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A More Personal Note |
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BY SUZAN DIBELLA
I was out on maternity leave when I first heard the news. Bleary-eyed from my typical less than three hours' sleep a night, I happened to pick up the newspaper that morning and wondered where I'd been for the last month.
Of course, I hadn't been reading the newspaper; I hadn't read anything except directions on formula cans. But I was definitely out of the loop on this one: A woman had been named president of UNLV, and even in my muddled state at the time, I had the presence of mind to be — well, frankly — astonished.
Having been at the university for more than a decade during the tenure of the largely male administration of former President Robert Maxson, I just wasn't expecting such good fortune as to have a woman named president. I called a colleague.
"How did this come about?" I asked, still incredulous. After all, I had lived in Nevada for 33 years at that point and had noticed that women in high places were not exactly ubiquitous. My colleague's brief explanation confirmed that a search had indeed progressed and resulted in the appointment of this seemingly dynamic woman from SUNY — Geneseo, an institution unfamiliar to most of us.
"Surprised, eh?" my colleague asked, amused at my uncharacteristic disconnectedness.
"Astounded and pleased," I responded. "What else do we know about her?"
Though the typical factual information about our new president — her credentials, her administrative experience, her work as a scholar — was soon known, the question of what else was to be learned about Carol Harter lingered.
Like many members of the campus community, I've read a great deal of material about her ideas, programs, and accomplishments since she arrived here in 1995. But aside from knowing that she had maintained a long-distance marriage for her first five years here, several of my colleagues and I seemed to know little about the woman herself. It seemed likely that others shared our curiosity about her life. So, we decided to do something so patently obvious that it's almost embarrassing that we didn't think of it sooner: We asked her about herself.
For the record, Harter is a bit puzzled as to how any mystery at all could surround her.
"I'm always surprised to hear that people don't know about my life," she says with her trademark candor. "Anyone who knows me knows that I've always been very open about it." And, as if to prove her point, she begins recounting the highlights of her youth, offering an analysis of how it might have shaped her career.
"I'm very self-conscious about growing up female in my generation and interested in what aspects of it might have affected my life, while not really knowing what they are except by speculation and retrospect," she says.
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| Harter, who was actively involved in the arts in high school, was named "the most talented" female student in her graduating class at Wantagh High School in 1959. Photo courtesy of the Black 'n' Gold yearbook, Wantagh High School. |
Born Carol Ann Clancey in Brooklyn in 1941, Harter was the older of two daughters of Irish-German-English parents. Her mother, a nurturing homemaker in a very traditional family environment typical of the 1940s and '50s, was an avid reader and a creative influence in the household.
"My mother has always encouraged me to succeed," she says, adding with a smile that at 87, her mother continues to live vicariously through her. "In some ways, I think she has lived her life through my successes. But she's always been a wonderful, supportive mom."
Carol's father was a financial planner for Socony, the predecessor company of the Mobil Oil Corp., and then for Mobil; he started out with the company as a mail boy.
"My parents were from a classic immigrant family in New York at that time. They were pretty poor. My father and his brother were the first on either side of the family to go to college," she says, adding that her father attended New York University at night to get his degree.
"Unfortunately, he mostly hated it because he was working full time, and it took him eight years to finish. For him, it had nothing to do with the college experience. It was just about getting the credential," she says.
Despite his busy schedule, her father always found time to encourage young Carol to excel at whatever interested her.
"Right from day one, he always treated me as he would've treated a son," she says. "I mean I was going to doubleheaders at Ebbets Field to see the Brooklyn Dodgers play when I was 4 years old. I was out in the street nearly every day playing stickball with the neighborhood boys and my dad. I remember always having the sense that there was nothing I couldn't do."
While her father bolstered that notion, he was also quite strict — in her own words, "a totally domineering figure," from whom she sought to break free when the opportunity arose.
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| Harter is seen here with her sister, Mary Ann Bartley, far left, and her parents, Catherine and Ross Clancey, in 1989. |
"He was kind of enigmatic," she says. "He both treated me as if there was nothing I couldn't do on the one hand, but, on the other, he was a very traditional father. He would be standing at the door ready to kill me if I got in one minute past midnight."
Her opportunity for some independence came when she went away to college. Once again, her father played a pivotal role in shaping her world view as she approached her college years, telling her that although he supported her desire to get an education, he didn't want her to use that education to become a single career woman without a family.
"That was something he just did not want for me. He thought I'd be miserable," she says.
