Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania

Meet Some of the Extraordinary Jewish Women at the Helm of Major Universities.

Amy Gutmann grew up during an era when “it was unfathomable for a woman to say, ‘I want to be a college president someday.’ But that has definitely changed,” she says.

Gutmann, 58, certainly knows what she’s talking about. She’s president of the University of Pennsylvania, which has a $5 billion budget, approximately 20,000 employees and more than 23,000 students. She also is among a growing, though still rarefied, group of Jewish women at the helm of America’s colleges and universities.

“I think that people, first and foremost, see me as the president of Penn,” she says. “But I see being a woman as a very positive thing, and I’m very proud of my Jewish identity.”

Gutmann and other Jewish female college presidents formed part of a 2007 study conducted by the American Council on Education, which found that women made up 23 percent of the nation’s college presidents, up from 9.5 percent in 1986. The study coincided with the inauguration of Harvard’s first female president, Drew Gilpin Faust, who joined Gutmann, Shirley Tilghman at Princeton and Ruth Simmons at Brown as a woman heading an Ivy League institution.

The Jewish women who lead universities today have much in common. They are accomplished scholars with far-ranging vision and administrative know-
how. They’re not afraid of working 18-hour days, and they take great pride in their schools.

Wherever I go, I wear my university pin because I truly love my university,” says Judy Genshaft, president of the University of South Florida, which is the ninth largest public university in the country with more than 45,000 students. “You can’t consider a position like this without feeling the passion for it.”

Raised in Canton, Ohio, Genshaft, 60, credits her family for instilling “a work ethic that was all about striving. They also believed that education is key,” she says. “My grandmother would say to me, ‘Money has wings, but your degrees can never be taken from you.’”

Genshaft’s father came to America as a poor Russian immigrant and wound up establishing the largest independent meatpacking company in the country. Genshaft grew up working in the family business; “that’s how I knew I would like administrative work,” she says.

Barbara Gitenstein, 60, president of The College of New Jersey (TCNJ), a small liberal arts undergraduate school, also feels her childhood had a profound effect on her future career. Growing up in Florala, Ala., she knew of only one other Jewish family nearby. “I think that being able to be an individual in places where you are not like other people is an important leadership trait,” she says.

As a teenager, Gitenstein attended an all-girls boarding school where, again, she found herself in the minority. “I developed a lot of skill in understanding how to place myself in situations without being judgmental of others but still retainingstrong opinions and values of my own,” she says.

Shirley Strum Kenny, president of Stony Brook University "I’m a builder by nature…I like creating change."

Kenny, 73, takes particular pride in her university’s ethnic and religious diversity and feels she first learned about respect for others from her father. “He owned a shoe store and never discriminated during a time when most people did. Back then, shoe stores had black people sitting in one section and white people in another, but my father never did this,” she says.

Gutmann, whose father fled Nazi Germany in 1934, sees a vital link between her academic accomplishments and her early Jewish education. Growing up in Monroe, N.Y., “I first became a moral and political philosopher in Hebrew school,” she says.

A prominent political scientist and author of 15 books, Gutmann taught at Princeton University for 28 years, where she became the founding director for the Center for Human Values, a multidisciplinary institution devoted to ethics. The experience she gained at the center, she says, “launched me into where I am today. Because that’s when I realized I could create something with greater impact than my books could ever have.”

Nancy Cantor, president andchancellor of Syracuse University "I have always cared about promoting diversity, only now I can effect institutional-level transformation."

In her four years as president, Cantor has launched a number of interdisciplinary programs at Syracuse, where students can study subjects like arts journalism or the entertainment industry. “We’re trying to be nimble and collaborative in the way we bring our intellectual mission to the world,” she says. “I have always cared about bringing together different groups of people and promoting diversity, only now I can effect institutional-level transformation.”

Gitenstein set out thinking she’d be an English professor “for the rest of my life. I found out gradually that I was interested in administration,” she says.

As president of TCNJ, Gitenstein hopes she will be remembered for leading “major revolutions in both the school’s academic programs and student affairs.” She compares much of her work as president to teaching. “You need to first understand the complexity of issues, and then you figure out how to clearly present that to groups of people,” she says.

“As an administrator, the teacher comes out in me,” says Stony Brook’s Kenny, who also began her career as an English professor. “It’s my job to help other people reach their full potential.”

Of course, not all professors become university presidents. “There are two major things you need for this job: a vision of what you want to create and the administrative know-how,” says Kenny, whose achievements since arriving at Stony Brook in 1994 include implementing major campus construction projects and dramatically restructuring the undergraduate curriculum. “Plus, I have enormous energy.”

“You have to be energetic,” agrees South Florida’s Genshaft, who generally starts her day at 5:30 a.m. and often doesn’t return home until 10 or 11 in the evening. “You don’t sleep.”

Serving as college president is “the ultimate multitasking job. There is no leadership skill you don’t need,” observes Gutmann. “Everyone thinks that as president, you’re mainly a fundraiser, but that’s not the half of it. I need to lead an extraordinarily diverse constituency not by command or control, but by persuasion.”

