finding a rewarding career.

“There’s this idea that there’s a lane for blind people to stay in and the sort of jobs would be expected,” Servan says. Helpful and well-meaning people suggested massage therapy, telephone operator, musician.

“In the back of my mind, I knew I could do something, you know?”

Servan’s father died of a heart attack while he was away at training. But as his son was growing up, he offered what would become prescient advice. “It is not the circumstances of birth that make a man; it is what he makes of himself. You will have ups and downs, but your strength of character will show as you get up after every fall.”

Carlos Servan earned three degrees from UNM after losing his sight.

In Peru, Servan had learned the basics of the Braille code and how to walk with a cane. As he was living in Baltimore with his mother along to help him, Servan began to take English as a Second Language classes and found a sponsor for his application to immigration services to stay in the United States.

Because Spanish was his first language, Servan was sent to New Mexico to continue his training. In Alamogordo, Servan was immersed in learning how to live independently without sight.

“The skills of blindness have to do with learning and embracing the Braille system and learning how to get around in all situations with the white cane,” Servan says. Doing your own shopping, cooking, using the stove. Not just the basics, but mastering them.”
After he finished the course at Alamogordo, Servan moved to Albuquerque and continued to learn English. When he thought he was ready, he applied to UNM.

“It was a big challenge,” Servan says, learning how to navigate the campus, find his classrooms and get his reading materials on tape. He learned to type his papers with one hand.

“I guess I got good training in Alamogordo, because once I knew where my classes were, it was easy,” Servan says. He likes navigating in crowded spaces. “When there are a lot of people in a place, it’s easier for a blind person because if you get
confused, you can ask anybody. And you can listen to the footsteps, where people are going, when people turn to the left or to the right. You can hear when people go upstairs.”

Servan got his BA in political science in 1993 and for a second time was accepted into law school. At UNM he studied law while also pursuing a master’s degree in public administration. With an MPA in 1995 and JD in 1997, Servan was ready to work in the field he had come to know and respect — services for the blind.

He was hired as the deputy director of the Nebraska Commission for the Blind and Visually Impaired and in 2017 became the agency’s executive director. Like the New Mexico Commission for the Blind, which helped Servan get his footing when he first landed in Albuquerque, the Nebraska commission offers independent living and vocational rehabilitation to help blind people, like Servan did, pursue their chosen career fields.

Servan has always advocated for full immersion of the blind in life. too. “You know, when I talk to people here, they usually just want to settle for jobs or benefits that will only take care of them. I say, ‘You can do more.

You can own your own house, you can go on vacation, you can have money for your retirement. And not only that, but you just feel productive.’”

Servan has also seen a change in younger blind people, especially those who have come of age since the adoption of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

“So the blind folks in my generation, we never thought the world would change for us. We thought we have to do everything for ourselves,” Servan says. “But after the ADA, the new generation, they say, ‘Wait a minute, I have the right. You better make this accessible.’

They’re more assertive and that’s good.”

Greg Trapp (’87 BA, ’90 JD) met Servan in the late 1980s on a bus trip to a National Federation of the Blind conference in Denver. Trapp was finishing law school, Servan was thinking of applying and, even though Servan still struggled with English, the two hit it off.

“Kind of kindred souls, kindred travelers,” says Trapp, who is executive director of the New Mexico Commission for the Blind.

“The skills of blindness have to do with learning and embracing the Braille system and learning how to get around in all situations with the white cane.”

They remained friends and colleagues and Trapp has been impressed by Servan’s fortitude. “He was able to overcome both the blindness and the physical disability and also the language barrier,” he says. “He really is a leader in our field and he has accomplished a tremendous amount in his life and a lot of blind people have benefited from his work.”

They spend time together regularly as they travel to conventions — Trapp was president of the National Council of State Agencies of the Blind in 2007 and Servan just finished his term as president — and before Trapp was married, he liked to take advantage of Servan’s charisma and Latin accent to meet women.

“We would go to the hotel bar and I would say, ‘Carlos, start talking.’”

Servan began his latest vocation — author — only as a way for him to review the astounding events of his life. As he wrote he began to think he might have a story that could help or inspire others and he eventually found a publisher who brought the memoir to bookstores. Of course, it’s on Audible as well.

As to the ending of Servan’s story, it is not yet in its final chapter. He has exciting innovations in the works in Nebraska, including developing equipment that will help high school and college students do laboratory science independently and using
a 3D printer so blind people can name something they would like to experience — say the artery system of the heart — and have it quickly in their hands.

He ended up marrying Catalina, the woman he began dating after his injury. They have four children — all graduated from college and several in graduate school. His mother settled in Albuquerque and his siblings live there today.

