С����Ƶ

Halfway through, after an inventory of credentials, he let it slip that the candidate was a “she.” There, Mackey ’68 took a dramatic pause, letting the reaction rise. С����Ƶ, it was evident, had reached yet another milestone moment.

Then, finally, the big reveal. “Let me introduce her: С����Ƶ’s 18th president, Carol Quillen.”

Ask McDonald 11 years later how the vote that morning by the Board of Trustees he had chaired worked out and he is unequivocal, no delayed reveal.

“Carol continued to provide unmatched leadership and wisdom throughout her time,” he says. “С����Ƶ is a much better school because of her time in office.”

Risk didn’t seem to be a factor in Quillen’s appointment. Though she’d never been a college president, she’d risen through academic ranks throughout her career with deep administrative experience at Rice University in Houston, where she’d been recently named vice president for international and interdisciplinary initiatives.

Recognizing Her Roots

Quillen says she wasn’t deeply familiar with this small, Southern college of about 1,900 when she was first contacted by an executive search firm, but recognizes now the opportunity came at a perfect time.

Her husband, Ken Kennedy, who taught computer science at Rice and was considered a pioneer in the field, had died of pancreatic cancer in 2007, and her daughter, Caitlin, was about to enroll at UNC Chapel Hill.

When she met the search committee, she was impressed. “It was composed of people all dedicated to leaving the world better than they found it,” she says.

After 21 years in big-city Houston, she was ready for a walk-to-work job in a small town a bit like her hometown.

In Delaware, New Castle is a know-every-neighbor community of about 5,000 just south of Wilmington. It still wears its colonial vestments. Founded in 1651 by Peter Stuyvesant, some of the town’s buildings are ancient by American standards. Among them is the original 1732 courthouse where Delaware’s license-plate slogan “The First State” was earned in 1776, when its state assembly was the nation’s first to declare independence from Great Britain. Harriet Tubman came later with the Underground Railroad.

Quillen grew up on a street fronting the Delaware River. She could walk to the penny candy store downtown. It was the kind of place, she says, where people looked after one another and cared about the community.

There, the Quillens attended New Castle Presbyterian Church, whose Meeting House dates to 1707. Her family has an American Dream storyline. Her grandfather, a car dealer, never attended college. Her father went on to be a Harvard-educated attorney, later a judge and then Delaware secretary of state. He ran unsuccessfully for governor once. Today, her sister, Tracey Quillen Carney, is Delaware’s first lady, wife of second-term Democrat John Carney.

Both sisters attended Wilmington Friends School, founded 1748, from kindergarten through high school. Its Quaker values hold that everyone has a unique and immeasurable dignity commanding respect of all, and that learning is a never-ending process of exploration and discovery.

Tracey, one year younger, and Carol both excelled on the field and in the classroom.

“I liked books more than people,” Carol says, though she played field hockey and basketball.

Tracey, whom Carol says was the far better athlete, says her sister couldn’t match her own “killer instinct” in sports. Even from childhood, Carol was more of a, well, team player, striving for collaboration.

“I am an introvert,” Quillen admits. “I feel like I live in my head a lot. Engaging with others sometimes takes energy.”

She’s not into chit-chat, perhaps a professional disability, and is more drawn to substantive conversations. Staff at С����Ƶ quickly adjusted to the realization  that, when they met with her, she would have an abundance of tough questions about whatever they were proposing. They knew they had to do their homework and defend their ideas.

Diversity Always at the Fore

Already, С����Ƶ had made strides in broadening its diversity. It had revised hiring and recruiting practices to look in new sectors. Human Resources and the faculty created search processes that identified talent that С����Ƶ might have missed before. Even the Board of Trustees joined in, identifying younger graduates who were remarkable candidates for board seats.

Quillen oversaw the broadening of minority talent in the executive ranks with the hiring of Chris Clunie ’06, the first Black athletic director; Byron McCrae, first Black vice president for student life and dean of students; Ann McCorvey, first Black vice president for business and finance and chief financial officer; and Philip Jefferson, first Black vice president for academic affairs and dean of faculty, recently sworn in to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.

During Quillen’s tenure, the student body also grew more diverse, racially and socio-economically. In 2010, there were 96 domestic students of color in the incoming class. Last year there were 143.  