Harter enrolled at Harpur College, a small, elite public liberal arts institution that later became the State University of New York — Binghamton. As were many young women of her day, she was encouraged to study literature.
"In high school, I had had great encouragement to go into the sciences," she recalls. "But at Harpur College, I was discouraged from going in that direction. They said, 'Girls don't do that. They do English or foreign languages. That's where you'll be happier.' And suddenly I was an English major. Now I was always happy as an English major — I've always been a voracious reader — but had I been in school in a later generation, I might have gone into science or math or business. I think I might have wanted to go to law school. I might have chosen differently."
The combination of studying literature and enjoying her new-found freedom agreed with her. She flourished — especially socially.
"I think being out from under my father's thumb enabled me to have such a wonderful time that I was not as great a student as I could've been," she muses, adding that it wasn't long before she met a fellow Harpur College freshman who would change the course of her life.
"I had a serious boyfriend back home, but I was casually dating a guy at college, and he and I played pingpong every night at the student union. I used to beat the heck out of this guy. And every night, one of his friends would stand there and watch us play."
After she soundly beat her date again and again, the observing friend — a fellow named Mike Harter — stepped up and asked if he could play.
"And then he beat the heck out of me," she says, smiling at the memory. "I thought he was cute and interesting, and we became friends. Then when my boyfriend from back home and Mike's girlfriend came up for Winter Weekend, Mike and I decided that the four of us should socialize together. His girlfriend stayed with me, and my boyfriend stayed with him."
By the end of the weekend, Carol and Mike had discovered that they were more concerned with each other than with their former love interests.
"It very quickly grew into a loving relationship — to the point that it was November when we met and we were married in June," she says. "We ran off from school and got married in our sophomore year. We were 19. We never thought either one of us was ever going back to school."
Mike quickly got a job and suffered through two months of manual labor before realizing he had to go back to college.
"It happened for Mike really quickly," she says. "He was working in a welding sweatshop, and it wasn't two months before he said, 'I simply cannot do this.'" Not long after, she found out she was pregnant.
Fortunately, they had discovered the federal government had recently passed the National Defense Education Act — legislation that enabled them to obtain loans to pay for college. With the loan funding and some help from his parents, Mike returned to school immediately. After their first son was born, so did Carol.
"During my pregnancy I had some pretty serious morning sickness, so I needed to stay home. I decided to use that time to read. I went to the library once a week and checked out seven books each time. I read one a day, and I read the heavies. I went straight through Dostoyevski, Faulkner, Hemingway, and even Joyce, although I had real trouble with his more complex work."
Her absorption in the classics inspired her to study literature again, and she enrolled at Harpur College in the fall of 1962.
"We managed our schedules so that each of us was home with the baby when the other was in school," she recalls. "Mike worked part time, and we pulled all of it together without ever sending our oldest son, Michael, to a babysitter until he was 3. We shared housekeeping and baby care, and went to school. Those were some pretty nontraditional things to do in 1962."
She also became a dedicated student in short order, entering the honors program and excelling.
"It was a wonderful English program — superb. There were very few students, so we received almost entirely personal tutoring from some absolutely marvelous faculty. It was a great experience."
Toward the end of her senior year, one of her professors suggested she continue her education.
"I had to take an honors exam with this bear of a professor named John Hagopian who terrified everybody, including me," she says. "Even my own adviser warned me about this guy. So when I finished the exam — I thought I'd failed — he said to me, 'Harter, you're a bright woman. You need to go on for a master's degree.' I was stunned. My response was, 'Huh?'"
After the exhilaration of passing the exam wore off, she gave more serious thought to his suggestion. She had planned, like her husband, to get a teaching job after she graduated with her bachelor's degree in 1964. But the notion of going to graduate school stuck in her head.
"The college had just developed its master's program in English, so some stipend support was available, and I thought maybe we could find a way to make it work. We thought it would be nice if I could stay home with our son during the day and go to class at night. It seemed to make sense for a couple of years until he went to kindergarten. I could earn a little money by teaching, which I liked, and I could study some more, which I loved. So I decided — with really no ambition toward a professional career — that I would enter the master's program."
Midway through her master's program, she became pregnant with their second son, Sean; she suffered some serious health problems after his birth, thus delaying completion of her master's degree for a year. In the meantime, her husband had taken a teaching job but continued to share in the children's caregiving.
"Way before it was chic, Mike was a devoted father," she says. "He was a great caregiver, right from day one. And through sharing care of the boys, we managed to spend a lot more time with them than most people have the luxury of doing. We have always been very grateful for having had that opportunity. I think that is the reason we are still so attached to the boys and they to us."