As for running, Servan still does. He takes to a bike path in Lincoln with a partner, one of his children or a colleague, holding one end of his cane and running a step or two ahead of him.

Also, Servan jokes, he walks so fast with his cane that maybe running isn’t even necessary.

“Blindness, it’s just part of my life,” Servan says. “Obviously I have challenges, but we all do in parts of our life.”

Story by Leslie Linthicum Photos by Roberto E. Rosales

Richelle Montoya, who had been a convenience store clerk, executive assistant and the elected president of the Torreon Chapter — one of 110 local government entities on the reservation — was sworn in as the nation’s first female vice president.

When Montoya (’11 BUS) spoke at her inauguration, she said in Navajo, “You are all my children.”

Montoya says that is the principle that guides her as she takes on the biggest and most demanding job of her life.

“I feel that somebody needs to be protective of my family, my children,” she says. “I feel that our men, they haven’t done that. If they did, we wouldn’t have domestic violence.

If they did, we wouldn’t have, unfortunately, incest. We wouldn’t have rape. And so I feel that myself and other women in leadership positions, we have that role now.” Montoya relates her serpentine path to a college degree and myth-busting election at the end of yet another long day as the vice president of the Navajo Nation. Decked out in her customary velveteen blouse, concho belt, turquoise necklace and Apple iWatch. She has been up since 5 a.m. participating in the Northern Navajo Nation Fair, waving to the crowds from the Navajo Nation float in the legendary Saturday morning parade, and then driving from Shiprock to Albuquerque to get a little sleep before a 4 a.m. wakeup call to represent the tribe at the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta.

Life has changed dramatically for Montoya since she first applied to join the Nygren campaign and then listened to the election results on election night. She moved from her home into the official residence of the vice president in the Navajo
Nation capital of Window Rock, Ariz.

She organizes her days around travel to communities around the vast reservation, which spreads into the states of Arizona, Utah and
New Mexico, and meetings in Window Rock with constituents, often fueled by a white chocolate mocha from Starbucks.

Recently separated from her husband of 11 years, a split she attributes in part to the pace of her new job, Montoya lives with her adult son Trenedad, who she can rely on to keep the house running.

“At this point, don’t even ask me how much a gallon of milk is,” Montoya says. ” I’m not going to the store.”

Montoya was born and raised in Torreon, the easternmost community on the reservation. By the time she was nearly 30 she had bounced between her home, nearby Cuba and Albuquerque working at a series of jobs at convenience stores. She was working as a clerk at the 7/11 in Cuba and taking care of her three young children when her older sister suggested she apply to the Albuquerque Public Schools temp pool.

She got hired and wound up answering the phones for the Indian Education Program. Her boss, Nancy Martine Alonzo from the Ramah Navajo community, eventually hired her fulltime, then promoted her to executive assistant and then data technician.

Alonzo, who was working toward a master’s degree in education administration at UNM, then gave Montoya the bad news. Without
a college degree, she could never move up further in the school district. She encouraged Montoya to go to college.

“She talked to anybody and everybody who worked for her about education and how important it was,” says Montoya.

Montoya took the advice seriously, but when her mother suffered a heart attack, she moved back to Torreon to help her recover.

It took her sister’s prodding and example — Vivian Montoya-Watuema enrolled at UNM and earned her BA in 2009 — to persuade Montoya she could have a place in higher education. Starting at CNM in Albuquerque, Montoya studied police science, then transferred to San Juan College in Farmington, where she received her associate’s degree.

When she walked by a UNM recruiting table at San Juan, she realized she could pursue a bachelor’s degree at UNM without leaving Farmington, where she had settled with her husband Olsen Chee and their blended family of six children.

Montoya enrolled and took all but one of her classes at a UNM satellite in Farmington.

By the time she walked with her graduating class at the Pit and received her diploma in University Studies, Montoya had no grand plans for a career, “I just wanted my degree, that was it,” she says. “I wanted that piece of paper, that diploma that said, Richelle Montoya finished something.”

With her husband no longer able to work, Montoya took a job as executive assistant at DNA-People’s Legal Services in Window Rock, and she spent a lot of her time chaperoning her daughter Autumn during her 2018-2019 reign as Miss Navajo.

Montoya also began to consider public service. Her father had served as chapter secretary and vice president in the Torreon chapter and had encouraged his children to be involved.

Montoya joined the local school board and then, frustrated that issues such as domestic violence and language preservation weren’t being adequately addressed, she ran for and won the election for chapter president.

“I became president of my chapter because no one was listening to me,” Montoya says.

