Beverly Davenport Sypher		Katie Pope

From Campus Women Lead to Purdue Women Lead: A New Program for Inclusive Leadership
By Beverly Davenport Sypher, associate provost for special initiatives and Susan Bulkeley Butler Chair for Leadership Excellence, and Katie Pope, director of the Women’s Resource Office, both at Purdue University

In the last five years, women and minority men have constituted more than half of new hires at Purdue University. These hiring patterns reflect concerted efforts on the part of university leadership to pursue the inclusive vision laid out in Purdue’s past and current strategic plans. The university has supported a number of converging efforts to retain and develop diverse talent, and to encourage and prepare more women faculty and faculty from underrepresented groups to pursue leadership positions. While Purdue has long led the nation and the world in scientific discoveries that are changing lives and solving human problems, we also aspire to be a leader among our peers in terms of inclusive leadership.  

Hopefully, Purdue has become a model for facilitating women’s leadership. In the past decade, Purdue hired its first female provost, Sally Mason, who has since become president of the University of Iowa. France Córdova, a nationally renowned physicist and former NASA chief scientist, currently serves as Purdue’s twelfth president and is the first woman to hold this position. These trends are appearing at Purdue’s peer institutions as well: women presidents now lead half of all Big Ten schools, acting as beacons of inclusive leadership to higher education at large. At Purdue, these appointments represent our aspiration to be an inclusive institution that offers diverse constituents the opportunity to change the face, literally and figuratively, of higher education leadership.

Converging Initiatives

Inclusive institutions are those that help people feel connected and sustained as they grow and achieve. These institutions celebrate, promote, recognize, and make visible their efforts to support all stakeholders, including those who have been historically underrepresented. Inclusive institutions ensure that everyone has a voice and an opportunity to speak.

Purdue outlines its goals for inclusion in Toward a Mosaic for Educational Equity (www.purdue.edu/provost/shtml/documents/mosaicplan.pdf), a document that posits empowered leadership as the key to an institution’s success. One of the Mosaic plan’s strategic goals is to provide faculty with meaningful opportunities to grow and advance professionally. This means ensuring that development opportunities for underrepresented populations exist and are vigorously communicated. In designing these opportunities, we look for direction and guidance from institutions that have pursued similar strategic goals. Like those institutions, Purdue aspires to make a difference by changing the face and voice of leadership, creating a more inclusive, inviting, intellectually diverse, and welcoming environment. 

Important opportunities provided by a key benefactor have converged with the Mosaic plan to set Purdue on a more inclusive path. In October 2004, Susan Bulkeley Butler, a member of Purdue’s Board of Trustees and a 1965 alumna of the Krannert School of Management, donated $3.65 million to endow a Center for Leadership Excellence and a chair of the same name. She later gave $1 million to fund the Purdue Libraries’ Women’s Archives. Most recently, she helped place a bronze statue of Amelia Earhart in front of Earhart residence hall, in the center of Purdue’s campus. Butler is clearly making a mark on Purdue’s efforts to promote, nurture, and recognize women leaders.

Butler envisioned the efforts necessary for Purdue to support inclusive leadership, and she has pursued those efforts through sponsorship and authorship. After retiring in 2002 as the first female managing partner of Accenture, Butler wrote Become the CEO of You, Inc. (2006), a how-to primer on developing one’s career and personal potential that has become a guide for leadership development efforts. Having already created her Institute for the Development of Women Leaders (www.sbbinstitute.org/Public/HOME/index.cfm) to offer inspirational leadership training for women, Butler saw the university campus as another important training ground. She saw an opportunity for young women students and women faculty to help develop strategic directions for universities. Butler’s efforts continue to help Purdue develop the talents of a diverse faculty and eventually of a more diverse community of leaders. 

Campus Women Lead

The Butler Center has provided Purdue a platform for launching a collective effort to promote alliances that support women’s talent for and interest in leadership. We began our work with a visit from Campus Women Lead (www.aacu.org/campuswomenlead), a leadership alliance affiliated with the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

When Campus Women Lead came to Purdue, we were looking for a catalyst to advance our commitment to inclusion and develop the Butler Center’s mission. Alysa Rollock, vice president for Ethics and Compliance (formerly vice president for Human Relations), had worked tirelessly to promote a university-wide mission of inclusion, laying the groundwork to make the Butler Center’s goals attainable. Rollock and the Women’s Resource Office director, Katie Pope, identified Campus Women Lead as the appropriate inaugural event to support the Butler Center’s vision and enhance its visibility. The Butler Center, the Office of the Vice President for Human Relations, the Women’s Resource Office, and the Office of the Provost leveraged our individual resources to share the cost, distribute responsibilities, promote the program, and ensure its success.

Located in Purdue’s ambitious research-focused Discovery Park, the Butler Center provides research support, educational seminars, and workshops that enhance both aspiring and experienced leaders’ ability to manage today’s complex institutions. The center’s mission is to develop leadership capacity through research, education, and collaborations that help broaden representation in academic decision making. In bringing Campus Women Lead to Purdue, we sought a high-visibility way to generate interest, develop skills, and augment leadership abilities among women already in positions of authority. We wanted to create a space for campus women leaders to come together, develop support networks, and discuss concerns and best practices. We wanted our inaugural event to provide a venue for women faculty and staff to discuss their unique issues as separate groups.

