When his 6-week-old daughter Imani gives him space, new dad Michael Hunt imagines methods of making the students he mentors even more successful.
“If we want to dismantle white supremacy, we have to get to the root of it and change how we mentor and how we support,” Hunt says.
Hunt was a standout engineering, math, and science student at Polytechnic High School in Baltimore and continued in the same vein at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where he’s now the director of the McNair Scholars Program.
The program is named after NASA astronaut Dr. Ronald E. McNair, who died in 1986 in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. It “provides experiences that prepare students for graduate education in all disciplines” and “involves students in research, mentoring, and other scholarly activities,” according to its website.
“My focus is creating opportunities for young people to see that their dreams are made possible — in the here and now,” Hunt says. “And particularly, I’m thinking about graduate education for the students. I take joy in the work I do with undergrads, but then I’m also changing the world as people are thinking about mentorship.”
He relinquishes the traditional thought that mentees come as empty vessels waiting to be filled. He calls it holistic critical mentoring and envisions them as equal partners in the process, bringing their life experiences, traditions, and beliefs to offer at the common table.
“It shifts the dynamics of mentoring to focus on the mentee rather than what the mentor is bringing. We’re changing that paradigm to say this is a horizontal relationship where you learn from me, and I learn from you. We’re gathering. You have insights that are important, but I, too, as a mentee, have insights that are important and that I’m bringing a lot to the table, too,” Hunt says.
“So we’re not looking at a deficit model of mentorship, but really where they are, which is known as community cultural wealth, that the mentee is bringing value also.”
It goes against the traditional idea of mentoring, but he finds it makes for a more successful outcome.
A God Guy
“He’s more than a math guy, Hunt’s big sister, Mashica Winslow, tells Word In Black. “He’s a God guy,” she says. “He loves God, and God loves him — he loves his students and hopes to see them change the world, just as he’s always known he should change the world.”
Raised by a single mother, Hunt says his “mom was the one who surrounded me with community” because she knew “she couldn’t do it by herself.”
Raised to Change the World
Hunt says his mom “made sure I was surrounded by the right people, for her sake and my own,” Hunt says. “Then my grandmother let me see the world. She was the one that took me to Belize, Central America, every summer to do missionary work there. And she started when I was 9. We went every year until she died. I went one year without her, but it just wasn’t the same.”
I often think of that experience because I remember what she did for me, to be sure I saw the world. Thinking about it this way opens up the realization that what I do isn’t just for my family and myself. The impact is worldwide. It makes me take inventory of how I’m living, what I’m making happen, and the reason for it all.”
Hunt pays forward the global perspective and commitment to service his mom and grandmother instilled in him by traveling with his scholars.
He loves to “see the looks on their faces, especially the ones who’ve never been anywhere outside Baltimore City.” He encourages his mentees “to apply to summer research opportunities out of state. It’s usually only for a month or two, and if they really don’t like it, they can always come home,” he says.
The One I Lost to God
When he was an undergraduate student studying mathematics and engineering, Hunt says Dr. Freeman Hrabowski, who was president of UMBC when he began, “encouraged me every step along the way. After I left for seminary at Emory University, he began to introduce me as ‘the one I lost to God.’
It’s not always easy to shake the traditional ways taught by grandparents, pat yourself on the back, or give yourself compliments. But Hunt’s experience with Hrabowski shows how much we need someone to mirror our true selves back to us. “He would also say, ‘Michael Hunt is brilliant.’ I wasn’t at the top of my class, in either engineering, math, or in seminary. So I never saw myself as brilliant,” Hunt explains. “Then, the last couple of years, as I’ve been doing my research and work, I look at my stuff, and I say, golly boy, this is dynamic.”
Hunt prepared for what he thought would be a traditional ministry as a pastor, he found less support when he needed people to help him sort through the ideas in seminary that were new to his thinking and previous exposure. He didn’t know how to accommodate them into his own dynamic of theology.
He spent seven years as a co-pastor in a nontraditional church but found he couldn’t exercise his best gifts in that particular structure.
The late Rev. Dr. Harold Carter Sr., former pastor of New Shiloh Baptist Church where he grew up, and Bishop Robbin Blackwell also helped him understand that even mentors have limits to what they can give in support.
And now Hunt brings the wisdom he’s received to the students he mentors.
“That’s why I feel so blessed in the job I’m in now,” he says. “I don’t know if this is the job I’ll retire in, but it’s indeed the one I love in this moment.”
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