She met the future Navajo President Nygren when he spoke to her chapter via Zoom during the pandemic and then called her up after the meeting to ask how he did. She eventually joined his campaign and was then asked to apply to be his running mate.

She liked Nygren’s story — like her, he was the child of divorce who lived without electricity and running water and spoke Diné fluently. And, like her, he was committed to bringing services in the sprawling nation up to date and solving problems by consensus. She was also impressed that he was committed to picking a woman to serve beside him.

“One of the things that I’ve always done in my family is we don’t have gender roles,” Montoya says. “I always brag that my daughters can go outside and chop wood and do oil changes and my sons can make food, do the laundry, clean the house.”

In her new job, Montoya believes she brings an approach to decision- making rooted in a long line of matriarchs who went before her.
“I feel that I bring the perspective of, ‘Slow down, let’s look at this issue from every single aspect that we can — yours, mine, hers, his, theirs. And let’s see what solutions everybody has. Let’s see which one has worked, which one hasn’t worked and let’s not repeat what’s not working.’

And a lot of the time, it’s just me listening.”

During the campaign, Montoya talked openly about her history with domestic violence. Her mother, who was married at 14, suffered abuse at the hands of her father, which led to their divorce. Her grandmother was also abused and her daughter had experience with a controlling boyfriend.

“I have three biological children,” Montoya says. “Each one of them has a different dad, and each one of the relationships ended because of domestic violence. And I kept saying, ‘No more. I’m not going to do this.’”

Although domestic violence was not part of the administration’s platform, women come to Montoya to seek help and she listens and tries to iron out red tape that’s getting in the way of their obtaining protective orders.

“I feel like my mom’s mom went through it. My mom went through it. I went through it. My daughter got through it a little bit. And now I’m like, hopefully my granddaughter never has to.”

At the Balloon Fiesta in Albuquerque, Montoya got a balloon ride and time to be alone with her thoughts. She visits the annual fiesta to connect with the spirit of her late son, Romeo, who was born in Albuquerque on Oct. 5 and was held by his mom as she watched balloons float by.

While her family is central to Montoya’s life, she has drawn a wall between them and her official duties.

“One of my biggest asks of my family is not to be around,” she says. “That’s my way of protecting them.

I don’t want them to be around my office or events. I want them to be home. I want them to live their lives. I want them to continue to do their traditions, their prayers, and everything they possibly can do to include me in on those because, of course, I need it.”

By Ellen Marks

That kid was John Hight, who is now creating fantasy worlds for a global audience as senior vice president and general manager of the World of Warcraft gaming franchise.

The franchise, which has been a major critical and commercial success since its release in 2004, allows huge numbers of people to play against each other at the same time in online role-playing games. A 1985 University of New Mexico graduate, Hight oversees game development and operations of the franchise, which is owned by Blizzard Entertainment.

Previously, he worked for Sony Computer Entertainment America and Atari, Inc. All told, he has worked on 56 games and interactive products.

If you have a favorite feature or place in World of Warcraft, you can probably thank Hight for having had a hand in developing it.

“Over 260 million people on our planet have, at one time or another, played a Warcraft game,” says Hight, 63, of San Clemente, Calif. “Our mission statement is to build a fantasy universe that delights and connects everyone everywhere. We want you to come here, escape, be who you want to be.”

Hight, who won a Distinguished Alumni Award from UNM’s School of Engineering last year, showed a kind of genius for programming early on. He was an undergraduate at UNM when he agreed to help his older brother, George, modify an early version of a computerized general ledger system for George’s Albuquerque accounting practice. George Hight said his brother’s work involved moving a basic business operating system to personal computers, which was “really way ahead of its time for 1983.”

The brothers and several others spun off those innovations and started a company that subsequently sold for a healthy profit. In fact, the younger Hight was able to buy a house in Taylor Ranch, becoming a homeowner before he turned 21.

“It took a very powerful intellect to be able to work at the core level of computers to move the operating system,” says brother George, who lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. “He’s brilliant.”

At the same time, John Hight says he started “tinkering and writing little (computer) games on the side. And I kind of dug it.”
His initial career dream of marine biology (he still keeps a 200-gallon saltwater aquarium in his office) morphed into computer science, with an interest in fine arts. He says he wanted to start learning about “things that were more entertainment-oriented,” feeding his growing interest in computer graphics and gaming.

“It took a very powerful intellect to be able to work at the core level of computers to move the operating system.”

The New Mexico native, whose first job was at Clark’s Pet Emporium in Albuquerque, decided to combine his skills in programming and storytelling and produce what are now called massively multiplayer online games.

After getting his degree in computer science at UNM, Hight went on to earn a Master’s in Business from the University of Southern California.

