Seeing the whole elephant: Mary Klayder and a career centered on students

Mary Klayder's name is nearly synonymous with the University of Kansas Honors Program. Her decades-long career, which concludes this May, has touched thousands of lives, most notably through her student-centered approach that has redefined what mentorship can mean in a university setting.

“I really feel like nothing else I do matters very much,” she says. “For me, my career is students. It’s completely students.”

When Klayder joined the University Honors Program in 1992 as its assistant director under then-director J. Michael Young, she stepped into a role that didn’t yet fully exist. It was a time of undefined responsibilities and few formal systems, which Klayder saw as an opportunity.

“Mike chose the organic,” she says. “I just started doing things that kind of seemed right.”

She quickly became an invaluable advisor for a majority of the program’s members. “I was advising 80% of the students,” she recalls, citing her intuition as an advantage. “I can tell what people need pretty quickly, and I’m a quick reader of people.”

Even as opportunities arose to move into executive positions, including one to direct the advising center, Klayder turned them down, insisting on continuing to teach throughout her administrative tenure. Her reasoning was simple.

"The teaching was how I actually really related to people,” she says. “All that advising and stuff was really about teaching."

Klayder refers to a kind of "triangle" that has best allowed her to truly know her students: the intersection of teaching, advising, and study abroad. Each touchpoint reveals something different.

“All three things that I do affect each other,” says Klayder. “The fact that I teach helps me be a better mentor, because I know how students are in that part of their lives — which helps me be a better teacher because I know their struggles and discoveries.”

Study abroad, in particular, has provided Klayder with a prolonged and immersive context for connection, as well as motivation to innovate as an instructor.

“I expect my classroom to be transformative — you know, by golly, this is going to be as exciting or as meaningful as London,” says Klayder. “It makes me want those classes to be something more than just ‘let's read a book.’”

This layering of engagement — the academic, the personal, and the experiential — has allowed Klayder to develop deeper, lasting connections more so than in a single role, through which she believes “you only get to know … your little piece of the elephant.”

“I pretty much got to see the whole elephant,” says Klayder.

Helping people help people “big”

Klayder’s comprehensive, intuitive understanding of a student has allowed her to see what students were sometimes unaware of. She recounts walking with student Melinda Lewis after a football game: “She was talking to me about stuff she was doing, and I just thought, ‘you need to be a Truman.’”

Lewis, now a professor of practice in the KU School of Social Welfare and the director of its Center for Community Engagement and Collaboration, recalls a meeting in the days that followed that set her on the path to becoming a Truman Scholar.

“When I sat down with Mary, I remember that she didn’t ask many of the typical advisor questions — about grades and degree requirements and letters of recommendation,” says Lewis. “She asked what change I wanted to achieve in the world, what I cared about most, what inspired me.”

Lewis’ response of wanting to “help people big,” as she recalls, included lofty goals: policy change, system reform, and social-movement building.

“Instead of rolling her eyes at my youthful idealism,” says Lewis, “she pulled out a brochure about the Truman Scholarship, acknowledged that the application deadline was coming up quickly, and then said — this is the part I will never forget — ‘I’m not sure if you’ve ever heard of this, but you are a Truman Scholar. You just need to get the application in.’”

That moment, Lewis says, set off a “flurry of writing, revising, consulting, and reflecting” that resulted in her Truman Scholarship. The experience and relationships developed through it “changed the course of my career several times over,” says Lewis.

Lewis’ course will take another turn this fall when she begins her three-year appointment as an Honors Faculty Fellow — a role long held, and in some ways defined, by her mentor.

“It’s a bit surreal, honestly, to now be a colleague of Dr. Klayder’s,” says Lewis.

Connections thanks to “the Klayderbase”

Although she has been instrumental in helping students secure elite scholarships, Klayder is wary of chasing acclaim for its own sake. “If it’s just for the prestige — you know, most people don’t get them,” she cautions. “So where else does this lead you?”

Helping students pivot was often the real reward. “I think that was 80% of it: ‘Okay, this is just one option, but think about the other things you might want to do besides this.’”

Though her methods weren’t always formalized, they were far from disorganized. “It’s not that it has no structure,” she explains. “It’s just organized in a different way.”

Much of that structure lives in what students and colleagues have come to know as the "Klayderbase" — an intricate mental web of connections that Klayder has maintained over decades. She carries within her an extraordinary memory of students' stories, trajectories, and talents, often introducing current students to alumni who had once sat in the same classrooms.

“If someone comes in, I think of seven people they remind me of and that they should talk to,” she says.

This deep personal Rolodex isn’t just a point of pride; it has been a cornerstone of her mentoring. The relationships she cultivated have become a living network of support, with Klayder at the center making thoughtful introductions and opening new doors.

Klayder takes pride in having helped shape a program that remains open and accessible. “When people think of me with the program, I think they think of me being attentive to students,” she observes. “I feel like I just have been talking for a living for forty-some years,” she says with a smile.

And in those conversations — in classrooms, on trips abroad, and during advising sessions — she left a legacy not just in the honors program, but in the lives and futures of her students.

Gifts in honor Dr. Klayder can be made to the Mary Klayder Study Abroad Opportunity Award fund through the KU Endowment website.