Although teaching has long been a field associated with women, higher education and specifically higher education administration remain dominated by men. The numbers are slowly shifting. According to the American Council on Education’s “2017 American College President Study,” in 1986 just 9.5% of all U.S. college presidencies were held by women; by 2011, the number had jumped to 26.4%; and in 2016, it stood at 30.1%.
To learn more about this important progress toward gender parity, we interviewed three recently installed women college presidents from the greater Milwaukee area: Cindy Gnadinger of Carroll University, Sister Andrea Lee of Alverno College and Christine Pharr of Mount Mary University. What follows are profiles on each woman’s background, goals for her institution and, in the case of Lee and Pharr, the particular benefits and challenges of single-sex women’s education. All three, likewise, shared their perspective on women in academic leadership, where trends are heading and how best to support ongoing progress.
Cindy Gnadinger, Carroll University
Photo credit: Carroll University
Cindy Gnadinger, Carroll University
Gnadinger was elected the 15th president of Carroll last July and is the first woman to hold this position. She hails from Louisville, Ky., where she previously served 17 nonconsecutive years in myriad capacities at Bellarmine University culminating in executive consulting within the office of the president. Gnadinger also briefly served as president and provost of St. Catherine College in St. Catherine, Ky., and as vice president for academic affairs at William Peace University in Raleigh, N.C. She brings to Carroll an unusually extensive background in accreditation and regulatory compliance.
She began her career as an elementary school teacher covering all content areas and earned her Masters of Education in teacher education, with a literacy specialization. She put the latter degree to use developing a graduate program for reading specialists as a faculty member and dean at Bellarmine. Asked about her trajectory from education to administration, she stated, “Aside from my last few positions, where I’ve applied, I was tapped unexpectedly every time.” These included her Bellarmine appointments to department chair, dean and assistant vice president. “What in my background helped me to be positioned for that? Obviously, elementary teachers need to be well organized. When it was time to handle accreditation in my school, we put a plan together, and it’s sort of like writing lesson plans when you’re an elementary school teacher. I certainly know those skills of planning, of execution, of assessing.”
|
|
Asked what drew her to Carroll, Gnadinger extolled the university’s offerings as both “traditional and historic” and “new and evolving,” noting that, while the university maintains its original strong focus on liberal arts, her predecessors also “had foresight in saying that health sciences were a growing area for our communities around the nation.” She likewise praised Carroll’s cross-cultural component, which requires all undergraduates to complete a cross-cultural experience (through domestic or international study), thus “helping them to be more empathetic and to understand others within our global society.”
Moving into her first year as president, Gnadinger’s plans and goals are focused on developing a new strategic plan to guide the university for the next seven to 10 years. She and her staff are developing this plan through a series of 50 to 60 small roundtable discussions with various constituencies—including alumni, community members, faculty, staff and students. In addition to this egalitarian process, Gnadinger said she hopes to expand the College of Health Sciences and the School of Business because of their existing success and the high demand for graduates within these disciplines. Progress has already begun in the form of the construction of Doug and Nancy Hastad Hall, which will feature state-of-the-art exercise science, physics, engineering and nursing facilities, as well as Waukesha’s first green roof.
Asked to name a specific program that fosters young women in leadership roles, she mentioned Carroll’s Executive-in-Residence Program, which brings a different local executive to campus each semester. This fall, Girl Scouts of Wisconsin Southeast Executive Director Christy Brown holds the position and will speak to the coeducational campus about her leadership in the business world.
Andrea Lee, Alverno College
Photo credit: Kat Schleiker
Andrea Lee, Alverno College
Lee, a religious sister of the Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (IHM), became Alverno’s eighth president at the beginning of the 2016 academic year. From 2012-’15 she sat on Alverno’s board of trustees. Well qualified for Alverno’s presidency, Lee served for 18 years as president of St. Catherine University in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Her undergraduate training focused on music, Italian and elementary education. IHM centers primarily on education, and Lee has been a member for 50 years. Between St. Catherine’s and previous administrative leadership roles at Marygrove College in Detroit (dean, chief financial officer, executive vice president and interim president), she now has nearly 40 years’ experience working in Catholic colleges. On a personal note, she is also the adoptive mother of a young man from Haiti and a grandmother; she summarized, “I often say I have the best of both worlds.”