Although he has gone far afield to market Blizzard’s games around the world, he and his family return three or four times a year to a 150-year- old casita they own in Santa Fe.

“It’s a home away from home,” he says. “I wear my boots and cowboy hat. I don’t do that here (in California) at all.”

New Mexico Roots

The Hight family has a long history in Gallup, where the future gaming guru grew up.

Hight’s grandfather was a mayor of Gallup, and his father was a city councilor and mayor pro-tem. One
great-uncle served as police chief; the other headed the fire department.

The younger Hight started taking college classes at UNM’s Gallup campus when he was a junior in high school.

In elementary school, Hight spent a lot of time playing with classmates from the Navajo Nation, who were often bused in and sometimes lived in off- reservation dormitories during the week. Hight and his family lived directly across the street from Red Rock Elementary.

John Hight melds computer science with storytelling. (Photo: Blizzard Entertainment)

Those childhood experiences were in his mind when he created Hecubah, the main antagonist in the game Nox, who is queen of a tribe called the Necromancers. (The character is named after a caiman Hight’s brother kept until he had to donate it to a zoo.)

According to the plot line, Hecubah was left behind as a child, but she learns about her heritage and the great war waged years before between humans and her people, the Necromancers.

“WoW was a game that actually brought thousands of people together in a single server,” Hight says.

“She can resurrect the dead, but rather than have her just be this evil thing, I wanted us to understand what her culture is all about,” Hight says. He would like players to understand that she’s “really just protecting her people.”

“Through the course of the game, as you’re attacking her, as you’re fending off her and her minions, you’re beginning to realize that it’s cultural identity that’s important and… you are basically making assumptions about what’s best for the world. You’re trying to take her out and, what you’re really committing is, to some extent, genocide.”

In fact, Hight says, much of the entertainment industry is wrestling with “how to come to grips with this — here in America: Who are we and how are we excluding some and including others? What is our cultural identity?”

Not Just a Game

Blizzard’s latest addition to its product line is Warcraft Rumble, which is for a younger audience, Hight says.

While it’s like other role-playing games in that it can last for hours, it also can be polished off in a three- minute session — “perfect for waiting for the bus or for Uber,” Hight says. “This generation does not want to wait for anything. They want it now.”
The company releases games periodically to keep things fresh and to make sure the brand remains relevant, Hight says. World of Warcraft, known to gamers as WoW, is nearly two decades old, launching “before Facebook (when) people were just beginning to create their own webpage.”

In other words, eons ago, technologically speaking.

“WoW was a game that actually brought thousands of people together in a single server,” Hight says. “You could run around as an avatar. You might be a dwarf, I might be an elf… and we could interact with each other. More important, we were part of the online experience. So it wasn’t just a game, it was a manifestation of us being online.”

The game has attracted a second generation of fans who grew up playing with their parents. And one of its more famous is an 80-year-old woman, known as “WoW grandma.”

“She has a big following of people,” Hight says. “She streams her playing. She’s flown out here, and I’ve met her.”

Hight also has inspired fans among his many colleagues over the years. Holly Longdale, WoW executive producer and vice president, says Hight is exceedingly modest, so “the depth and breadth of his experience and expertise in this field is not widely recognized.”

He has developed “games that are pivotal in how we make games now. He’s like a delightful nerd. He’s everything we need.”

By Jenny Block

Goldberg grew up in Albuquerque, the youngest of three children raised by a single mother. When she was 17 and attending Manzano High School, she performed stand-up for the first time at her high school talent show… and she won, despite it not going quite as planned.

“I was wearing a pair of jeans, a button-down and a tie with polar bears on it, and I’m talking about my boyfriends and why it’s not working out so well,” Goldberg said. “And now I’m like, maybe it wasn’t working out so well because of my tie and button-down collection.”

Goldberg (’01 BA), who makes her living today as a working writer and comedian with a standup routine based on observational humor and politics, says comedy is something that has always lived inside of her.

“When I was younger, I used to listen to the Comic Relief team with Whoopi Goldberg, Robin Williams and Billy Crystal,” she says. “I don’t think I realized it at the time, but I was absorbing everything and I was studying and it was just something that I wanted to do.”

While Goldberg was attending The University of New Mexico, she went every year to see a show in Albuquerque called Funny Lesbians for a Change, which served as a fundraiser for higher education scholarships for women in the community.

“I saw some of my now colleagues headlining and I wanted to know what that laughter felt like,” says Goldberg, even though she would not get on a comedy stage for years.

Goldberg enrolled at UNM to study criminology and English, thinking she would teach English in prisons. She switched majors to communications with a math minor and finally landed on physical education, aiming to be a gym teacher, and graduated in seven years.

