W. Rochelle Calhoun, who started as vice president for campus life in September, explained that she puts in a special effort to get to know students because while her job is centered around students, her office is in Nassau Hall and students don’t go to Nassau Hall just to hang out.
“I’ve really spent many of my afternoons and evening ... going and visiting student groups,” Calhoun said. “I feel like the major part of my job is to be connected with students, and that helps me to really understand how I in my role as an administrator can have at the center of my work the interests and needs of students.”
Calhoun comes to the University from Skidmore College, where she worked for seven years as Dean of Student Affairs, and she worked at Mount Holyoke for more than a decade before that in a series of positions relating to student life, including college ombudsperson and director of diversity and inclusion. She graduated from Mount Holyoke in 1983 with a double degree in theater and politics, and got her Master of Fine Arts in theater in 2001 from Columbia University.
“A creative leader, she has enormous capacity to engage in a warm and productive way with students,” Executive Vice President Treby Williams '84 said. “She came across to me as very authentic in her desire to express students issues and concerns.”
As vice president of student life, Calhoun will use a 300-person staff and a $49 million budget to manage a number of organizations on campus such as the Pace Center for Civic Engagement and the Department of Athletics. Williams explained that Calhoun reports to her, but the technical appointment is to the cabinet, so University President Christopher Eisgruber ‘83 reviewed the input and evaluation from the search committee and made the final decision to hire Calhoun.
English professor Jeff Nunokawa, who served on the search committee that selected Calhoun, said he thinks she has a lot to offer the University.
“I’ve never heard anyone speak with such kind of acuity –I haven’t in the past year and I’ve heard a lot of people talk about it –about the activism that was so much at the center of our campus last year, that flowered last year. Not just on our campus but across the country,” Nunokawa said.
He noted the University saw numerous protests last year in many ways precipitated by the Black Lives Matter nationalmovement.
Calhoun said she recognizes the importance of these issues and University students expressing them in protest form, much like on other campuses. She added that she sees protests as a learning opportunity and she values the integrity of the protesters.
“It’s important to have the right narrative around protests as well,” she said.
Calhoun’s office will be deeply invested in working towards more diversity, equity and inclusion, she said. She added that thanks to the results of a task force on diversity, she will be following the recommendation to hire an administrator in her office to focus on these issues.
“We’re at an inflection point on campus on a lot of these issues,” Williams said."So we’re very excited [Calhoun has] joined our campus at this moment."
Williams explained that finding Calhoun involved an extensive national search process involving resume reviews and written materials. After a national search and coordinated efforts between the administration and a search firm to identify candidates around the country, an iterative process whittled down candidates to fewer than five. Search committee members, other campus colleagues and groups of undergraduate and graduate students not on the committee interviewed the finalists.
Williams said that one of the difficult things about finding a vice president for student life is that the ideal candidate is someone who can connect with students but is also a very organized administrator.
“There are significant and complex organizational pieces that are under vice president of campus life, so finding someone who can embody the student voice on campus but can also provide sophisticated organizational skills is what we were looking for,” Williams said.
Nunokawa said she was hilarious in her first interview and utterly thoughtful in her second. He also said that her desire to be a part of student life as a warm and effusive personality was evident to the search committee.
“She is, first of all, super funny, in a way where funny is about being honest,” Nunokawa said. “People can be funny as a way of distracting you from the truth and people can be very funny in a way of getting you to the truth in a way that’s not too threatening but to real truths, to hard truths and she’s very good at that.”
Calhoun noted that she double-majored in politics and theater during her undergraduate years at Mount Holyoke and believed politics to be a logical choice. She added that she found politics to be awful and decided not to go to law school.
“Politics was practical, but theater would get me through college,” she said.
Calhoun said that her theater background informs many of her ideas about her work, the way she is in the world and the way she understands other people in the world. More than that, it ingrained itself in her adept organization skills, she said.
“As a director, I’m very organized but also I am deeply moved by people’s lives and I think that also speaks to working in an environment when you’re working with people’s lives all the way,” Calhoun said.
She explained that she was first introduced to administrative work while she was getting her MFA in theater from Columbia, during which time she also did administrative work alongside the head administrator. She noted that the students began to call her ‘co-dean,’ and said that this circuitous route led her to administrative work first at Mount Holyoke, then at Skidmore and now at the University.
Williams said the selection committee saw her background as illuminating for her role at the University, because as Calhoun described, when theater is at its best, it takes a stance and gives the audience a new understanding of the world. Calhoun said commitment to others’ lives will guide her administrative work.
“Diversity and inclusion is important in every single unit in campus life and that absolutely includes Pace and we look forward to more support and more expertise in the area for sure,”saidKimberly de los Santos, executive director of the Pace Center.
Joshua Woodfork, Calhoun’s former colleague and Vice President for Strategic Planning and Institutional Diversity at Skidmore, noted that Calhoun’s experience with diversity issues is expansive. Calhoun noted that she currently serves as a steering committee member for the Saratoga Springs Community-Wide Conversation on Diversity and worked both at Mount Holyoke and Skidmore on committees and strategic initiatives towards greater diversity and inclusion.
Woodfork also noted that Calhoun had to respond to a protest at Skidmore last year, explaining that a group broke off from the larger protest and interrupted the academic exposition in one of the academic buildings, and students on Yik Yak responded with racist and discriminatory remarks.
The administration called a meeting about diversity on campus in response, and Calhoun spoke at the meeting, Woodfork said. He said she understood that sometimes you have to put your foot on the neck of an institution to advocate and push for change but that she reminded students that they had made their impact and they had finals coming up.
“Rochelle is not just funny and humorous. She uses her intellect and humor in a particular way to make people feel included and connected and she’s terrific,” Woodfork said. “It was a big loss at Skidmore and we feel it every day, but we couldn’t be more proud she’s going to make contributions elsewhere.”
Moreover, Woodfork said, Calhoun is especially equipped to handle sexual assault and misconduct issues on campus because she was very compassionate and knowledgeable about the federal regulations involved.
“She always reminded us that every one incident is a person’s life,” he said.
Calhoun said she sees Skidmore and the University as similar in the nature of their protests but Mount Holyoke and the University as more alike, steeped in tradition and surrounded by incredibly loyal alumni. She said that in many ways, she not only has returned geographically closer to her alma mater but she also is encountering another similar institution and one in which she fell in love with.
She added that what ultimately compelled her to come to the University was an attitude of service to this nation and all nations.
“I was coming to a privileged institution that understood its responsibility,” Calhoun said.
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