Land Conservationist to Lead Alumnae Relations at Sweet Briar

Conserving a College

Before Mary Pope Hutson applied for an executive position at Sweet Briar College, her alma mater, she “really had to think long and hard” about leaving her 18 years of work as a land conservationist. But then she realized that her new role — as vice president for alumnae relations and development — was, in a way, simply another type of land conservation.

“It was a gift of land from Indiana Fletcher Williams that chartered Sweet Briar to be a women’s learning institution,” says Ms. Hutson, who will step into her new role on January 1. “This struck a particular chord in me that tied back to my line of work. To do this is to fulfill that promise of perpetuity that that gift of land was for the sole purpose of educating women leaders in America.”

Ms. Hutson was most recently executive vice president of the Land Trust Alliance, in Washington. She led a major-donor task force of Saving Sweet Briar Inc., a nonprofit group set up by alumnae last March that sued to prevent the financially strapped college from being shut down. In July she became a member of the college’s Board of Directors as part of a reconfiguration that was called for in a settlement agreement between the college and Saving Sweet Briar.

Part of her new job will be building a national network of alumnae. Leading the task force showed her that it’s time to look beyond the traditional alumnae base for fund raising, she says. There were more than 7,500 donors to the campaign, many of whom had not graduated from Sweet Briar. “We had many donations from friends, parents, students,” people affiliated with other institutions like the nearby Hampden-Sydney College, “and many Virginians themselves who also valued the institution,” says Ms. Hutson. “These are all avenues that haven’t been explored.”

She will focus on working with foundations, women’s leadership organizations, and corporations. Sweet Briar is one of the few women’s colleges that has a four-year engineering degree, she notes, and that program could open up opportunities to raise money from “women in STEM” groups.

“The ‘save Sweet Briar’ campaign was very ‘all hands on deck,’ but we just cannot take it for granted that we can keep this momentum and level of engagement,” says Ms. Hutson. “Some women’s colleges that have been very successful have diversified their bases of support for many years.” Sweet Briar will be doing that as well, she says, over the next decade. — Angela Chen

Winning Back Alumnae

Four months into his first presidency, Brian C. Ralph says he is benefiting from a gamble that turned out well, along with trying to remedy the fallout from other past decisions.

In 2013, his predecessor as president of William Peace University, Debra M. Townsley, used a substantial part of the institution’s endowment to buy an adjacent shopping center whose owner had filed for bankruptcy. That move drew some criticism, as did several other management decisions. Last year, the majority of full-time faculty members sent a letter to the university’s Board of Trustees expressing no confidence in her leadership.

Ms. Townsley was a high-paid, self-declared “change agent” who in 2012 oversaw the end of the institution’s 140 years as a college for women and its name change the previous year from Peace College. The university’s enrollment is now 35 percent male. She also sought to replace many tenured faculty with adjuncts.

The university’s board selected Mr. Ralph only after Ms. Townsley declined a five-year contract extension, but alumnae critics have bade her good riddance.

Mr. Ralph says Ms. Townsley “had to make some very tough decisions,” and he gets to be “the beneficiary” of some of them. For example, he says, the investment in the retail center, whose specialty shops and restaurants attract students and many other consumers, is working out well, so it was “a smart move made by smart folks.”

Just before he moved to Peace after 12 years as vice president for enrollment management at Queens University of Charlotte, Peace started academic programs in video-game design and musical theater, and it has since added marketing and business analytics.

He says lifting enrollment, “an uphill climb” for small colleges, is among his priorities; at Queens he managed to increase enrollment of full-time degree-seeking undergraduate students by about 60 percent. At Peace, “we haven’t begun to scratch the surface of what it means to be a small liberal-arts college in a great city like Raleigh,” he says.

Among the issues he will have to deal with, however, is alumnae criticism of the high student-to-faculty ratio he inherited from Ms. Townsley. Peace has only 28 full-time and two part-time faculty members, along with 54 adjuncts, for 795 day students and 243 night and online enrollees. He says he will need to win back support from alumnae, some of whom became “disengaged” during Peace’s changes. His task, he says, is to lead William Peace University from “a little bit of a fragile state, to a growing state.” — Peter Monaghan

Museum’s Turnaround

During her time as an assistant curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Kim Conaty spent her evenings teaching classes at the museum and working on her dissertation at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. So when the curator position opened up at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, several colleagues in her field sent her the posting, suggesting the job would be a great fit for her dual passions for academic work and postwar and contemporary art.

This month she assumed that post at the museum, which is known for both its extensive 20th- and 21st-century art collection, and a controversy that roiled the art world and threatened to shut the museum’s doors in the not-too-distant past.

In 2009, the university’s then-president said Brandeis would close the museum and sell its works to cover the university’s financial losses from the recession. Alumni, students, and donors protested, and four benefactors sued to keep the museum open. Two years later, Brandeis, with a new president at its helm, agreed as part of a court settlement of the lawsuit not to sell the art.

Since then, the museum has experienced a turnaround and is in a period of significant expansion led by its director, Christopher Bedford, who started in 2012. Ms. Conaty says she was drawn to the job by Mr. Bedford’s vision and dynamism.

Mr. Bedford had added significant contemporary works to the collection, opened a satellite gallery called Rosebud in downtown Waltham, Mass., and commissioned an outdoor sculpture, Chris Burden’s “Light of Reason.”

The piece, with its three rows of Victorian lampposts, “literally lights up the campus,” Ms. Conaty says. “It lights up the face of museum, and it brings people to it.”

One of Ms. Conaty’s first jobs will be to conduct an extensive survey of the museum’s 8,000 works and consider ways to exhibit the collection in a bigger way. She hopes to keep teaching.

Ms. Conaty will also work on building relationships with art collectors and museum supporters, with the intent of getting them involved with the Rose’s exhibits and excited about the new direction of the museum.

The Rose, she says, “is off again with a running start and doing great things.” — Kathryn Masterson

Leadership Shift

Kim E. Schatzel, interim president of Eastern Michigan University, will become president of Towson University, in Maryland, in January.

The universities are both public master’s institutions of similar size, with more than 22,000 students.

Ms. Schatzel became provost of Eastern Michigan in 2012 and took on the added role of interim chief in July.

Earlier in her career, she led industry and technology start-ups. After she earned a Ph.D. in marketing and management of technology from Michigan State University in 1999, she shifted her focus to higher education. — Ruth Hammond

Obituary: Minnesota Historian Dies

Hyman Berman, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Minnesota who specialized in U.S. labor and Minnesota history, died on November 29. He was 90.

Mr. Berman taught at Brooklyn College and at Michigan State University before joining the University of Minnesota in 1961. There he taught the university’s first courses in U.S. labor history.

He was a well-known political commentator who often appeared on local television and radio stations, including Minnesota Public Radio. He did research on the state’s iron-ore-mining region, the Iron Range; wrote a book on the state’s Jewish population with another historian; and served as an informal adviser to Gov. Rudy Perpich in the 1970s.

Mr. Berman retired from the university in 2004.— Anais Strickland

Read more about people in Gazette or on Twitter at @ruthehammond. Submit news releases and contributions for What I’m Reading to people@chronicle.com.