While finishing her master's degree in 1967, Harter was recruited once again to continue her studies at what had become by that time SUNY — Binghamton. She was drawn to the doctoral program in part by the same benefits to her family that she had recognized three years earlier, though she did understand that she would have less flexibility in her schedule at the doctoral level.
"I did have to send Sean to a babysitter because I could not both teach and study at the doctoral level and be at home all the time," she says. "I had to be in the library, I had to teach, and I had to go to my classes. But it still enabled me to spend more time with the boys than a nine-to-five job would have allowed."
As she approached the completion of her doctorate, professor Hagopian again intervened.
"'Harter,' he said, 'stop being a housewife. You need to become a professor.' Again, my response was, 'Who, me? A professor?' There were hardly any women professors around at that time. And I was so unprogressive that the notion seemed somewhat foreign. But I really began to think about it."
The decision for her to pursue a career in academe was a difficult one for the Harters. It was at that point that they realized there would be some serious life changes in store for the family if Carol were to take that route. However, Mike himself had hoped to obtain his Ph.D. and realized that by following her to another institution, he could do so. They had also hoped to raise their boys in a quasi-rural environment. When she received a job offer from Ohio University, they felt it was a wonderful opportunity in many ways.
"I had several offers," she says. "It was at a time when it was still novel to hire a woman, and it was before the job market took a downward turn, so I think I ended up with five or six different opportunities. But we loved Athens [the city in which Ohio University is located]. It was a small town, and the schools were good because the university faculty made sure they were."
Mike got a job teaching in a local high school, and soon the Harters were able to buy a house of their own for the first time.
"By then, we had been married for 12 years, and we had always rented sabbatical houses," she recalls. "And when we bought our first house for $38,000 in Athens, we thought we were so far in over our heads. Our payments were $232 per month, and that seemed so huge an amount that I didn't know how we would ever make it. At the time we were still repaying our undergraduate student loans — but then we were still paying off those loans many years later when we were paying for our older son's college tuition. So buying the house was a financial challenge. But after not having a home of our own for so long and raising kids without it, a first house is something you treasure. It will always be the house I love. I have a picture of it in our current home."
It appeared they were living the American dream, albeit a progressive version of it. In the early 1970s, the Harters were considered a little unusual in that she was the one with the Ph.D. and the faculty job. Mike had begun pursuing his doctorate at Ohio after teaching high school for a year, but he postponed completing it to take a position directing a child development project for the Appalachian poor. Thus, Carol — having a greater amount of education than her husband — was something of an anomaly.
"We were called the 'odd couple.' They'd say, 'Oh, we can't wait to meet the odd couple.' Of course, by today's standards, that seems utterly ridiculous. But back then it seemed harsh and awful to me. But Mike survived it all incredibly well. He has always had such a strong sense of self that those kinds of things didn't bother him."
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| Harter accepted her first administrative post in 1974 — about the time this photo was taken — when she became ombudsman for Ohio University. |
After four years in her teaching post at Ohio, Harter received unpleasant professional news: The university had suffered huge enrollment and budget losses and was being forced to lay off 90 faculty members. Untenured faculty such as herself were going to be the first to go; she received word that her contract would not be renewed.
"At the time I received notice, Mike was a full-time student in the Ph.D. program, so we were looking at the prospect of no income with two children," she says. "Fortunately, my English department colleagues put on a campaign to help me get the job of ombudsman, a relatively new position that had been created in part in response to the large number of complaints lodged against the university over all of the layoffs."
Much to her relief, she got the job, which she held for two years. During that time, a new president, Charles Ping, arrived at Ohio University.
"This new president came in and had the horrible task of trying to save the place and turn it around," she says. "He came and visited me as ombudsman, seeking my insights into what areas of the institution seemed to be causing students and faculty the most problems. I was so impressed that a new president would do that."
Ping was equally impressed with Harter.
"I sensed at the time that Carol was a good judge of people and responsive to their needs," says Ping, now president emeritus and trustee professor of philosophy and education at Ohio University. "The type of sensitivity to people she possesses, combined with her intelligence, determination, and perseverance, leads directly to success in an organization as people-oriented as a university."
When it came time for Ping to appoint a new dean of students, Harter was at the top of his list.
"When he advertised for that position, I got a great deal of encouragement to be a candidate. So I applied, which was — now when I think of it — so brassy. I was 34 years old. I had nothing but faculty and ombudsman experience. I had no administrative experience, and this was a brand new position."
