Hannah and Her FamilyProvost Hannah Goldberg is our academic leader, arch innovator

and fiery defender. But it’s her heart that will be most missed.

BEHIND THE STAR-MAKER MACHINERY • YO-HO-HO: INTERNET PIRATES ARE WALKING THE PLANK

Wheaton QuarterlyWheaton QuarterlyWinter 1998

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HannaH and Her

Family

For the past 15 years, Provost Hannah

Goldberg has been our academic leader,

arch innovator and fiery defender.

But it’s her heart that will be most missed.

P rovost and Academic Vice President Hannah Goldberg was recently sitting courtside at a Wheaton men’s basketball game

when an over-enthusiastic dad from the competing team hollered to his point guard son to break the ankles of the Lyons’ point

guard. Wheaton’s provost did not appreciate his advice. Recalled Dean of Students Sue Alexander: “Hannah just said, ‘What?’ And the father made the mistake of turning around and looking at Han-nah, who flashed him ‘The Look’—the death ray. The guy didn’t say anything for the rest of the game; it was over.”

It is a scene that those who know Wheaton’s provost would de-

B y B o B G o o d m a n

Dav

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ig

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10 W h e a t o n Q u a r t e r l y10 W h e a t o n Q u a r t e r l y

a hannah sampler: (top, left to right) Commencements with nobel

laureate Dudley herschbach, “60 Minutes” anchorwoman leslie

Stahl ’63, n.J. Governor Christine todd Whitman ’68. (Bottom,

left to right) as acting president in 1992, and with author-educator

Sara lawrence-lightfoot, Supreme Court Justice ruth Bader

Ginsburg, the honorable nancy ann holman ’56. Following pages:

hannah at convocation with President Dale rogers Marshall,

theresa Jefferson ’95 and Dean of Students Sue alexander.

Photographs by richard Benjamin, richard Chase and Janet

Woodcock.

scribe as “classic Goldberg,” combining her voracious love for competitive sports with her righteous indignation over bad sportsmanship—and her ability to set matters right with the sheer force of The Look, a piercing stare from which the offender will not soon recover.

Of course, The Look is employed sparingly; most Goldberg classics involve her trademark jesting. There was the time she and then Wheaton President Tish Emerson, during a tense stretch in faculty-administration relations, walked into a faculty meeting wearing cardboard masks, breaking up the room. (Goldberg has an extensive mask collection from all over the world.) There’s the doggerel poetry she often pens in tribute to departing colleagues, such as this bon mot to Professor of English Emerita Frances Shirley, delivered at a faculty retirement luncheon: “From Dunsinane to Elsinore / With Verona there as well / What of Romeo and Juliet / Without Frances there to tell.” And there are the unorthodox office trappings in Park Hall: an enormous, fuzzy, stuffed lion, a life-size cardboard cutout of Celtics basketball legend Larry Bird and a throw pillow emblazoned with the motto: “Age and treachery will triumph over youth and skill.”

The fact that her colleagues delight in trading Goldberg gems reflects the power of her spirit as well as the central role she has played at Wheaton during the past 15 years as the college’s academic leader. But at the end of the academic year, Goldberg, who has championed such tremendous changes as the move to co-education and the founding of

the Filene Center for Work and Learning, will retire and leave what she calls the Wheaton “family,” much to the family’s chagrin.

Goldberg plans to move to Providence, R.I., where she will pursue interests old and new, including serving as an academic consultant on curriculum and faculty development, becom-ing certified as a mediator, furthering her scholarly work on the history of Jewish women in 19th-century England and, of course, staying in touch with the Wheaton community. She feels it’s the right time, for her and for the college, to turn to the next chapter. “Fifteen years is a very long tenure for a provost,” she says. “I’m going to be 65, so it’s time in every way for me to move on. I think it’s important for me to go out at the top of my game. People say, ‘Oh, God. How terrible it is that you’re going.’ I’d much rather have them say that than ‘God, when is she leaving?’”

Wheaton President Dale Rogers Marshall says the col-lege owes Goldberg a tremendous debt of gratitude for her service. “She’s been an outstanding provost because she’s a very effective advocate for the faculty. And she has been a very creative academic leader who stimulates good ideas and gets people working together to realize those good ideas. She has contributed to a more inclusive, more cosmopolitan and more universal campus culture.”

Faculty members say they, too, will be sorry to see her go. “We will sorely miss her,” says Professor of Economics Gordon Weil, who worked closely with Goldberg to help faculty find more time for research. “The faculty respect,

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admire and support Hannah. She’s seen each person as an individual with special qualities to offer the community, and not merely as one of many faculty.” Adds Professor of Political Science Darlene Boroviak, who helped Goldberg in her effort to revamp the curriculum and also served for four years as dean of faculty: “She is someone the faculty have trusted to do the right thing and respected for her creativity and hard work. They also know that she respects them and sees them at the center of the college. I think the faculty have felt proud about having Hannah as an academic leader of this institution.”

