Women Who Lead the Colleges Their Fathers Did

When Wilma Mishoe was asked to become president of Delaware State University, she could not say no. “Higher education,” she says, “is my natural habitat,” and Delaware State was her home institution.

Mishoe grew up on the campus of the four-year, public, historically black institution in Dover. She was 12 when her father, Luna I. Mishoe, became president of what was then Delaware State College, in 1960. The small student body and the fact that many faculty members and administrators lived on the campus, she recalls, made the campus a “very family-oriented environment.”

She credits her father’s example with helping her prepare for her current role. “I spent a lot of time in his office as he was working and meeting with others,” she says. She also watched him give speeches.

“I was fortunate enough that I had a father who would even share situations and problems with me and would even ask for my opinion and included me in the decision-making as well. I guess in his own way, that was training me up even then.”

When her father was resting or sleeping, she remembers, she used to shield him from the reporters who would call their home day and night. “His life, as well as his entire family’s life, was open to the public 24/7,” she says. From that, she learned “what it is to have a public life as opposed to a private life.”

By the time her father retired as president, in 1987, two years before his death, Delaware State’s enrollment had grown from 386 in 1960 to 2,389, and the college was well along the path to becoming a university six years later.

Mishoe worked at a variety of postsecondary institutions, including Delaware Technical Community College, for 30 years, before retiring in 2010. She came out of retirement to become acting president of Wilberforce University, another historically black institution, in Ohio, in 2014. The next year, she joined the Board of Trustees at Delaware State.

Mishoe was elected the board’s first female chair in 2017 and became interim president in early 2018 and the university’s first female president six months later.

Mishoe took her father’s values and leadership style to heart. “My mantra is ‘Students first,’ " she says. “I know that I got that from observing Father.” She remembers him as a brilliant man who used his background in mathematics and science to inform his decisions.

“Without even really thinking about it, I say, ‘Now, how would my father approach this?’ " She tries to make decisions in the same collaborative, open-minded way her father did. Mishoe sees her work as building on her father’s work, as well as that of the presidents of Delaware State who came between them.

The university has nearly twice the number of students it did when her father retired, but it has the same basic challenges, she says: increasing enrollment and financial resources, and sustaining the academic programs and the entire institution.

Months before Mishoe assumed the top job at Delaware State, Rebecca J. Stoltzfus became president of Goshen College, which her father led from 1984 to 1996. She had some of the experiences her father did, like getting the traditional dunk in the fountain for new presidents, but she was determined to set her own path.

“I worried that this relationship with my father, that he had been president prior, would loom larger than it has in reality,” she says. Her focus, instead, was on making the transition from vice provost for undergraduate education at Cornell University.

Her father, Victor Stoltzfus, took the helm at Goshen, in Indiana, after she had graduated from there. She remembers being happy and proud when she learned of her father’s appointment. A high regard for education, and a Goshen education in particular, runs in the family. Her mother was a teacher; her parents, sisters, and daughter all attended Goshen; and her son is in his third year there now.

Stoltzfus began to see a college presidency as a possibility when she was rising through the ranks as a professor at the Johns Hopkins University and then at Cornell. As she wound up on more committees and in more leadership roles, she found herself “beginning to develop a concept of myself as somebody who could contribute at the leadership level.”

When she returned to Goshen as president, Stoltzfus talked with her father about establishing boundaries: “I’m very much my own person, and he respects that, so I don’t ask him for advice on a lot of things, and he doesn’t offer advice on a lot of things.” She does, however, tap his skills in donor relations and fund raising, and asks him for background information when she reaches out to donors who have shown interest in the college since his time as president.

The college, which is affiliated with the Mennonite Church USA, changed in the 21 years between the end of her father’s tenure and the beginning of hers. For instance, the church no longer requires all board members and a supermajority of the faculty to be church members. But Stoltzfus also sees that the challenges facing college presidents are fundamentally the same: making great hires, managing relations with the governing board, and earning the trust of the people they serve.

A for-profit institution in San Francisco also has a female president who followed in her father’s footsteps. Elisa Stephens leads the Academy of Art University, which had been led by both her father and her grandfather, who founded it in 1929.

Other colleges are being led or have been led by women whose fathers were college presidents, although not at the same institutions. Clayton Spencer, president of Bates College, is the daughter of the late Samuel Reid Spencer Jr., who led Mary Baldwin College and Davidson College. Frances Lucas-Tauchar, president of Millsaps College from 2000 to 2010, is the daughter of Aubrey K. Lucas, who led the University of Southern Mississippi from 1975 to 1996.

Stoltzfus sees the logic in following a parent’s footsteps into the post. “Being a college president is not a usual occupation. It’s not something one grows up wishing to do,” she says. Seeing a parent, or another family member, serve as a college chief “makes you realize that these are ordinary human beings that step into these roles, so maybe it demystifies it a little bit.”

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