Harter was also concerned about what effect the anticipated 12-hour days would have on her boys, who were then 10 and 14.
"I remember when I was offered the job, I picked up the boys from school one afternoon and had a serious talk with them about it," she recalls. "I said, 'I've got this opportunity that is going to take me away from you, and that bothers me.' Sean was too young, I think, to know what it would mean. But my older son said, 'Go for it, Mom.'" After weighing the decision carefully, she decided to take the job.
One of her first tasks was to find a way to get Ohio University's nearly bankrupt residence halls out of debt.
"The residence halls were built for 8,000 students, and we had 5,500 living there," she recalls. "We had $2 million in debt we couldn't pay. And the president said to me, 'This is an odd thing to do to someone who is dean of students, but I'm going to give you the responsibility to bring this whole thing out of disaster.'
"So my first real task was not really part of the normal student affairs job. It was essentially a management job. I've never worked harder or longer or with less of a sense of ability to accomplish anything than I did that first year. I had people working 16 hours a day for days on end to find out how we were going to reduce our costs by several million dollars and increase our revenues."
A year into the job, Harter was promoted to vice president and dean of students. She was able to hire an associate dean to handle student matters while she attended to the thornier financial and operational matters.
It was projected to take 10 years to do it, but Harter turned around the residence halls in four. When the institution's vice president for operations retired in 1982, Harter's name was once again at the top of the list for the post. Her work with the residence halls shined as an example of the kind of commitment and administrative skills she possessed.
"I had done so much work with the residence halls — including labor union negotiations, budget development, and facility management — that Charlie Ping asked me to take on operations in addition to my other responsibilities," she says. "My title became vice president for administration, and it meant that I had a large overlapping set of responsibilities that included management of the physical plant and facilities planning, as well as enrollment management and all of the student services."
Her seven years in that post amplified her experience in areas not typically managed by women.
"There never had been — and, I believe, never has been since — a vice president for administration in the Ohio system who was a woman," she says, adding that the experience so vastly expanded her understanding of how a university runs that she considers it invaluable today.
"But what I finally decided was that I didn't enjoy administration without the values of the academic side of the institution," she says. "I had spent a great deal of time in that position doing things like labor negotiations and facilities management. While useful and informative, those tasks were not what I had wanted to do with my time professionally. I wanted to have a life that was embedded in the academic and intellectual life of the campus. So, for me, when I started thinking about making a change in 1988, it was a choice of going back to the faculty or considering a presidency."
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| Harter receives congratulations from then-SUNY Chancellor R. Bruce Johnstone, right, former SUNY- Geneseo President Robert MacVittie, middle, and her mentor, former Ohio University President Charles Ping, left, during her inauguration as president of SUNY-Geneseo. |
By the time the opportunity arose to pursue the presidency of the State University of New York — Geneseo in 1989, Harter had made the decision. Her sons were grown by that time; Sean was 23 and finishing law school, and Michael, 27, was preparing to become a teacher after spending several years managing restaurants.
"It was pretty much the perfect time in terms of the children," she says. "However, with my husband, it was a very different story."
Up to that point, the two had always been able to find work in the same geographical area. In recent years, they had even worked at the same university: Mike had been recruited to become the second dean of health and human services at Ohio during her tenure there. They didn't relish the thought of a commuting marriage, she says, but the opportunity was too great to pass up. She accepted the post of president at SUNY — Geneseo.
"Our hope was that he would quickly find a position nearby," she says, noting that at the time there were 356 colleges and universities in the state of New York and probably 50 in the vicinity of Geneseo. "We actually hoped it would happen more quickly than it did; it took a year for him to find a position in the area. Now when I look back on it, that was no big deal. But it was difficult for us."
One bright spot was that Mike's family was close by. And she was uniquely suited — by both her interests and her qualifications — to her new job. She possessed an unusual combination of administrative skills that were not especially common in women college presidential candidates.
"Given their needs at the time, my administrative background was valuable to them," she says. "Also, I saw the need for fund raising there, and I had already been involved in two capital campaigns back in Ohio. So there were some very good matches between their interests and mine. And I had decided that if I was going to leave Mike for any length of time, at least I was going to be only 50 miles away from his entire family. That's why that particular college worked for us at that moment in time."
In her six years at Geneseo, Harter enjoyed many successes, including creating and implementing a strategic planning process, steadily increasing minority enrollment, increasing retention, and strengthening the academic focus of the institution. She also counts as one of her greatest accomplishments there her part in raising more private money for the institution than had been raised in the previous 120-year history of the college.