Through the years, Goldberg’s participation as a panelist and speaker at many academic conferences has extended her role as an academic leader beyond Wheaton’s borders to colleges and universities across the country. When U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala visited Wheaton last November, she recalled her efforts to woo Goldberg to Hunter College, in New York City, where Shalala served as president. “She has a wonderful reputation; Hannah Goldberg is a legend in our business of higher ed,” Shalala said. “I tried to recruit her once when I was at Hunter. Luckily for you, Wheaton got her.”

Goldberg has led the 100-member Wheaton faculty for nearly a decade and a half, including eight years in the administration of Tish Emerson, a year as acting president and the past five years as part of President Marshall’s team. Goldberg credits the present administration with sharpening the college’s educational identity and increasing its national prominence. And she’s especially proud of several recent

accomplishments, including the creation of stakeholders’ meetings (brainstorming sessions which bring together everyone who has a “stake” in a particular issue) and the inauguration of the Jane E. Ruby Lectures in the Humanities, which have brought to campus such luminaries as Edward Said, Robert Coles, David Levering Lewis, Susan Sontag, Carol Gilligan and Daniel Goldhagen. While Goldberg has contributed a dizzying array of innovations since she came to the college in 1983, here’s a sampling of some of the most significant:• The Garden Club. Goldberg headed a two-year committee that worked with the faculty to revamp the curriculum’s general education requirements. The results included a new emphasis on non-Western cultures and the creation of the First-Year Seminars (a single interdisciplinary course for all first-year students examining a historic controversy and showing how competing viewpoints can advance human knowledge). The committee’s horticultural nickname came from a favorite Goldberg metaphor (“The curriculum is like a garden that needs work and pruning”) that stuck.• Co-Education. Goldberg strongly supported the move to co-education and went on the road to heal rifts with skeptical alumnae, reassuring them that Wheaton’s essential identity—including the spirit of its faculty and the college’s commitment to balance between women and men—would continue to be cherished. “Next year we celebrate our 10th anniversary as a co-ed college, and I think we’ve done it in a pretty special way.”

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‘I’ll miss the whole place, and I expect to miss parts of my job. But I’ll miss the people most of all: This I know.’

• Experiential Learning. Inspired by the co-op model of Antioch University, where she had worked, Goldberg championed the integration of work-based learning into the academic fabric. She convinced skeptics that Wheaton could gain all the value of “real-world” knowledge without losing any of the academic rigor of its liberal arts foundation. She was also the driving force behind the 1985 establishment of the Filene Center, the adoption of the unique second transcript for work experiences, the community service requirement for all students and the faculty’s commitment to fieldwork as a classroom component—all of which have become an integral part of Wheaton’s identity. “I felt we had two choices,” Goldberg recalls. “To vocationalize the curriculum or educationalize work. I chose the second and it has served us well.”

Colleagues say that in the currency of good ideas, Goldberg has always been a wealthy woman. Says Dean Alexander: “When someone says, ‘How would we want to approach this in a different way?’ Hannah can come up with five ideas in five minutes—any one of which would launch an entire new program or an entirely new way of thinking about the curriculum.”

None of these changes was simple to achieve, especially from the difficult post of provost, which requires a balanc-ing act between being an advocate and being an arbiter. Consider, for a moment, the definition of a provost in Webster’s dictionary: “a high-ranking university official” is cited fourth, following “the chief dignitary of a cathedral,” “the head official of a Scottish town” and “the keeper of a prison.”

There happens to be a bit of Goldberg lore on this subject. The way the story goes, she had the following exchange with a man who was painting the three-story Victorian house in which she lives. The painter asks, “Dear lady, what do you do for a living?” Goldberg says, “I’m the provost of the college.” He doesn’t respond. She adds, “I’m the academic vice president.” Again, no response. She says, “I oversee the curriculum.” Still nothing. Finally, she says, “I hire and fire the faculty.” He says, “Oh! Such a nice lady to have so much responsibility.”

But Goldberg has always preferred to let the merit of her ideas, rather than the power of her rank, carry her agenda forward. “I don’t like to mandate things because, for one thing, I don’t think it works,” she says. “If my idea, or what I would like to see happen, isn’t good enough to persuade the principals, then it’s not very good.”

Her chief method of building support has been the art of conversation, articulating her ideas in one-on-one ex-changes and letting them filter through the faculty by peer osmosis. And when an idea needs jump-starting, she has often hosted a dessert party at her Wheaton home. “She’s a hostess par excellence,” says Dean Alexander. “So she would post a notice saying, ‘You’re invited to a dessert party at the provost’s,’ and students would run and sign up; and faculty would come; and suddenly you’re all sitting around the floor in Hannah’s living room, talking about what it means to be an American, with Hannah presiding.”