“If your applicant pool is diverse, you’re going to build a diverse community ,” Quillen says. “As we focused on equitable search processes, diversity happened.”

“Unintended collisions” is what Quillen calls them.

“You never know what kind of ideas are going to pop up when you bump into colleagues,” Ramirez says. “What has taken root is precisely what she wanted.”

Perhaps an unintended nod to its chemistry origins, Quillen insisted the building honor the fusion of silicon dioxide, calcium carbonate and sodium carbonate. Non-chemists call that glass, and it is everywhere.

Professors’ offices have glass doors, glass walls. Same with classrooms. Light pours in through each exposure. Random comfy nooks invite students to plop down and study. Whiteboards are everywhere, mostly ablaze with student scribblings—a complex molecule diagrammed here, a lab rat depicted there. Tables and chairs are all on rollers. Any room can reconfigure in seconds.

Ramirez points with pride to a physical manifestation of what occurs at the intersection of science and art. One of his students, Adrienne Lee ’21, grew conversant in both. She crafted a plasma-cut steel sculpture, a skull-shaped dome, that describes the neural connections of the brain. “Tell Me Where Is Fancy Bred, Or in the Heart or In the Head,” she titled it. That’s discipline No. 3: English lit, a line from Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice.”

Another specimen: The four-story atrium—where a grandstand-style arena faces a huge screen where lectures, student art and other ephemera flicker on command—includes Ten Days, a collaborative project between painter Herb Jackson ’67, Douglas C. Houchens Professor of Fine Arts Emeritus, and poet Alan Michael Parker, current Douglas C. Houchens Professor of English. Jackson, who arguably elevated С����Ƶ’s art department to the national stage before retiring in 2011, produced 10 drawings, and Parker wrote 10 poems, which were paired in this lyrical installation.

They each did their part independently over 10 days, then revealed to the other what they had created. To their astonishment, they found that pieces were connected in almost mysterious ways. Afterward, they wed the components thematically.

Just nine paces away, visible behind a wall of silicon dioxide and its nimble partners, squats a nuclear magnetic resonance device for chemistry experiments.

Challenging Idiosyncrasies

Quillen found a С����Ƶ steeped in tradition, with some unusual quirks. Since 1925, for example, the college had washed students’ clothes. A shocker, she says. “It was a, ‘Wait. What?’ moment.”

She had done her own laundry while collecting history degrees at the University of Chicago and at Princeton. It seemed to her that the resources could be better used elsewhere. In 2015, С����Ƶ announced it would end the perk.

“To me, it wasn’t fitting with the place we were trying to become,” she says.

Change can startle. Larry Dagenhart, the 1953 class valedictorian and a proud alum, bemoaned the move at the time, telling the Charlotte Observer: “We gave up vespers, we gave up chapel, we went coed, we even gave up the marching band, but dad-gum-it, we can't give up the laundry. What is this world coming to?”

It came to this: Now the old laundry is the Lula Bell Houston Resource Center, where  students can go for food, interview clothes and text books.

After the din subsided, Quillen learned the decision was not only broadly supported, but it also revealed another С����Ƶ distinction: openness to change.

“It helped me understand that my instincts weren’t wrong,” she says. “С����Ƶ is a place where people are more willing to make changes than other places in academia. It is a scrappy place.”

So in 2013, С����Ƶ announced it would be leaving the Southern Conference, its home since 1936 and where it was a perennial No. 1 in basketball, to join the larger and more competitive Atlantic 10.

С����Ƶ became the smallest college in the A10. Its Big Three members—George Mason University, University of Massachusetts and Virginia Commonwealth University—have enrollments above 30,000 and vastly more scholarships to distribute.

Media predictions for men’s basketball rolled in: “Dead last” and “0–18.” Coach Bob McKillop joked he would call former Wildcat standout and NBA star Stephen Curry to see if he could use his final year of eligibility.

Costs would soar. Rather than riding a bus to regional rivals, athletes would have to fly. С����Ƶ would have to pay a $600,000 exit fee to the Southern Conference and an expensive entry fee into the A10.   