Asked what drew her to Alverno, Lee shared that her religious congregation played a strong role in determining her career trajectory, as did her desire to work with underserved populations. “I didn’t ever sit around saying, ‘When I grow up I want to be a college president’ … but when I had the opportunity, I chose to do so. I wanted to work in schools that served a large percentage of first-generation students—students who have a more restricted range of options for higher education than might be present at some of the larger, more prominent Catholic institutions. I was interested in the role of education in cities and what role higher education institutions can play in helping the city become its best self in terms of opportunities for its citizens.”
Alverno’s undergraduate population is a staggering 68% first-generation college students, with 60% being Pell Grant eligible. Eschewing the paternalistic attitudes often expressed toward female first-generation and minority student populations, Lee stated, “You have a plate of potential in your hands, and it’s sacred stuff trying to give women an opportunity to let that explode and flower,” Lee said.
Elaborating on Alverno’s unique programing, she highlighted the college’s decades-old weekend class program, which often serves women juggling higher education with work and family. Under Lee’s leadership, this program will gain greater flexibility and open to male enrollees seeking to complete degrees as well. Other programs of which she’s particularly proud are Alverno’s mental health nurse practitioner (whose first graduating class doubled the number of professionals in this field in Wisconsin), music therapy (now transitioning to include a master’s program) and social work degrees.
During her first year at Alverno, Lee has developed and begun to implement a five-part strategic plan focused on health care education, K-12 education in urban settings, mental and behavioral health, academic excellence and women’s leadership, and the school of adult learning (Alverno’s revamped take on the weekend college). Lee said that her focus on programmatic development stems from the fact that, unlike large universities like Notre Dame or Georgetown, students “come to places like Alverno because there’s a program that draws them, so those programs have to both address what students want and what’s needed in the workforce.”
Asked about the unique nature of single-sex education, Lee cited the overwhelmingly positive impact on young women who directly experience other women in leadership roles. She said there is also “the expectation that they’re going to succeed … the difference is those young women who come from women’s colleges don’t sit there like shy little persons when they get into classrooms that are dominated by men.” She cited various metrics for the success for women’s education—such as the high number of women’s college attendees in Congress and microeconomic studies that prove that fostering women’s education and literacy in developing countries significantly raises those countries’ overall economic stability.
Lee concluded, “The same way I look at women and girls in developing countries, I look at lower-income women of color in Milwaukee and what an education does to transform their lives. That’s why I’m doing this and why it will always be different than UW-Milwaukee or Marquette University—because it’s focused on activating that incredible potential that’s embedded in half the population.”
Christine Pharr, Mount Mary University
Photo credit: Kou Vang
Christine Pharr, Mount Mary University
Pharr began her tenure at Mount Mary University this past July and is the institution’s 12th president. She brings more than 20 years’ experience in higher education administration, with much of it drawn from her time at the College of St. Mary, a Catholic women’s institution of comparable size in Omaha, Neb. Her final position there was vice president for alumnae and donor relations. “Being on the leadership team at a small private women’s college, you really learn a lot about all the different aspects of managing a university,” she said. “You’re not just worried about your own area. You’re hearing about the finance, you’re hearing about the marketing, you’re hearing about the development aspects.” In addition to experience with enrollment and academic leadership, she brings an extensive background in fundraising to Mount Mary.
Pharr began her academic career with degrees in chemistry and biology. Asked about her transition to administration, she explained, “I was a faculty member and had no desire to do anything but that. I loved teaching and working with students, but there are opportunities in your life that come along where you realize you can make a bigger impact. My first opportunity was to become a division chair of natural sciences and mathematics at a small public institution … pretty soon that college decided that they needed an academic dean, and I was hired. Then, when you start to oversee all the disciplines at the university, your perspective becomes much broader, and I really enjoy a lot of things—I love the arts, I like music, I appreciate history and I love to travel.”
She drew connections between her initial areas of scientific study and administration: “I’ve always wanted to write this paper called ‘The Art and Science of Administration,’ because it really is … what I learned in science was to think logically, to problem-solve, but also to be creative. You have to think outside the box when things don’t work. I just translate that from working with chemicals to working with people and processes.”
What drew her to Mount Mary? It met her personal preference for a small Catholic university, which supports her existing background, and its location in the Midwest, which she shared is not only her home region, but suits her personality. The school also impressed her for its “very interesting mix of programs. I’m used to health care, I’m used to business education, but programs in fashion and fashion merchandizing? That’s something new for me that’s exciting and fun. And they also have a really great program in dietetics, and we’ve started a brand-new program in food science.” She also cited Mount Mary’s Women’s Leadership Institute as a prime example of programming with tangible effects for female students in the form of events, activities and resources. Last spring, the institute brought co-founder of the Malala Fund, Shiza Shahid, to campus to discuss her work funding girls’ education globally.