She came out as gay at 18 and found UNM to be a safe space as she found her community.

“I think just being able to go to such an outstanding school that was so close to home gave me an opportunity to continue to find myself being a newly out lesbian in a community where I felt accepted, I felt safe, and I felt like I could be myself on the campus,” Goldberg says. “It’s a place where people can feel safe and not just accepted, but celebrated.”

She bartended at Applebee’s to pay the bills while she was in college and student teaching. “Every once in a while, one of my students’ parents would come in and be like, ‘You made my child care about school again.’” Goldberg remembers.

“I affected the kids in the most beautiful way. I loved it. But I also had this dream gnawing at me that I really wanted to keep pursuing.”

Goldberg found she could make more money bartending full time than teaching and continued to attend Funny Lesbians for a Change when the show came through town. She confessed her dream of doing standup to the woman she was dating, who encouraged her to audition for the show. Goldberg finally took her advice but arrived after the audition closed and was told to come back in a year. During that year, the two stopped seeing each and the woman moved away. Not long after, Goldberg discovered that she had been killed in a plane crash.

“And, so, it was one of those watershed moments in your life where you go, ‘What do I really want to do?’” Goldberg says. “And she believed in me and she went to that audition with me. So, sort of in her memory and because of her encouragement, I went back and auditioned the next year and they gave me a seven-minute set in front of 650 people at the KiMo Theatre in downtown Albuquerque.”

The show was a turning point in Goldberg’s life. “I hit my first big joke and I heard the most deafening laughter I’d ever heard, and I was like, this is what I’m supposed to be doing. And I knew I wanted to be on stage.”

The 47-year-old, who now lives in Los Angeles, says things started falling into place after that. She performed regularly at a comedy club in Albuquerque and videotaped her sets. She sent the tapes to Olivia Travel, “the travel company for lesbians and LGBTQ+ women,” and got a gig. She is now a long-time regular aboard their cruises and on their resort trips.

“Dana is an incredible comedic activist and her ability to combine the two in an LGBTQ+ frame is so timely and effective,” says Judy Dlugacz, the co-founder and president of Olivia Travel. “Off-stage, Dana is caring and such a kind being! I have watched her grow up in comedy and am so proud of the work she does in such a smart, funny way.”

In 2007 Goldberg started a one- night comedy show in Albuquerque called The Southwest Funny Fest, which, up until the pandemic, she produced for 13 years.

The format brought together Goldberg and three other female headlining comedians from HBO, Showtime or Last Comic Standing for a one-night show to benefit either New Mexico AIDS Services or Equality New Mexico.

Albuquerqueans crave comedy and make for an incredible audience, says Goldberg, who made the show all-women to ensure women got the stage time they deserved.

“Most importantly, I wanted to continue to give back to a community that helped me get my start. And, so, it was a reciprocal relationship where I brought something to them that they wanted and they continued to come out and sell out the KiMo Theatre year after year.” She’s hoping to bring the show back this year.

In 2009, Goldberg’s career took a turn toward fundraising work when an auctioneer dropped out at a gala for the Human Rights Campaign in San Francisco.

“Someone on the board emailed me and said, ‘Do you know how to do a live auction?’ she recalls. “And I was like, ‘Let’s find out.’ So, I got on stage and I found a way to combine my comedy with some strange dormant gift of fundraising and live auctioneering that I never learned professionally, but just lives inside me, and pulled off one of the best live auctions that the gala had ever seen.”

Joe Solmonese, the president of the Human Rights Campaign at the time, was so impressed with Goldberg’s performance that he invited her to be a part of HRC and the organization’s national dinner in Washington, D.C.

“And so later that year,” she says, “I got on stage and went on between then-President Barack Obama and Lady Gaga.”

When Goldberg emceed, organizations raised big money.

“I found a very beautiful combination of comedy and fundraising,” she says. “When people are happy, they donate and they give.”

“Her remarkable talent for injecting humor into our advocacy efforts, all while mobilizing crucial resources for pressing causes, is unparalleled,” Says Kelley Robinson, the current president of the Human Rights Campaign & Human Rights Campaign Foundation. “She effortlessly blends laughter and heartfelt concern, providing both relief during tough times and renewed vigor to our mission.”

Working with HRC opened doors to the Trevor Project, GLAAD, Planned Parenthood, Lambda Legal, and other organizations. For the past five years, Goldberg has hosted the annual fundraising gala for the Child Rescue Coalition, a Florida-based nonprofit that helps law enforcement catch and prosecute child predators.

