Many Roads Taken

When I hear other higher education leaders describe their pathways to their positions, I have to remind myself that, while they may sound teleologically linear, most leadership routes are in fact winding and capricious, because where—and when—you are shapes your choices.

My own road runs over an intensely personal geography that, although it has been global, began in a particularly insular location: Appalachia. I graduated from high school in West Virginia in 1985. The where and when are important. From the place, I know that young people from small, rural towns can feel unconnected to the world, and from the time, growing up at the end of the Cold War, my view of central Europe was as an unknowable gray area on the map.

My drive to understand the world from the standpoint of that particular time and place ultimately led me to a PhD in German languages and literatures. While working toward my doctorate I spent the academic year 1990?91 in Berlin—the year after the fall of the wall, and the year of German reunification. The impact of Berlin during this history-making event on me, a kid from West Virginia, was staggering. In fact, once I earned my doctorate, I was not yet ready to live the life of the mind. I met my now husband, then fiancé, while in grad school, and we both decided to go into the Peace Corps. I ended up in Russia, and he in Poland, but this was 1996—neither of us had a phone or email, and letters were taking a month one way. So I quit the Peace Corps and moved to Poland.

At the end of those two years teaching English in Poland, I was fortunate to land a tenure-track position at the University of Minnesota, Morris (UMM). I certainly was not considering administration at all at that time; I hoped to live the academic’s idyllic dream of exploring ideas with colleagues, making my way through the faculty ranks to full professor. During my time as assistant, then associate professor, I served as discipline coordinator—UMM’s version of a department chair—and took part in the University of Minnesota study abroad curriculum integration effort. This led me to a whole other career path in international education administration. I left UMM—and a tenured position—in 2005 to become the director of off-campus study at the College of Wooster (OH), but after just two years accepted the position of dean of international education at Juniata College in central Pennsylvania.

While at Juniata I took part in the most significant professional experience of my life: the ACE Fellows Program. During 2010–11, I participated in three weeklong intensive leadership training workshops. Under the mentorship of the president and provost of Manhattanville College in New York, I spent each month of that academic year shadowing a different member of the senior leadership team, including the president and all of the vice presidents. I saw the boiler room. I sat in on meal plan negotiations with food services. I dug into enrollment, since my project for Juniata was to articulate a comprehensive international student recruitment and support plan in the context of a larger diversity effort. I also read about higher education leadership, and visited good practice institutions in the New York area.

It was a transformative year, and gave me the perspective I needed to move toward a position as head of a campus. That year also made me rethink my institutional type. Having spent my undergraduate years and my career at liberal arts colleges, I was caught between wanting to advance the values of a liberal arts college, and desiring to serve a population of students who needed to be served, like where I grew up in Appalachia.

A few years after my Fellows year, I accepted the position of campus dean at Ohio University Zanesville, a public, commuter, regional campus, and I began studying the literature around underresourced students. After just another two years I accepted my current position as chancellor of Penn State Beaver, a residential commonwealth campus north of Pittsburgh. As a new leader, I spent 2016–17 undertaking a campus-wide strategic visioning process, and some of our major initiatives concentrate on global and experiential education. The notion of bringing the world to lesser-resourced students resonates strongly with me because of my personal background. From my childhood in West Virginia, I know that students from economically disadvantaged small towns often can’t see their connection to and agency in the world, but also that global and intercultural competence is a vital skill in the twenty-first century.