Dan Golden, who was hired by Goldberg as the first director of the Filene Center, in 1985, goes so far as to call her the “faculty rebbe,” a Yiddish title of respect for a Jewish teacher and, in the Hasidic community, a spiritual master. Adds Golden: “She has the poetry of the cantor and the wisdom of the rabbi.”

When Goldberg, sitting in her Park Hall office near the Larry Bird, hears she has been dubbed Reb Goldberg, she laughs so hard she nearly cries. “I never head that one before. In the sense that people would go to the rebbe with problems—with questions—I suppose that’s true. Especially, people used to go with problems about money.” Now that type of question, perhaps, she won’t miss. But there is a lot that she will. “I’ll miss the whole place, and I expect to miss parts of my job. But I’ll miss the people most of all: This I know.”

Ironically, when Goldberg left her job at Antioch Col-lege to come to Wheaton, she never expected to become so attached. “I’d been at Antioch forever. I came as a child bride, and it was home to me in every way. It was like having a love affair and not wanting to fall in love again. And the fact that I did when I came to Wheaton took me totally by surprise. I thought it was just a job. And it was just a job, and a good one, but it also became family.”

The idea of a college community as an extended family has deep roots in Goldberg’s personal story, which has led her from the Bronx to Yellow Springs, Ohio, to Norton, Mass. She was the younger of two daughters born to Charles and Minnie Friedman, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, who had met in New York City while learning English at night school. She grew up in the Bronx, in a place that sounds, from her description, much like a mini-college campus: “It was an early co-op housing development built by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union. It was 100 percent Jewish and most of the people were immigrants,

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and all of the notices were written in Yiddish and English and they were all addressed as ‘Dear Co-Operator.’ There was a co-op grocery store, credit union, a day camp and a nursery school that I went to when I was two because my mother worked. There were lectures there and visiting people. It was a wonderful place.”

Her parents believed that they had to make sacrifices so they could afford to send their daughters to college. “They thought of themselves as freethinkers and Yiddish-ists and socialists. For them, this country really was a land of opportunity, and they had a great feeling of pride that they educated two daughters here,” she says. Goldberg achieved a stellar academic record, graduating from Bran-deis University magna cum laude, with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, and going on to earn a doctorate in history from Johns Hopkins University, where she met her future husband, Milton.

After a brief stint at the University of New Mexico, the newly married couple went to Antioch College, where Goldberg would stay for 26 years, 21 as a history professor and the last five as dean of the faculty. While at Antioch, Goldberg again felt the importance of community as she faced personal tragedy. Her husband, Milton, an English professor at Antioch, died at age 51 of a heart attack while the couple was on sabbatical in London, leaving her to raise their

daughter, Lisa, as a single parent. The Antioch community rallied around her. “It was the most wonderful, caring com-munity,” she recalled. “It was very embracing. And I always knew my child was going to be safe and looked after.”

Originally, Goldberg was drawn to Wheaton by the idea of working at a women’s college, the college’s commitment to increasing its diversity and even the school’s financial stability. “Antioch had fallen on hard times, and I’d spent a couple of years finding 500 diplomatic ways of saying no.” She also enjoyed a strong personal rapport with President Tish Emerson, Wheaton’s first woman president, who served from 1975 until 1991.

Emerson, now a senior fellow at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, recalled that the pair hit it off immediately. “We met at Logan Airport, went to Faneuil Hall and talked for three hours without stopping,” Emerson said. “I think we both knew right away that we could be a good team, and would have fun doing it.”

Now, as Goldberg enters her final semester at Wheaton, her days on campus have taken on a bittersweet quality. She won’t miss the relentless demands of her job, which she herself has steadily added to over the years with each new project. But she will miss the platform she’s had. And most of all, she’ll miss the community she has called home.

“Growing up in the co-op, and growing up as the child of immigrant parents who had high aspirations for their children and were willing to sacrifice for that, has made me very aware of that kind of community. Antioch was that kind of community. And Wheaton has been that kind of community. I think in Providence, I can find or help create that kind of community.”

Although Wheaton community members have no trouble reeling off an extensive list of her contributions, they say ultimately Goldberg’s role has transcended institutional change. “Hannah is very bright and bold in her thinking,” says Catherine Conover, vice president for college advancement. “But it’s her heart that comes through. She has touched an amazing number of people. The committee charged with naming her successor has been told over and over again: ‘Just hire another person like Hannah.’”

Freelance writer Bob Goodman lives in Boston and bears a striking resemblance (especially the curly hair) to a Wheaton professor who shares the same surname.

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