But there were attractions. Exposure would soar, too. It would bring the Wildcats to big media markets in the Northeast and Midwest, where it could connect with more alumni. Costs would be offset by bigger revenues from TV contracts with the A10. ESPN, CBS Sports and NBC Sports would televise men's basketball nationally.

“I think it’s been one of the greatest decisions the college ever made,” says McKillop.

Alumni got behind the move and helped bankroll the athletic budget. Recruiting grew more robust. Quillen was in absolute lockstep with the athletic department, McKillop says, in making the jump.

As for the dire media predictions?

In their first year in the A10, the Wildcats finished 14-4 in basketball to win the A10 regular season championship. Sports Illustrated admitted the team had “outpaced the expectations of even the most wide-eyed dreamer.”

And on it rolls. This season, С����Ƶ was No. 1 in A10 basketball with a 15–3 conference record and a bid to the NCAA playoffs. And those Big Three schools? С����Ƶ beat them all, at least once. And, in case you don’t follow the sport, С����Ƶ beat the University of Alabama as well, 79–78, in Birmingham.

Clunie says the success of С����Ƶ athletics is all the more remarkable when considering its size, one of the smallest Division I colleges in the nation.

“It’s hard to be a Division I scholar-athlete,” Clunie says. “It’s even harder to be a scholar-athlete at С����Ƶ.”

There are no special residence halls for athletes, no separate cafeterias. Scholar-athletes are expected to complete their studies like everyone else, without special tutoring.

Most of С����Ƶ's peer colleges—small, private, academically ambitious liberal arts institutions—compete in Division III. It’s rigorous and demanding for those who play Division I.

“Athletes are still 100% athlete and 100% student 100% of the time, despite greater demands,” С����Ƶ soccer star Andrew Kenneson ’16 wrote in The С����Ƶian in 2016, describing the pressure his senior year. “Even after a move to a bigger conference, С����Ƶ treats its athletes like regular students.”

Clunie, a Terry Scholar, basketball player, and Watson Fellow as a student, says he was drawn to return to С����Ƶ in part because of Quillen’s philosophy on how athletics is vital to a student’s education.

“Carol’s the best person I’ve ever worked for. … She sees the educational value of athletics—resilience, teamwork, stress under pressure, critical thinking,” he says. “Athletics enhances that educational mission. It’s not the four years when we’re here that you have to think about; it’s the 40 years when we’re gone.”

Quillen says 99% of scholar-athletes won’t go on to professional sports, but embraces the role it plays in С����Ƶ’s holistic education.

“We play sports because sports are part of the educational experience,” she says. “My beef with intercollegiate sports is that some lose sight of the educational value and focus completely on the competitive aspect. Students are here to be educated. We’re not a minor sports league. No school should be.”

Paying the Bills

Money is the lifeblood of every college. Fundraising is a critical role for any leader.

In 2012, The Duke Endowment made a gift of $45 million. In 2013, С����Ƶ announced a plan to spend $120 million in capital improvement projects over the next decade to re-engineer the campus with an eye to more integration among academic departments, with a new science center high on the list.

In 2014, С����Ƶ announced a stunning goal: $425 million, the largest drive in the college’s 177-year history, to bolster its scholarship fund and pay for expansion. That campaign raised more than half a billion dollars; another demonstration of support from an alumni body that consistently places near the top of alumni giving participation nationwide. С����Ƶ’s endowment mushroomed past $1 billion.

Compliment Quillen on how the С����Ƶ Trust prospered during her time and she humbly defers to a predecessor, Bobby Vagt ’69, who launched the initiative in 2007. С����Ƶ became the first liberal arts college to offer need-blind admissions through the С����Ƶ Trust, meeting 100% of demonstrated need without packaged loans, thus broadening its reach to students of lower income families.

During her term, Quillen emphasized scholarship fund-raising, bringing in more than $285 million. Quillen and her husband, George McLendon, pledged $1 million themselves in 2017.

Quillen is known for her broad concern for the role of a liberal arts college in the 21st century and how to stay relevant against competitors like online educators. She often talks about how the liberal arts cultivate the deep human skills that employers seek, such as finding connections between disparate problems or communicating across a diverse group. And she adds that, what they also need, are the more technical skills that prep them for day one.

