Struggling for a Balanced Life as a President

Female campus chiefs form networks to face the pressures and demands of their jobs

By JULIANNE BASINGER

Faith Gabelnick, president of Pacific University, recently had her first weekend off in a month, and she knew it would be another month of long hours of meetings and entertaining before she would again have two days she could call her own. So she cooked a Passover meal with her two visiting daughters and went to the new Chinese garden in nearby Portland.

Even there, however, she had to pay attention to what she wore -- a suit jacket appropriate for a college president. It's hard for presidents to relax in privacy. At the garden, Ms. Gabelnick discovered that the tour guide knew her as Pacific's president, and she also ran into a local businesswoman.

"Being a college president is more than a full-time job," Ms. Gabelnick says on a misty spring day on her rural campus. "So the question really is, How can you have this job and have a balanced life?"

She says she has yet to find that balance, and considers achieving it to be a process. Like a growing number of presidents, especially those who are women, she has made seeking it a priority.

For her, it means sometimes turning down invitations to extra community meetings, or taking time to connect to nature by visiting gardens. Carving out that personal time helps her do her job better, she says.

"Sometimes I can't go to all those meetings because I simply run out of steam, and if I'm too tired, I can't think of other things," she says. "You get a life because you must have a life in order to give so much to an institution. You have to replenish yourself."

That is a challenge, one that many presidents, and especially women, find difficult. In search of ideas, she and four other female presidents of private colleges -- Anne Ponder of Colby-Sawyer College; Janet E. Rasmussen of Hollins University; Shirley H. Showalter of Goshen College; and Sister Maryanne Stevens of the College of St. Mary -- last winter began meeting regularly, with a plan to gather twice a year to discuss that and other issues they have in common. This June, they plan a two-day retreat on an island in Washington's Puget Sound, although Ms. Rasmussen, of Hollins, may not join them, since she will step down in May.

In ways unlike those of male presidents before them, female presidents have sought one another out at national meetings of presidents of both sexes, say college leaders and education scholars. In recent years, some of them have formed more-systematic strategies for staying in touch on a regular basis.

Their conversations extend beyond the brief hallway chitchat over professional issues that all presidents have engaged in at conferences, and their networking efforts may be more frequent and substantial than the occasional telephone conversations or golf games in which some male presidents have shared their concerns.

The female presidents often share how they try to find time for themselves in the hectic jobs that dominate their lives. They don't aim for universal solutions, of course. They meet to share stories and learn from one another. "It's providing suggestions for problem solving, and it's also shared support," Ms. Gabelnick says.

David L. Warren, president of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities and a former president of Ohio Wesleyan University, believes that male and female presidents alike benefit from seeking each other out regularly for advice, although some never do so, either because they lack the time or view their institutions as being competitors. "There really is no peer on campus to whom you can turn," he says.

Whether female presidents face unique issues in their jobs because of their gender is a controversial subject. But the pressures can be greater for female college presidents, says Tamar March, dean of educational programs at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, since they often have more family demands to juggle than their male counterparts do. Moreover, fewer women presidents have a spouse to help out.

"What happens when you get the call that the child has boils just as you have to go into a trustees' meeting?" asks Ms. March, who directs leadership seminars several times a year that often focus on women's issues. "It's not that men never have these concerns, but at the moment, women deal with more complexity on an hour-to-hour basis in their work life, and the need to talk about it is very great."

Ms. March notes that women who are chief executives in a variety of professions have formed networks during the past decade or two, and as the number of female college presidents has grown, they have begun to follow that pattern.

Those presidents also face campus issues that they sometimes feel more comfortable discussing with their female peers. For example, Ms. Showalter says she turned to Ms. Rasmussen of Hollins last year. Ms. Showalter's college, a Mennonite institution in Indiana, was in turmoil after two female students were raped, one of them on the campus. Students and faculty members were questioning the college's policies for handling sexual assaults. The privacy concerns and volatility on the campus meant she couldn't speak freely about it with anyone there. "I felt a need to consult another woman president," she says. The chance to sound out her thinking with another president, as well as the moral support, helped, she says.

Until recent years, it was more difficult for female presidents to have those conversations with their peers, since their numbers were so small. According to the most recent survey of college presidents by the American Council on Education, the proportion of women among them grew from 9.5 percent in 1986 to 19.3 percent in 1998, when there were about 460 women among the 2,380 presidents who responded to the survey.