Pharr’s major goal as she begins her tenure is to meet with as many community members as possible to gain perspective on how Mount Mary is perceived and to promote all the university has to offer. So far, she’s found that the “Starving Artists’ Show” (a nearly half-century-old outdoor art exhibition) and the historic fashion department are best recognized, but says she aims to raise the visibility of the institution’s many other programs as well.
“People don’t understand that, for example, we have a very strong program in occupational therapy [currently one of only a dozen programs nationally offering the professional doctorate which practitioners will need starting in 2027], a strong program in dietetics, great programs in the social sciences and a great art therapy program including undergraduate, master’s and doctorate.” She’s also proud of Mount Mary’s reinvigorated nursing program, which partners with MATC. In the age of “brain drain,” she celebrates the fact that a remarkable 83% of Mount Mary graduates stay in the Milwaukee area, and that at least 40% of students are minorities.
Addressing the unique aspects of single-sex education, she stated, “There are students that can survive and be very successful in any kind of institution, but there are some students that really thrive at a place like Mount Mary.” She noted how many women, even today, defer to men in classroom and business settings, meaning that single-sex education has a unique power to help young women find their voices. Like Lee, she praised the potential women’s education has to provide positive female role models for young women.
“I think that’s one of the things that’s a great advantage; you can see and experience successful women; you can be in an environment where you can express yourself and where you can gain a tremendous amount of confidence. Then, when you go out into the bigger world where it’s coeducational again, you kind of forget that there was ever a time where you didn’t think that you could.”
Fostering Women in Academic Leadership
All three presidents were asked to share their perspectives on women in academic leadership. The three hold several viewpoints in common, and at the heart of each response is mentoring.
Cindy Gnadinger noted, “Most of the students who earned graduate degrees in the last 30 years have been women, and yet women don’t make up the number of people in that sector. Our [Carroll’s] student enrollment here is 35% men and 65% women. That mirrors the national average, so when you take a look at that, you see there are many more women out there who are educated and have been for years in comparison to men, and yet men still hold more of the leadership roles.” She believes that progress “will require that women leaders are successful. We have to prove ourselves worthy for our gender. Men never have to do that, but we do. We represent each other all the time.”
Despite these disheartening realities, she foresees the trend continuing toward more women in academic leadership. She called for more programs at the national association level to help prepare women for these responsibilities, but even more strongly extolled the idea that informal mentorship is key: “It behooves us who are in leadership positions to tap someone and say, ‘You know what? You’re going to make a great president someday.’ That’s what someone did to me, and I don’t know that I would have ever contemplated this position that I’m in right now if she hadn’t.”
She also raised the key idea that programs and universities fostering women leaders must work to educate men about this issue as well. “That’s why one of my first steps for programming was to make sure we’ve highlighted really strong women in leadership roles for our executive and leadership series—our men will be at that session, too,” she said.
Andrea Lee took an optimistic standpoint, pointing to recent presidential appointments of women at Ivy League institutions, including Harvard. She noted, “In my sector among the Catholic universities, there’s a higher percentage of women presidents than in any other sector in the country.” At her previous institution, St. Catherine, a billboard campaign ran slogans, including “A woman president? We’ve had 10 of them,” and “Putting women in the corner office for 100 years.”
Addressing the idea of mentorship, she praised efforts being made by subgroups of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Counsel of Independent Colleges, but also championed “mentoring by people who are in the roles and know we’re not going to be here forever.”
Christine Pharr likewise called peer mentorship essential to success—not just for developing the top ranks of academic leaders but at all levels of academia and especially for women seeking their first promotions and tenure. She also contended that focusing on developing your strengths rather than trying to “fix” your weaknesses is a far more effective pathway to success. “Having people help you find your strengths and then investing in you—sending you to conferences, letting you have opportunities—that’s what we have to do to help people really achieve their greatest potential.”
Gnadinger, Lee and Pharr demonstrate this potential—realized to its maximum effect. Through the lived examples of women like these, as well as conscientious programming and mentorship decisions, Wisconsin can look forward to greater gender parity in higher education in the years to come.
