She Leads the Way: What Women Leaders Teach Us About the Leadership Higher Education Needs Now

The fifth 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.

Kate Smith remembers the exact night the room went silent. She was building a new program at her college, the kind she believed in enough to gather a twenty-five-member council around it, and when the administration decided to move the program elsewhere, she planned to stand up at the next campuswide forum and say why that was wrong. The dean who had mentored her tried to talk her out of it. “If you stand up and say anything,” she told Kate, “you’re gonna stand alone.” Kate didn’t believe her. Everyone she’d spoken with agreed with her, even people who had nothing to gain either way. So she stood at the forum and made her case. When she finished, nobody in the room said a word. “I stood alone 100%,” she told me. “I was like, whoa. This is real.”

That’s the part of the job nobody warns you about ahead of time: not the decision itself, but the silence that can follow it. Talk to enough college presidents about the calls that kept them up at night, and a pattern turns up that has nothing to do with confidence. None of them described knowing, in the moment, that things would work out. What they described was moving anyway, and being ready to answer for it either way, in a season when the old playbooks for a lot of these decisions simply don’t exist anymore.

Four Acres in Berkeley

Carol Christ inherited a piece of land nobody at Berkeley had figured out what to do with. People’s Park had been a protest site since the 1960s, four acres near campus that had drifted, over the decades, into a homeless encampment with a reputation for drug trafficking and violence. Berkeley also had an acute shortage of student housing, and the park was the largest open parcel close enough to campus to build on. Christ decided the university would build there. “Everyone told me, you can’t do this,” she said. “There’s going to be violence. You will not succeed.” The mayor of Berkeley told her he would fight her on it. Her house was vandalized. She stayed the course anyway, in part, she admits, because of where she was in her career. “I knew it was my last job,” she said. “I wasn’t looking for another job, and so I could make a hard decision.” The university is building on People’s Park today.

Noise Outside the Window

Pat McGuire’s hardest decision started with a question she almost didn’t ask. In her first weeks as president of Trinity Washington University, she asked the admissions director how many students the college enrolled from Washington, DC, its own city. None, she was told. When she pressed for why, the answer was blunt: they can’t do the work here. McGuire heard exactly what that meant, and she reversed course, opening recruitment to the public schools in Trinity’s own backyard. The backlash lasted years. Alumni accused her of destroying the college. Faculty argued she was abandoning the mission. She held her ground, in part because she had already learned what to expect from doing the right thing. “If you don’t hear noise outside of your window,” she told me, “you’re not doing your job.” Making everyone comfortable was never the point. “If you’re not making some people angry, you’re not making enough change.”

Black Skies

Lisa Vollendorf was leading Sonoma State University in October 2017 when the wildfires hit, the ones people now call the origin fires because of how much worse the fires that followed would get. With more than three thousand students still living in the residence halls, she helped run an emergency operations center around the clock for seven straight days, air quality near 600, ash falling like snow. What she carries from that week isn’t the decisions themselves so much as how she made them. “We managed, I think, with integrity,” she said. She has kept a rule from it ever since, one she announced to a new chief of security on her first day at a later campus: she would be the first president he’d ever met who never used the word crisis, not unless people or property were actually threatened. Save the word for what it means, she reasons, so you still have the judgment left when you truly need it. “You can go to bed with the integrity you woke up with,” she said, “and do it all again the next day.”

The Alcan Highway

Not every act of courage in these conversations involved a crisis. Lori Carrell’s came earlier, and smaller, and entirely hers to make. She was a young teacher who had just replaced her own mentor in her hometown high school, on the path everyone expected her to stay on, when she resigned the job, bought a truck, and drove the Alcan Highway north alone, chasing a rumor about teaching jobs in the Arctic. “It took a lot of courage,” she told me, “to step away from something that was safe and known to the great unknown.” She had no way to know it would work out. It became the education that shaped nearly everything she led afterward.

Own It Either Way

Not one of these women described certainty. What they described, in one form or another, was the same trade: act without knowing how it lands, and be the one who answers for it. Kate Smith learned that lesson twice, first the night she stood alone at that forum, and again as she thought about what she’d tell a younger leader facing the same choice. Know where you stand, she says, before you decide to stand up. And when a decision goes wrong, say so plainly. “I want people to hear me say, oh, I’m so sorry, I missed that,” she told me, “because then they know I own my stuff.”

That, more than any single decision, is what this piece is really about. Courage in higher education right now rarely looks like certainty. The old maps for a lot of these calls don’t exist anymore, and waiting for one to appear is its own kind of choice, usually the wrong one. What these women had in common wasn’t confidence that things would work. It was the willingness to move before they could be sure, and the discipline to own the call either way.

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.