Preparing students for lives of leadership and service should include launching them into meaningful careers; she wanted to ensure С����Ƶ gave graduates the direction they needed to succeed.

For that, Quillen poured resources and energy into the Betty and B. Frank Matthews II ’49 Center for Career Development. There, students are coached, from freshman year onward, on how to channel their academic knowledge into internships, fellowships, graduate degrees and jobs. Under the direction of Executive Director Jamie Stamey, the center connects students with opportunities and employers from around the world and follows up after graduation to measure how students fare.

Dealing with the Unexpected

Leadership is defined by dealing with challenges. It’s easy to lead in good times and flush with money. COVID-19 was about as far from a good time as one could get.

Quillen kept the ship of С����Ƶ steered toward a clear destination: Fulfilling its mission within the context of the circumstances around it.

Uncertainty mounted. Phases rolled through. Case numbers spiked and fell. Staff and faculty created ways to connect without increasing risks, from Zoom open mic night to outdoor faculty office hours. The staff forged new techniques for serving meals safely.

Quillen showed up everywhere. She answered questions from anxious faculty and students in town hall meetings, and convened and led a team that coordinated the college’s response—everything from making С����Ƶ “test-optional” for prospective students to equipping the classrooms with the technology to go all virtual to creating expert-informed safety practices and policies.

When the dining hall fell short of staff, Quillen and other staff signed up for shifts, pulled on aprons and plastic gloves and started serving the chow line.

She marshaled the resources to make it all happen and worked alongside the people behind the scenes who were doing new and different work every day. And she cheered them on.

“I want to thank you for your empathy and courage,” Quillen said in a 2020 address to the campus. “Students, faculty, staff all have pushed past the sadness and anxiousness. You’ve poured yourselves into upending, then reconfiguring, how you do everything.

“You have bridged enormous distances to help others, to sustain and strengthen the incomparable sense of community we all cherish so much at С����Ƶ.” 

Change is born of a challenge. It also can invite it. Upending traditions and normalcy churns conflict.

“Leadership, to me,” Quillen says, “is in part helping people overcome their fear of loss so that they can reach high and imagine what might be possible.”

Even with its high standards and motivated principles, running a college like С����Ƶ can be mentally wearying. So many quarters—students, educators, staff and alumni—demand and deserve attention. Conflict is inevitable.

McKillop, who coached basketball under four college presidents at С����Ƶ, likens it to being president of a country.

“I learned a lot from her in terms of vulnerability,” he says. “She leads an incredibly diverse constituency. We’re dealing in a different culture than what  С����Ƶ was in the 1960s, 70s, 80s.”

It is challenging.

“I have seen the pain she’s experienced, the heartache she’s had in order to unite this distinctive but wide range of people С����Ƶ has,” McKillop says. “She taught me how to weather those critics who are out there.”

“From my perspective, all the risks she took paid off,” says Ramirez, the neuroscientist. “It’s a good lesson for our students.”

Ask Quillen how she thinks she’s going to be remembered in, say, 100 years, and she dismisses the question. No one should care, she says. It’s a group project. It’s about being part of the community’s trajectory, exemplified by the presidency of Sam Spencer, when С����Ƶ's doors opened to women. It’s about helping this special place recognize and seek to fulfill the promise of its founding.

In her 11 years, Quillen has markedly strengthened every corner of the college—finances, academics, athletics, diversity, Mauzé says. She has set С����Ƶ on a firm and prosperous platform ensuring future success. She has left it better than she found it.

“I think she has extraordinary courage, one who empowers and supports her team,” says Mauzé. “She’s a pioneer, thoughtful, kind and the most humble leader I’ve ever worked for.”

Mauzé says Quillen left her successor with “very big high-heels to fill.”

Additional Coverage

Hurt Hub Gift Inspired by Family, Liberal Arts and President Quillen

Quillen Joins Princeton Board of Trustees

Gifts Honor President Quillen’s Transformative Leadership

$10M Commitment Names Fieldhouse, Honors President Quillen’s Leadership

This article was originally published in the Spring/Summer 2022 print issue of the С����Ƶ Journal Magazine; for more, please see the С����Ƶ Journal section of our website.