3rdtimeluckystudio/Shutterstock
Much of my success as a leader can be attributed to having experienced and learned from painful personal loss and challenges. Those lessons stood me in good stead when I became a senior leader in higher education. They are the angles described in “Experience is the Angled Road: Memoir of an Academic.”
Perhaps the most painful angles of my life have been confrontations with death or sickness. When my mother died of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, she was 69 and had been bedridden for six years. I learned to cope with the loss of her real presence during those six years by erasing any memory I had of the mother she had been. It was not until my father died 22 years after my mother’s death that my real mother returned. Cleaning out my father’s home with my sister, I found a plastic hat box, and in it was a packet of my mother’s letters, comforting me after a boyfriend had dumped me.
Up until that point, for almost 30 years, I had not been able to remember my mother’s voice, her smile, her laugh. Then I saw those letters, and there she was. I heard her, I saw her beautiful hair, and I smelled her special smell. This memory taught me the power of words and the power of remembering. There is something dangerous about erasing the past, and it is rarely an effective way of getting healthy.
As a president, I led The College of New Jersey (TCNJ) campus through the difficult choice to rename an iconic building on our campus, because of the racist history discovered of the man for whom the building had been named. We had to reclaim that painful history and name the action.
Other angles that I confronted in “Experience is the Angled Road”were lessons in which I had to stand up to unfair and cruel expectations. I write of the need to confront unfair pressure from those in power and those who espoused anti-Semitism. I confronted a teacher from high school who used her classroom as a forum to attack me. I told a senior faculty member at my first place of employment that no, I would not accept his use of either the n-word or the word “kike.”
I stood up to those who would criticize me to others and those who argued that I should accept racist or anti-Semitic language. As the person with less stature in both cases, I took a chance of further discipline, but by standing firm, I gained self-confidence as well as admiration from others.
As president, there were times when I had to stand up to trustees whose values did not mirror those of the institution. There was an instance in which I insisted that we implement protocols for increasing the likelihood that victims of sexual assault would report their experiences. At the time, there was one very powerful trustee who was very concerned about the negative impact on the reputation of the college by an increase in the number of reported assaults. His solution to the sexual assault problem would have been to discourage all victims from reporting. Fortunately, the vast majority of the trustees agreed with me that the modification of the protocols, whatever the impact on the data, was in keeping with protecting the integrity of the college and increasing the safety and security of the students.
These personal experiences during my formative years helped set the stage for how I would deal with crisis and loss when I became a senior academic leader. For instance, my leadership during two devastating crises during my years as president at TCNJ was informed by these angles.
On a beautiful September morning in 2001, I was on my way to a meeting off campus when the news of the first plane flying into the Twin Towers reached the TCNJ campus. I knew instinctively that my most important job was going to be to try to establish a sense of normalcy and calm on the campus. I instructed all senior officials to get out of their offices, to be seen and present on campus. We created communal spaces for students to be together in groups and not be alone, as we tried to absorb the enormity of the events. We created times for commemoration that were both attentive to the national nature of the event and to the reality that the losses for our students, faculty, and staff were very local. TCNJ is very much an institution of the state of New Jersey, whose north faces the skyline of New York City, which has been forever scarred by that horrific day.
In 2006, a student went missing from his residence hall and two months later, his body was found in a nearby landfill. The eerie sounds of helicopters and the glare of news media transformed a tranquil campus into a devastating landscape. I learned that my most important job was communication and that my most important audience was the students. I had to focus on telling them the most that I could, doing my best to rectify some of the more salacious gossip that was promulgated by the press, and giving them a place to grieve.
“Experience is the Angled Road: Memoir of an Academic” is not about my years as president, but it clearly describes some of the most important events that helped mold me into the leader that I became. “Portrait of a Presidency: Patterns in My Life as President of The College of New Jersey” (Koehler Books, forthcoming January 2025) focuses on my 19 years as president of TCNJ.
