She Leads the Way: What Women Leaders Teach Us About the Leadership Higher Education Needs Now
The second of seven short pieces drawn from conversations on the IngenioUs podcast. I’ve talked with more than thirty women presidents and senior leaders in higher education, and a few ideas kept surfacing no matter who was in the conversation. This series is where I gather them.
Isabelle Cherney was standing in a room full of strangers at a women’s club, newly arrived in Omaha from Switzerland, when another woman asked her what she did. “I’m raising my boys,” Cherney told her. The woman turned and walked away without another word. Cherney went home that night thinking about the fact that she spoke four or five languages, that she had a mind full of unused ideas, and that she had just been filed away as nothing more than a housewife. “It just burned in me,” she told me. That burn is what sent her back to school as a non-traditional student, in her thirties, with two young children, toward degrees she hadn’t planned on and a presidency nobody would have predicted for her at that women’s club that night.
She’s careful to add that there’s nothing wrong with being a housewife, that wasn’t the insult. The insult was being written off before the conversation had even started, as though raising two boys and running a household used up every ounce of capacity a person could have. Cherney didn’t go back to school to prove that woman wrong specifically. She went back because the moment made something visible to her that had been sitting there unused the whole time.
None of the women in this piece got to a presidency by a route anyone could have mapped out in advance. That’s true of plenty of leaders in this series. What’s different about the four here is that they didn’t just survive an unplanned route. They composed one, piecing together experience from wherever they found it until the pieces added up to something whole.
Two Hundred Head of Cattle
Krista Newkirk was five years old when her family moved to a cattle ranch in Missouri and built it from nothing, a house, a barn, a herd, a life. She was eight when her father died suddenly, leaving her mother with two teenage sons, a five-year-old daughter, two hundred head of cattle, and three horses. Newkirk’s mother went back to work. Newkirk came home from school and split wood, fed cattle, made dinner. “I learned at a young age that I could do a lot more than I thought I could do,” she told me. The path that eventually took her through a career in law and into a college presidency didn’t begin with an ambition. It began with a ranch that needed running and no one else available to run it.
“Hardships are not forever,” she said, “and also the good times aren’t forever. You just have to kind of take it and realize that life has those ebbs and flows.” That isn’t a lesson anyone chooses to learn at eight. It’s one that gets handed to a child who has no say in the timing, and it turns out to be exactly the lesson a president needs decades later, when the ebbs and flows belong to an institution instead of a ranch.
It’s also where her path bent again. The recession that hit soon after her father’s death nearly cost the family the ranch itself, and Newkirk watched her parents fight foreclosure without a college degree between them. That’s the memory she points to when she explains why she went into law before she ever considered higher education: she had seen, up close, what it looked like to have no leverage against a system, and she wanted some.
No Single Ladder
Barbara Mistick’s résumé reads like five different careers stapled together: her own transportation company, with six hundred vehicles on the road every day, an entrepreneurship center at Seton Hill University, the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, a stretch at Carnegie Mellon split between public policy and design, and now a university presidency. “We were told that you have a ladder that you’ve got to follow,” she told me. She never much believed in that ladder. What she believed in was curiosity, going toward whatever problem looked interesting enough to solve, and it took her somewhere a straight climb never would have.
The hardest adjustment wasn’t any single career change. It was the feedback. Running six hundred vehicles, she knew within a day whether something had gone wrong. Running an academic program, the results took years to show up, if they showed up to her at all. “I found that really required a lot more internal motivation and internal direction,” she said. Composing a career this way doesn’t just test whether someone can learn a new field. It tests whether she can keep going without the kind of quick proof a single climbed ladder would have handed her at every rung.
The Fourteenth President
Barbara Farley’s path looks, on paper, like the traditional one: tenured faculty member, department chair, graduate program director, dean, chief academic officer, president. She’s careful to name it that way herself. But traditional was never the same as straightforward. She was the first woman to serve as dean and chief academic officer at one college, and she is the first woman president in the nearly two-hundred-year history of Illinois College, its fourteenth president altogether. A mentor once told her there was so much she could accomplish if she stayed. She did, and staying turned out to require its own kind of reinvention. “I am not the president who came here in the summer of 2013,” she told me. “But my core values have not shifted.”
That’s worth sitting with. Even the path that looks the most like a ladder from the outside required her to become someone slightly different at nearly every rung, without ever losing hold of what mattered to her in the first place. The straightest-looking road in this piece still wasn’t straight once you were the one walking it.
What Burned, What Held
Isabelle Cherney never got an apology from the woman who walked away from her at that women’s club, and she doesn’t need one. What she took from that moment wasn’t vindication. It was direction, the same thing Krista Newkirk found on a ranch she didn’t choose, that Barbara Mistick found by refusing a ladder she didn’t believe in, that Barbara Farley found by staying somewhere long enough to keep becoming someone new inside it.
It would be easy to file all four of these stories under resilience and move on, but that undersells what’s actually happening in them. Resilience implies something happened to a person and she recovered. What these four describe is closer to what the anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson once called composing a life: taking whatever material actually shows up, a dismissive comment, a death, a boring job, a decision to stay, and building with it rather than waiting for better material to arrive.
These four wouldn’t describe their path as a mistake that eventually corrected itself, or as a ladder they simply failed to climb in order. A composed life isn’t assembled from a blueprint. It’s built the way Cherney, Newkirk, Mistick, and Farley built theirs, one available piece at a time, until the pieces added up to exactly where each of them needed to be. Composed. Not climbed.
Dr. Melissa Morriss-Olson is a distinguished leader in higher education with over 35 years of experience shaping innovation and fostering institutional excellence. Currently leading the launch of The American University of Greece Global Campus, she is also Distinguished Professor of Higher Education Leadership at Bay Path University. During her tenure as Provost, she launched over 40 academic programs and secured over $6 million in grant funding. She is the author of several influential works, including IngenioUs Leadership: Creating Solutions to Wicked Problems in Higher Education.