“She has been a big part of us growing that event from a small gathering of local supporters to being a sold-out and greatly anticipated gala in Palm Beach County,” says Carly Yoost, co-founder and CEO of Child Rescue Coalition. “People have described our event as being a wonderful ride that Dana takes you on, where one minute you are laughing, then brought to tears, then standing from your chair cheering.”

Goldberg’s career has allowed her to work with a roster of celebrities, including film and stage star Kristin Chenoweth. The two met at the Trevor Project gala and then finally shared the stage at the Gay Chorus of San Francisco gala in 2019, at which Chenoweth performed. After that, they continued to appear together at a number of events and became fast friends.

Chenoweth describes Goldberg’s topical humor as “balls to the walls.” “It’s something to behold when you’re watching her make everybody laugh,” Chenoweth says. “Not just people who agree with her — everybody. And not a lot of comedians, and dare I say women, have that quality, without overstepping. She can overstep and you still find yourself laughing.”

Chenoweth has long been an ally to the LGBTQ community.

“Comedians like Dana are so vital and so important to the community,” she says. “Not just to be heard, but to be able to laugh at oneself and to be able to discuss politics and laugh; and make it a meaningful conversation is really important. And she does all of these with aplomb.” As Goldberg reflects on her career, she is grateful for the life she has crafted and for the moments she will never forget.

“I get to do this because I know how to make people laugh,” she says. “I get to see the world because I bring joy to people, and there’s a value to that in our society. There’s a value to making people happy in our society.”

Robinson of the HRC agrees. “Her work has allowed us to gain the resources to elect more LGBTQ+ elected leaders than ever before and to mobilize more Equality voters than ever too — at a time when our world desperately needs real leadership,” Robinson says. “If you were to ask me for the name of one of the most important people that is fueling the movement for LGBTQ+ equality, I would say Dana Goldberg.”

Story by Ellen Marks Photos by Roberto E. Rosales

It’s an arcane question, and in the distant past it would have taken Perkins — a professor of medicine at UNM — a day or two to scour the literature and find an answer. In the near past, he could have turned to Google or another search engine to call up a list of possible answers, follow the links and try to determine which was accurate.

Instead, it took him 15 seconds using ChatGPT-4, an advanced artificial intelligence instrument that scours multiple sources to collate an answer, in this case 223.

It’s a tool that has people both fearing its doomsday potential and hailing it as a revolutionary step in education, research, ethics and likely every field of study at UNM.

“Some people are just despondent, thinking this is terrible,” says Leo Lo, dean of UNM’s College of University Libraries and Learning Sciences. “Some are optimistic, like me. Some feel it’s not ready for prime time, and that it has a lot of flaws. But the fact is it’s already here. Education will be changed forever because this thing happened.”

Like universities everywhere, UNM is struggling to understand what the world of generative AI will bring and how to best prepare for it and use it to its best advantage. And it’s doing so as the technology undergoes constant and rapid change.

“We’re trying to run as fast as we can,” says Perkins, co-director of the medical school’s MD/PhD program and board president of the state’s Bioscience Authority. “It’s changing as we talk. By the time we hang up, it will probably be different.”

UNM is among 19 universities in the United States and Canada that are participating in a two-year research project to prepare for advanced technology. The work is being done under the auspices of Ithaka S+R, a not-for- profit research group.

“…the fact is it’s already here. Education will be changed forever because this thing happened.”
Dean Leo Lo

Todd Quinn

There are currently no university-wide guidelines at UNM, other than the standard prohibitions against plagiarism and cheating, says Todd Quinn, an Ithaka team member and business and economics librarian in Libraries and Learning Sciences at UNM.

Generative AI is fundamentally different from basic artificial intelligence (think Siri or customer service chatbots) because it can create new content.

Melanie Moses, a UNM computer science and biology professor, describes it as “a new category of algorithms.”

“The basic technology hasn’t changed much in the last 50 years, but the impressive ability to generate new images and texts and videos, that’s really exploded in the last year,” says Moses, who runs a biological computation lab. “It is kind of astounding.”

The key to the explosion, says Moses, is new tools that rely on “billions and billions of lines of text to make predictions based on patterns in the past.”

Often, the results of a ChatGPT search can be so convincing that they are indistinguishable from what a human would create.

The technology has the potential for everything from addressing climate change or cybersecurity problems to finding cancerous tumors at a very early stage.

However, the tools, as they exist now, can yield grossly inaccurate results.

“Sometimes it just makes stuff up and then doubles down on its lies,” Moses says. “It can be quite misleading.” Lo pointed to an incident at Texas A&M University-Commerce this year in which an animal sciences instructor suspected at least some of his students had used ChatGPT to complete their work.

