System Leadership

My upbringing instilled in me a belief that our purpose in life is to serve others, especially the underserved, and that the lasting measure of personal success is what you have done to help others raise themselves up. As an 18-year old, I pursued baccalaureate studies to prepare me for a career in the clergy. Over time I gravitated to the academic study of religion, to doctoral work in Classics, and ultimately to a career in higher education. In higher education, I found a community dedicated to the advancement of both knowledge and understanding and, at the same time, to helping students access a better future, achieve their dreams, and make a difference, in many cases against daunting odds. Higher education has been a deeply satisfying career for me. Satisfying on the one hand because the intellectual challenge has never left me without inspiration and aspiration, and on the other because I find here a calling, a vocation, that answers to inherited and embraced commitments to leaving the world a better place. 

As a faculty member, I sometimes found the decision-making processes in higher education opaque, though their effects were readily apparent in how easy or hard it was for me to do my work.  I became an ‘accidental dean’, since that was not my plan when my provost called, on the view that having a grasp on the bigger picture and wider influence on processes might help me improve conditions for conducting the core educational work of the university. The view from the dean’s office was both different from and complementary to the view from the classroom, and the responsibility to marshal policy and limited budgets to achieve the most in student, faculty, and college success made administrative work more complicated than I imagined but ultimately also more gratifying than I imagined. I must say, however, that I relish the opportunities, when I have them, to engage meaningfully with faculty and other front-line staff and students; it really energizes me for the work in the back office.

A core and resilient belief in the goodness of people, and that, if we work together informed by analytics, the children of the Commonwealth can become our students regardless of their means, our students will become graduates, our graduates will be hard-working, empathetic, and innovative employees and bosses and problem solvers and citizens and neighbors, and Pennsylvania will be better, more prosperous, and more just for the effort.

In general, my role is to provide strategy and policy leadership and support for the system as a whole and the universities individually in the areas of academic affairs, enrollment management, and student affairs. Current priorities are focused around System Redesign, especially facilitating coordinated academic planning and collaborative delivery of academic programs to support breadth and quality of student opportunity in every region of Pennsylvania, supporting university integrations to leverage institutional strengths and achieve financial sustainability, coordinating strategies to improve measures of student success, and working with our community college partners to improve transfer pathways into State System universities.

Listening to opera, both old and new, and to all forms of classical music carries me away. I am a devotee of the visual arts and some of my happiest hours have been spent wandering into art museums wherever in the world I find them. I love cooking, using seasonal and local products wherever possible. And when I have the leisure of cooking while listening to opera – as loud as my neighbors will tolerate – I am in heaven. And, of course, my grown children and their perfect and darling babies are my greatest treasure.