Working with Campus Women Lead facilitators, we developed a program that met our needs. Campus Women Lead helped us create two one-day programs, one designed for staff at the director level and above and one for faculty members in administrative positions or with administrative responsibilities (for example, department heads and center directors). While the days had similar agendas related to identity, inclusive excellence, and collaboration, each program included space for facilitated discussion about the unique challenges facing each group. 

In those two days, we knew we had created something special. We thought we had successfully selected participants when sixty campus women leaders quickly acknowledged their invitations. But we knew we had filled an unmet need when nearly every person arrived at 8 a.m., after travelling through knee-deep snow and blizzard winds, to take part in a program none had ever heard of. With BlackBerries in hand and cell phones buzzing, some participants said they could stay only for the morning. By the end of the day, almost all attendees remained in the room. Inspired by insightful and sensitive conversations guided by Gertrude Fraser from the University of Virginia and Kathleen Wong (Lau) from Western Michigan University, participants committed to continuing the work they had started after the workshop’s end.

Perhaps the most important realization at the inaugural event came from the repeated comment, “We’ve never been at the same table before.” Many participants marveled at how much power was in the room and admitted surprise that Purdue had so many women in important positions. Although many participants knew of each other’s roles on campus, few had ever met outside of specific projects. Many participants appreciated the simple act of coming together. They also valued the workshop’s attention to diversity in leadership. One participant said, “This was the most thoughtful treatment of leadership and race that I’ve heard.” Another said, “We must continue this dialog. We must help one another lead.”

A Catalyst for Change

In effect, the inaugural Campus Women Lead event set Purdue on a course to realize the goals of alliance building and leadership development upon which the Butler Center was founded. Over the course of the Campus Women Lead workshop, we found striking similarities between the  concerns, issues, and ideas of staff and faculty leaders. The overarching themes that emerged across the two groups became the focus for further work in the months following the workshops.

One of Campus Women Lead’s most valuable contributions was its emphasis on ongoing engagement. Throughout the planning process, the facilitators made clear that the workshop would be more successful if we viewed it as the start of a continuing program rather than as a one-time event. Our challenge after the workshop was to design meaningful activities to maintain the group’s momentum and turn insight into action. Following the Campus Women Lead facilitators’ suggestion, we took note of each day’s overlapping themes. We used these ideas to develop an ongoing program of networking opportunities and meetings to help participants continue the discussions and sustain the connections they created at the initial event. Building on the positive energy developed by Campus Women Lead, we have successfully pursued new initiatives for eighteen months, expanding the initial program to become Purdue Women Lead.

In creating Purdue Women Lead, we have harnessed participants’ enthusiasm and talents. Several participants have presented their research at monthly meetings, and our faculty-led discussions have addressed such topics as work-life balance, gender and careers, intergenerational relationships, and workplace civility. Many participants have cited the new professional networks they have developed as a key benefit of Purdue Women Lead. We have also contracted with a national webinar series hosted by Purdue alumna Rebecca Shambaugh of Shambaugh, Inc. The recent release of Shambaugh’s book, It’s Not a Glass Ceiling, It’s a Sticky Floor (2008), brought Shambaugh to campus to address our Purdue Women Lead group, and Shambaugh’s work has helped us increase our focus on the development of women leaders. We have varied our monthly activities to showcase our faculty’s work, offer the Shambaugh webinar series, and provide space and time for Purdue women leaders to connect with others and discuss issues of concern. 

Clearly, our work is easier and our impact greater when we share our resources, ideas, and opportunities. Our collaborating offices must demonstrate inclusiveness through our own partnerships. We also want to establish projects and programs that give a broader range of people an opportunity to develop their talents and build alliances across campus. Our goal is to help prepare a diverse group of women for leadership at all levels of the university, and to help those already in leadership positions do their jobs better.

We are currently in the process of developing a Purdue Women Lead planning team. This group will meet for the first time in summer 2009 to begin planning the next academic year’s programming. We hope to expand our participant list and continue to build the alliances Campus Women Lead set as a goal. Because Purdue Women Lead provides unique opportunities for women, more people want to join our efforts. With expansion, however, comes an ongoing challenge. We certainly want to be inclusive—how could we not? But we are looking for ways to preserve the connectedness developed within the smaller group while expanding opportunities to a wider audience, including those not yet in leadership positions who have ambitions to lead.

Despite the challenges, Purdue Women Lead looks to the future in anticipation of the new connections and communities Purdue’s women will build. We recently marked our one-year anniversary, and we looked to our origins to energize our future. By building on the foundation set by Campus Women Lead, we have turned Purdue Women Lead into a set of partnerships to leverage our resources, expand our reach, and further the mission of the Butler Center and Purdue University.   

References

Butler, S. B. 2006. Become the CEO of you, Inc.: A pioneering executive shares her secrets for career success. New Canaan, CT: Paribus Publishing Ltd.

Shambaugh, R. 2008. It’s not a glass ceiling, it’s a sticky floor: Free yourself from the hidden behaviors sabotaging your career success. New York: McGraw-Hill.

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