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| Despite busy schedules, the Harter family manages to gather each year for the holidays. Harter's husband, Mike, seated at left, recently accepted a position with the University and Community College System of Nevada. Their oldest son, Michael, right, teaches 8th grade at Elton M. Garrett Middle School in Boulder City. Their son Sean, an attorney, lives in West Virginia. |
However, by the mid-'90s, she began to see a waning commitment to public higher education in New York, she says.
"Public education is a value that I hold dear," she says. "And when I began witnessing a disturbing trend away from the support of public higher education in the state, it was very disheartening."
When she was recruited to join the slate of candidates seeking the presidency of UNLV, Nevada's commitment to public higher education spoke volumes to her.
"I wanted to come to UNLV because I felt there was an energy and vitality about higher education here," she says. "The growth of the state, combined with the quality and potential of the university, I felt, could only mean wonderful opportunities."
Yet, the prospect of once again maintaining a long-distance marriage was not a pleasant one to the Harters. After agonizing over the decision, Harter accepted the post, expecting that her husband would find a suitable job in the area. Though five years ensued before he did, Mike recently obtained a position with the University and Community College System of Nevada and moved to Las Vegas.
"It was a tough five years," she says. "This time I am absolutely unequivocal that we'll never do it again. It was far too long a period to be without your spouse."
For whatever loneliness and difficulty she may have experienced during that time, her first five years here were productive by any account. She is credited with creating an institution-wide strategic plan used to guide the university's activities; moving UNLV up into the ranking defined by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching as "Doctoral/Research Universities-Intensive"; playing a leading and active role in raising $116 million in private funds for facilities, program support, and scholarships; and creating Nevada's first public law school and first school of dentistry.
Harter has also overseen the development of several new master's and Ph.D. programs that have specific relevance to Nevada's need for highly trained professionals in such fields as physical therapy, health physics, and environmental sciences. Her dedication to meeting the needs of the community has not stopped there, however. With an eye toward the long-term needs of the community and state, she has developed plans to expand research opportunities and increase funding for research as rapidly as possible in an effort to move UNLV into the highest classification defined by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching — "Doctoral/Research Universities-Extensive."
Those plans are pivotal to the effort to diversify the economy of our area, according to one of Harter's most avid supporters, Don Snyder, who is the chair of the UNLV Foundation Board of Trustees and president of the Boyd Gaming Corp.
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| Harter chose to come to UNLV because she felt there was "an energy and vitality about higher education" in the state. She is seen here in her office talking with management assistant Lori Mandracchio. |
"If we are successful at strengthening the research orientation of the university based on Carol's plans, and then the community is able to attract the businesses that need and support the institution, she will have truly accomplished something great," Snyder says. However, he is quick to add that her achievements up to this point are already substantial.
"What Carol has brought to UNLV's presidency is a visionary approach to running the institution," Snyder says. "Many other people from the community have recognized and appreciated this quality as well. Her strategic plan for the university has been invaluable, as have been her skills in and commitment to implementing programs designed to translate that plan into reality."
He adds that he is equally impressed with her native intelligence, ability to balance academics and athletics, and her administrative acumen.
"The presidency of the university is a large job with a lot of moving parts," he says. "I'm continually impressed by her ability to grasp all aspects of it. You don't often see a person who can see the big picture but can also understand the subtleties of the environment."
Harter is appreciative of supporters like Snyder and credits them with understanding her vision — as well as her tenacious style and steadfast commitment to doing what she believes is best for UNLV. And, she says, as long as her vision for the university is shared by the regents, the community, and the state, she will remain on board as president.
As for her future beyond the presidency of UNLV, Harter says she looks forward to enjoying two things when she retires: spending time with her grandchildren and returning to the classroom as a faculty member.
"I often wonder what kind of life I would have had had I remained on the faculty," Harter says. "I've talked to Mike about it, and he keeps saying, 'Oh, baloney. You wouldn't have stayed in the classroom for long. You would have gone up the administrative ladder on the dean's side. You would've become chair of the English department, then dean, then provost, and then president. So you would have become a president anyway.' He may be right. I don't know if the less frenetic faculty life is what I would have chosen. But I look forward to it now as the way I want to bring my career to a close."
She adds that she might write a couple of books someday, one on women in leadership and one based on her experiences at UNLV.
"The latter will be a novel," she says, smiling. "And probably a comedy."
So for those awaiting more detail about the life and times of Carol Harter, she notes that there's more to come. Her first novel, like her presidency at UNLV, is a work in progress.
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