To test his theory, he fed some of his students’ writings into ChatGPT and asked it whether artificial intelligence had produced the work. The tool claimed credit for all of it and the instructor gave his entire class an “incomplete” grade.

Students unleashed an outcry, the university said it was investigating, and critics pointed out that ChatGPT is not considered a reliable resource for answering such a question. The university later said no students failed the class or were barred from graduating because of the issue.

“The tool is very good at synthesizing a lot of data but we’re seeing a lot of students getting fake citations” on research papers, says Lo, who is leading UNM’s six-member Ithaka team. “We have to tell them these don’t exist.”

Another difficult problem involves biases that plague the information found everywhere online. For example, a basic assumption is that doctors are men, so anything produced with generative AI is likely to have that bias, Moses says.

A case in point: An early AI model was asked to predict the winner of the 2016 presidential election. Contrary to what many polls had forecast, the model’s prediction was Republican Donald Trump over Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

“But then the question is why, and the why is, well, because men always win,” Perkins says. “Based on our culture, that’s correct, right? You could say it was pretty smart, but is it just reflecting, like a mirror?”

Moses points out that the gargantuan amounts of information that feed the intelligence tools can include outdated historical records, such as “books written in 1750.”

“Any stereotype you can come up with, these models tend to not just reflect them but exaggerate them,” Moses says. The internet is full of vile, violent kinds of text.

The internet, you might argue, represents the worst of humanity.” And what’s on the internet forms the building blocks for much of AI’s output.

Perkins says he offers a “positive spin” on the bias problem. Since our culture is full of biases anyway, he says, looking closely at what these new tools produce is another opportunity to examine humanity’s prejudices.

“It’s not like ChatGPT is making the biases up,” he says. “They’re in our culture, they’re in our data and in all these materials the (tools) have been trained on. It gives us another opportunity to confront them and address them and deal with them.”

And if there’s some resistance to adapting to the new AI reality, that’s probably to be expected, says Doug Ziedonis, MD, MPH, CEO of the UNM Health System and executive vice president of UNM Health Sciences.

Ziedonis, a psychiatrist, said he and other physicians chafed at the electronic health record when it was introduced years ago, and now accept it as part of medical practice.

“At a very high level, to me,” he says, “it’s not a question of if it’s going to happen. It’s happening. And I think that’s going to profoundly shift how we teach everybody.”

And how about what some say is the most frightening prospect of AI: that it could advance far enough to take over the world and make humans its slaves?

“It doesn’t keep me up at night,” says Moses. “My real concern with that way of thinking is that it puts the fear into something that’s in the distant future that no one feels like they can do anything about. It puts less attention on, we can make these algorithms better right now.”

But ask ChatGPT itself if it has any such apocalyptic plans, and the answer is an artificially intelligent “no way.”

“The idea of AI taking over the world is a common theme in science fiction,” the chatbot says. ”Generative AI, like the technology that powers me, is a tool created by humans to perform specific tasks. It doesn’t have consciousness, intentions or the ability to plan or make executive actions independently.”

Carter Frost, a UNM senior who is studying computer science, says he uses advanced AI extensively because “it’s quite useful for boilerplate stuff.”

It can write computer code and do other tasks that can easily be double-checked for accuracy, Frost says.

“Even when it’s wrong, it’s not mission critical, and I can just do it myself,” he says. “Ninety-five percent of the stuff it creates is correct or good enough.”

And while Frost says he doesn’t rely on ChatGPT to do his homework, he does use it to help with the intermediate steps of getting a project done, for example breaking a big job into smaller pieces – as long as there is no classroom ban on doing so. “It’s definitely saving me a lot of time,” he says. “It gives me time to work on maybe higher-level things… because a lot of the busy work has been taken away.”

Adrian Faust, also an undergraduate majoring in computer science, turns to AI for help in reviewing concepts he’s learned in the classroom. It can explain things that still might be fuzzy, he says.

And it’s that kind of potential as a “partner in learning” that makes Lo optimistic about a technological revolution. Say you’re out of your depth in a math class, he says.

The instructor has explained something to you several times, but it’s not getting through.

Before, “If I still didn’t get it, I didn’t get it and I’m stuck,” Lo says. “But (with AI), I could say, ‘Explain it to me like a 5-year-old.’ This tool is limited only by your own imagination, in some ways.”

Moses hopes that someday “everyone has an AI tutor who understands where they are and how to get to what they need to know.”

Students with a learning or other disability could receive specialized guidance to help them keep up.

“I can see it’s possible these tools could help students learn much better,” she says. “That’s much closer to possible than it was before these tools came out in the last year. Will we get there? I don’t know. It needs several pieces to fall in place.”