Since becoming the second female president of Penn four years ago, Gutmann has translated her vision for the school into accomplishments like making tuition affordable or free to all students, buying 24 “urban acres” in Philadelphia to build new teaching and research facilities and partnering with the University of Botswana to help combat the AIDS epidemic in Africa.

“My vision for the university has been eminence through four goals: increasing access, integrating knowledge, engaging locally and engaging globally,” she says. “And we’ve taken major steps in all these areas.”

The “we” in Gutmann’s vision refers to her executive team, which she would “pit against any major corporation. You also have to be really good at hiring the right people,” she says.

Gutmann isn’t alone in describing her leadership approach as collaborative rather than hierarchical. While “this doesn’t mean all women lead this way, I think this style is more common among women,” says Syracuse’s Cantor.

“Women are socialized to lead differently,” says Gitenstein. “We’re brought up to be more collaborative, and when I started out, it seemed that people saw that as a weakness rather than as a strength.”

According to a recent article in the online publication Inside Higher Education, female college presidents, in addition to leading collaboratively, also tend to be more entrepreneurial and risk-taking than their male counterparts. This makes perfect sense to Kenny, who loves her job precisely because of its entrepreneurial component. “I’m a builder by nature, so I wouldn’t want to go to the top university in the whole world and have it stay the same way,” she says. “I like creating change.”

As a risk-taker, Kenny has a notable track record. In 1997, for example, Stony Brook became the administrator of the Brookhaven National Laboratory, known for its groundbreaking research in physics, nuclear medicine and other scientific fields. Stony Brook’s association with the lab proved successful, but “it was risky for us to take over Brookhaven at the time,” Kenny recalls. “Yet I was willing to take a risk where others might not.”

Some female college presidents take a different kind of risk: trying to have a family while keeping up with the demands of their jobs. “I don’t think there’s any such thing as balance,” says TCNJ’s Gitenstein, who has two children. “I think you have to constantly juggle your demands and priorities.”

Kenny, the mother of five children, points out that women in academia still have issues “that men don’t face, such as ‘What do I do first? Get on the tenure track or have babies?’ When I started out, you didn’t admit you had children,” she says.

As the mother of two boys ages 11 and 14, South Florida’s Genshaft feels that “I couldn’t do my job if my husband wasn’t the primary caretaker. Of the female college presidents I know who have young children, either their husbands are the primary caretakers or they have some other support,” she says.

For Jewish women, juggling work and family is not the only balancing act. They must also figure out how best to publicly conduct themselves as Jews while representing ethnically and religiously diverse institutions.

Barbara Gitenstein, president of The College of New Jersey “I developed skill in how to place myself in situations without being judgmental of others, but still retaining strong opinions and values of my own.”

Genshaft takes equal care in her relations with campus groups. “I don’t show partiality to Hillel more than I would any other campus group,” she says. “I care deeply about being Jewish and, while I certainly don’t hide my Jewishness in public, I do temper it.”

Early in her presidency, Genshaft faced one of the most daunting challenges of her career. In 2002, she fired Sami Al-Arian, a Palestinian computer science professor, on the grounds that he was suspected of using his position on campus to raise money for terrorist activities. (Al-Arian was arrested on suspicion of terrorist activity the following year.) Genshaft’s decision to fire the professor attracted national attention and generated criticism from a number of detractors, some of whom called her “the Jewish president” and accused her of discrimination.

“That was a very dangerous and scary time,” says Genshaft, who had to hire bodyguards. “The decision was even harder to make because I was Jewish. I was firing him not because I was Jewish, but because it was right.”

Gutmann firmly believes that “having every possible religious group thriving on campus is what a great university is all about.” On Chanukah, she makes a point of lighting the candles at Hillel with both Jewish and non-Jewish students. “My Jewish identity is not just important for me; I think it has lessons for all people who value justice and freedom,” she says.

While Kenny feels perfectly at home on her campus as a Jew, she believes more can be done to promote women as university leaders. “We still have women’s studies and centers and, ideally, they will put themselves out of business,” she says. “I’m hoping that one day, it won’t matter whether a leader is a woman, an African American or, for that matter, a Texan. We will simply be who we are.”

Gutmann couldn’t agree more. A blond, stylish and photogenic woman, she has received more than her fair share of comments about her appearance, as if the phrases “attractive woman” and “university president” don’t belong in the same sentence.

“I would hope that people no longer think that’s a dichotomy, but perfectly consistent with what being a woman means today,” she says.

Nancy Judy Genshaft, president of the University of South Florida “They’re still not used to seeing women leaders, particularly younger or more attractive ones. I mean, I don’t look like Golda Meir.”

Genshaft believes that mostly, “people treat you the way you want to be treated. Plus, nobody can say I got this job because I am a woman,” she says. “I got my credentials, rose through the ranks and paid my dues.”

All consider mentoring others an important part of their work and the key to promoting diverse leadership in higher education. “If you happen to be in a position of authority, it’s your job to mentor people,” says Gitenstein. “And your mentor may not look anything like you. If I had waited to find female Jewish mentors, I’d still be in Alabama.”

Susan Josephs is a freelance writer who lives in Venice, Calif.