Until the early 1990's, the number of female presidents was so small at the biannual meetings of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, that they would all gather at a single table in the coffee shop of the hotel, says Christina Bitting, the association's vice president for membership services.

They began meeting as a formal group within the association, the Women Presidents Network, in 1991. Now, 82 of the association's 400 members are women, and they convene for roundtable discussions at each national meeting. They also keep in touch through an e-mail listserv and by phone between meetings, says Marvalene Hughes, president of the Stanislaus campus of California State University, who has been the network's chairwoman for two years.

"We find we have so many issues in common, and we learn a lot from one another," Ms. Hughes says. While they have often focused on campus concerns in the past, they have begun talking in depth during the past year about issues some of them believe are particular to female presidents.

"As women, we're expected to be much more accessible and more responsive and more compassionate," Ms. Hughes says. "We do those things, but we realize that because we do that, we crowd our lives a little more than we should. So we discuss trying to maintain that balance that is going to allow us to maintain our personal lives and be accessible."

To make time for herself, she gets up at 5 a.m. every day to exercise before the workday begins, and have quiet time alone. She works out in an exercise room in her home, she says, rather than venturing outdoors, because "there's too much personal interaction in the street," too many people expecting her to be available as president.

Some presidents dispute the notion that women have unique concerns in college presidencies, and dismiss that as the motive for these networks. "As long as our institutions are doing well and the money is coming in, there's nothing particularly about the job that has to do with gender," says Julianne Still Thrift, president of Salem College, in North Carolina.

But other female presidents have observed that people on and off their campuses have expectations for them that they don't hold for male chief executives. "To assume that people have been socialized not to perceive a difference is naive," Ms. Hughes says.

Achieving balance is more difficult for women presidents, she adds, since fewer of them have the sort of traditional presidential spouse that their male counterparts often do. According to the American Council on Education's survey, about 90 percent of male presidents are married, compared with 57 percent of female presidents. Only about half of the female spouses have their own careers, compared with three-quarters of the male spouses.

"A lot of women presidents don't have that 'wife,' that spouse. More women presidents are single, and being a solo president, taking care of all those things that two people do, can be demanding," says Ms. Hughes, who is married. Her husband, David Brinks, is a clinical psychologist who is "unequivocal in his support" for her, she says, which she describes as an enormous help in trying to balance her presidency with her personal life. For example, he adjusts his work schedule to help out with presidential entertaining at their house, she says.

Women who are presidents also have worried about possible salary disparities and being paid less than their male peers, and say they face different challenges in trying to find mentors and move up in their careers than men do. To help more women become presidents, the female-presidents' network of the state-colleges association in February joined the National Council of Chief Academic Officers to begin linking female provosts interested in college presidencies with female presidents who will be mentors.

The members of Ms. Gabelnick's group first met in 1996 at Harvard's summer seminar for new presidents. They kept in touch through e-mail and meetings of national associations, and last summer began their group. While it was difficult to arrange their two annual meetings, given their demanding schedules, they made it a priority.

Other groups of female presidents also have begun to meet. For example, all six female presidents in Nebraska -- from both public and private institutions -- have started gathering once a semester to talk about campus issues and balancing their personal lives and work.

The small size of the group helps them feel free to be more frank with one another, says one president, Jennifer Braaten, of Midland Lutheran College. "I would never go out on a listserv with some of these bigger issues, but with the small group, I do."

That ability to seek advice and be honest with someone about confidential issues is one of the main rewards presidents find in this networking, says Ms. Showalter of Goshen, a member of the presidents' group that includes Ms. Gabelnick. That group also plans to discuss ways to experiment with the management structures of their institutions at their summer retreat.

Ms. Gabelnick, for example, will describe the council she created of all of Pacific's midlevel administrators several years ago, to generate ideas and give the staff a greater voice in campus governance. They now have a vote on the University Council, which recently adopted their proposed rules for salary increases for staff members.

While those sorts of changes may be discussed during the presidents' retreat this summer, says Ms. Ponder, of Colby-Sawyer, the main focus will be more personal.

"The challenges of the job will sweep away the stamina of any individual who doesn't think carefully about how she leads a college and balances that with her personal and interpersonal and spiritual life," she says. "To listen to each other intelligently will help as we try to find balance in these somewhat unbalanced jobs."

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