New Dean Brings Fresh Perspective to the College

On a rainy afternoon in September, Dean Carolyn Denard sat across from me at the table in her office, wearing a prim, charcoal jacket with matching skirt. She wore lightly tinted red glasses that shone ever so slightly with the shyest ray of sun beaming through the window.

Marcela Grillo (MG): To start: what brought you to Connecticut College?

Dean Denard: Well first of all, I had been involved with Connecticut College in a kind of theoretical way for several years before, when I was an Associate Dean at Wells College, when they transitioned to a women’s college. Connecticut College was one of the colleges that we looked at as a model for transitioning to co-ed. I got very interested in diversity issues when I was at Brown and what Connecticut College was trying to do to make diversity a more integral part of the college was of interest to me. So I already had this kind of theoretical engagement with CC as a place where they were doing things well, in an exemplary way. They were charting a path that I found intriguing.

I had been an Associate Dean for eight years so when a colleague wanted to nominate me for this position I thought this was a school that I could work well in and provide some leadership around. It was small and it was liberal arts and fit all the criteria that I wanted in terms of leadership.

MG: What sparked your interest in education in general and why did you choose this path?

DD: Well I come from a family of educators. My mother was a first grade teacher, my father was a high school science teacher and football coach, and I had an aunt who was a dean at a college…[we were] educators throughout. It was a happy expectation for me. I love school! I always felt the right place to be in August and September is in school, so it just never occurred to me not to do education. I think teaching came from my mom and dad. It seemed the reward that came with engaging in student lives was really kind of a perennial reward because I would see people come back to my mother for year after year after year and see their children – same thing with my father. So all of my examples of engagement with student life were very positive ones.

So I taught, and had a great career as a college professor. I was tenured, I wrote and I had great relationships with my students, and then decided I wanted to have a larger view of the college experience so I wanted to go into academic administration as a result.

MG: Do you remember one of your favorite courses that you ever taught?

DD: It would have to be a seminar on Toni Morrison’s jazz. It was a graduate seminar. We read one novel. You have a syllabus always packed so full…this novel had so many angles from which you could come to it. The historical, the musical, the theoretical, the critical…. and I thought for students to fully engage that text, that we needed to slow it down and bring all of that to the reading.

That taught me something really significant about teaching: that it really is a quality, in-depth experience. You have students who have a really good background: you can focus on how to do this well. This course was not only a course where we enjoyed reading Morrison’s work, but we also enjoyed the full engagement of the text. I just loved that. It was a great beginning. I had a jazz demonstration band the first day of class so I knew I had them hooked after that! They came in and there was a jazz combo at the front of the class and they were sort of looking at their syllabus to make sure they were in a literature class, so that was the best teaching experience that I’ve ever had.

MG: Where was this jazz course taught? 

DD: At Georgia State University, it was a State University in Atlanta where I was a tenured professor. Both of [the above] experiences were there.

MG: What are some other ways that Toni Morrison has influenced you and your career path?

DD: Well as a Morrison scholar, you study and learn from her own work as an intellectual, you become yourself. I think I just became more confident in who I was as a person in the world. There’s a way in which you read Morrison’s novels and you begin to understand something about self-agency, and how important self-agency is and how you define that and act on it.

Morrison makes you a critical thinker. She’s always putting forth the unorthodox or the thing you don’t think would happen. I’ve found though as a scholar as an administrator, as a person who engages in the world, that I just have a more critical eye. I don’t mean critical in the sense of negative it’s just that I read things more carefully now, because of her words.

MG: A few steps back: where did you end up going for undergrad?

DD: I went to Jackson State University in Mississippi. It was a State College, a historically black college. In many ways it was operating as many historically black colleges did – they operated as private schools because they had a distinct, targeted student by design and by default because of segregation. It was a very aspirational place because I realized then that we had a whole generation who was waiting for the enactment of Brown vs. Board of Education. So there was a great sense of wanting everybody to be ‘ready’ when this was finally enacted. It was full of good spirit; all of the wonderful traditions of an undergraduate college…and everybody it seemed were planning to go to the next stage. There’s just not been a time since I’ve left there that I’ve felt that I wasn’t fully prepared for the next step.

MG: What was the next step?

DD: Graduate school. I went to graduate school first at Indiana University, where I was in the PhD program in English and that’s where I decided that I really liked the interdisciplinary more so when I left Indiana I came back to Atlanta and I was in the American Studies program at Emory. That allowed the interdisciplinary focus that I enjoyed and still allowed me to focus on literature primarily…that’s why the jazz class became so important to me because it was so much of what I had studied, bringing all of those disciplines together in the understanding of one text.

MG: Fast-forwarding a little bit: as the Dean of the College what do you hope to bring to this community? How do you think you’ll contribute to the commitment to diversity here?

DD: The last few years at Connecticut College have seen a lot of changes particularly around student support in diversity. I think first off, I want to really make sure that I’m managing those changes well. I’m keeping my eyes and ears open to seeing where there are places to provide additional leadership. I’m beginning to identify some of those places. I’m doing my research to see the best way; I try to approach new positions in new communities in an anthropological way. I think you have to really work hard in getting to know the culture. When you’re a leader in that kind of community, I think you have to work even harder at that. It’s a paradox: you’re new but you’re also a leader so I think you have to be respectful of being new before you launch out into new initiatives. But I am studying the campus very well and I’m hoping I can move Connecticut College far along the path that it was laid out for itself. I think I can continue to steer it in positive and innovative ways.

MG: What can diversity teach us as young adults and young learners? 

DD: I think diversity is about bringing everything you can to bear on understanding phenomena in the universe: everything you need to know to understand a text. Diversity is bringing everything you can to bear to a situation in order to understand it better. We’ve tried to understand this country through the lens of one major group, and I think we’ve cut ourselves off from full understanding. So I think when you deliberately bring those other views, in a way that empowers the views that have been left out, and use it for better understanding.

MG: If you could describe this college in one word, what would it be and why? 

DD: Engaging. I’ve found the people here to be very friendly, even on just a getting to know you level, and then there’s the self-governance…. maybe that world will change as I’m here for a longer time, but right now I think it’s engaging. It seems it would be hard to come here and not be engaged in one way or another.