Ithaka S+R’s multi-university effort to get an academic handle on generative AI includes Ivy League schools, such as Princeton and Yale universities; large state universities like the University of Arizona and UNM; and smaller less well-known schools, such as Bryant University in Rhode Island and Queen’s College in Ontario, Canada.

The first step has been surveying faculty across each participating campus to “give us more insight into what’s happening locally,” Quinn says.

The UNM team is learning that some instructors are using generative AI to simply manage and respond to email. Lo, for one, does so, but he lets the recipient know when his response has a little artificial assistance.

Others are using it to “brainstorm concepts,” while some are “purposely using it in the classroom,” Quinn says.

What Quinn says he worries about is the effect on white- collar jobs across the economy, which are already being threatened by the capabilities of artificial intelligence.

“There are already places where AI does a good enough job for what we want,” he says. “That will mean disruption for many positions.”

One thing is certain, and that is universities will have to teach students to ethically and effectively use these tools as a job skill, no matter what field they end up in, several faculty members said.

“If you’re in the workforce, you need to know how to use this, or you’re not going to be very competitive as an individual, and also, your organization is not going to be,” says Laura Hall, a division head in the Health Sciences Library & Informatics Center and a member of UNM’s Ithaka team.

Says Lo: “People who know how to use AI will have a huge advantage. There’s a saying out there: ‘Humans are not going to be replaced by AI, at least in the short-term, but will be replaced by people who use AI.’”

David Perkins

“Instructors may have to figure out other ways to assess learning.”

And if students are getting artificial assistance in doing homework, maybe they don’t need to learn whatever skills the homework is trying to teach, he says. “I think maybe this is a chance for us to rethink what education is. Maybe we use mental energy for something of a higher order.”

UNM as a whole, and certain academic departments, have started preparing for what’s ahead on the AI front.

For example, a new AI website — airesources.unm.edu/ — lists resources for students, faculty and staff. Ziedonis says he has budgeted $2.4 million to help Health Sciences begin preparing. And Moses is in an algorithmic justice group involving UNM and the Santa Fe Institute that seeks to “demystify algorithms and help everyone understand how they work in the real world,” according to the project’s website.

Moses also is writing to newspapers and speaking to legislators and other computer scientists about the coming implications of AI. She and several other professors spoke to UNM alumni on the topic at a Lobo Living Room session in September.

Such preparations are an initial step before the larger job of providing faculty support and training on how to use and teach the technology.

And that, Quinn says, will require money, although no one knows how much.

“Dollars for faculty to go to workshops, bringing people in to teach the tool in various disciplines, helping people overcome technological issues. I see a lot of training.”

Larger, wealthier schools are making big investments. The University of Southern California is spending more than $1 billion on a seven-story building that will house a new AI school and 90 additional faculty members. Oregon State University is planning a state-of-the art AI research center that will house a supercomputer and a cyber physical playground with next-generation robotics.
As for UNM, its contribution to the changing world might be its richly diverse student and faculty population, Quinn says. A recent New York Times ranking recognized UNM as No. 1 among the nation’s flagship universities when it comes to economic diversity.

“Having that uniqueness may allow for more voices we don’t hear from at a more elite university,” he says. “It may be if I talk about water, there are people who grew up… working around acequias or rivers or with farming. Those experiences can help come up with an idea using AI that we haven’t thought of before.”

Diversity is the touchstone for Davar Ardalan, a UNM graduate and founder of TulipAI, headquartered in southwest Florida. The company is using AI to find and produce audio sound effects, among other services.

Ardalan, a journalist and former National Geographic audio executive producer, says her work marries storytelling with artificial intelligence’s ability to cast a limitless net for content. Her company has a “strong commitment” to ethical practices that include making sure those who created the content are paid and bringing forward voices that are not often heard.

Although the future of AI is a daunting and sometimes scary prospect, it can provide sheer beauty that didn’t exist before, she says.

Ardalan and her sisters are creating an AI-generated collection of her mother’s writings, YouTube videos and other personal materials she produced before she died in 2020.

Ardalan’s mother, Laleh Bakhtiar — also a UNM graduate — was a renowned Iranian-American scholar who wrote, translated and edited more than 150 books.

The collection “will hold the body of her wisdom and allow a new audience to discover her. We can learn from her, even though she’s not here.”

As Ardalan seeks to unearth Native American and other lesser-heard voices, she is speaking out about the importance of teaching students how to use AI ethically and was part of a New York Academy of Sciences working group to prepare for what’s coming.

“This is one of the most profound technological moments of our generation,” she says. “We can form the creation of it.”