While College President James Wright's name is everyday fare in Dartmouth students' vocabulary, Susan Prager's is somewhat less well known.
This is ironic since she is not only Dartmouth's Provost, making her second in charge of the College, but she is a woman: setting her in an emerging class of high-level female administrators at elite colleges and universities.
Prager arrived in Hanover two weeks before the Initiative was released in last year, and she has since been Dartmouth's chief academic officer. She is highly involved in both the day-to-day running and the long-term projects of the College -- making decisions about new building projects, hiring people for key administrative positions, spending time with faculty and other staff, meeting alumni and leading the fundraising effort.
A typical day in Prager's life is packed full of meetings, which usually begin in the early morning -- by student standards, at least.
"Lots of meetings start at 8 a.m.," Prager said. "I am not a morning person, but I've adapted to Dartmouth ... In these administrative leadership roles there is by definition an endless agenda. You always feel like there are important things you aren't getting to."
Women as leaders
Prager was recently featured in an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, which discussed the increasing number of women acting as provosts at elite universities. The article suggested that many of these women should eventually become presidents of their academic institutions.
Currently, four of the eight Ivy League institutions -- Yale, Brown, Cornell, and Dartmouth -- can boast female provosts, while the University of Pennsylvania has a woman president.
Prager said this was completely unheard of twenty-five years ago, and Hannah Gray's appointment as the president of the University of Chicago in 1978 was revolutionary, since she became the first female president at a prestigious coeducational institution.
Part of the reason why women were not traditionally chosen for top administrative roles was that presidents and provosts were generally selected from the faculty -- where women were traditionally under-represented, Prager said.
"There just needed to be more women in the pipeline," she said.
She agreed with the theme of the Chronicle article that some of these female provosts will go on to become presidents of prominent universities. According to her, while some provosts are solely interested in the internal workings of the university where they work, others are fascinated with the presidency -- and the external relations aspect of the job. Prager said these women will most likely go on to lead universities.
"We are only five or six years away from the floodgates opening up," John Kuhnle, managing director of the higher education practice at Kohn/Ferry International, an executive search firm, told the Chronicle. "If someone gets through three years unmarred by serious controversy, they are poised" to be hired as president.
Prager said she would be possibly be interested in presiding over a university at some point if she feels she is the "right fit for the school" -- a school whose agenda parallels her visions.Prager was, in fact, a finalist for the chancellorship of University of California at Los Angeles in 1997, when one of her mentors, Charles E. Young, retired. However, the position eventually went to Albert Carnesale, then provost at Harvard.
Hanover experiences
When Prager landed in Hanover from California, the lack of racial diversity in Hanover -- not at the College itself -- made a significant impression on her.
Prager, who has acted as chief academic officer during one of the most monumental periods in Dartmouth's history, admitted that while her last year-and-a-half has been a difficult time for the College, it has also been a fruitful one -- a time of internal conversations about significant issues of gender and racial issues.
"It's now clear to me that these conversations should go on at Dartmouth," she said.
Prager described the College as a place that fosters healthy interactions both within the faculty and between the faculty and students.
"Dartmouth students operate in a culture where it's assured they will be able to interact with whomever they wish to interact with," she said.
She said the College's small size -- as opposed to larger research universities -- also enables the faculty from varying disciplines to get to know one another.
After a busy days' work full of meetings, Prager enjoys going home to spend time with her family. In fact, she is often seen in Food Court dining hall during the lunch hour getting a meal with her husband.
Having always been a career-oriented woman, she said raising her children was stressful when they were young.
"My children do not have traditional views of how a household operates," Prager said jokingly, adding she often used to bring her children -- one a sophomore in high school and the other a college graduate -- to her office at UCLA, so that they could spend more time with their her.
Gender roles
Prager has witnessed her fair share of gender discrimination both as a student and during her two-decade-long career in the higher circles of academia.
"Because I've been around for a long time, I've certainly seen a lot [of discrimination] over the years," she said.
According to Prager, when she was a law degree candidate at UCLA in the early 1970s, many critics thought law school was not a good place for women.
However, she admitted that things in the realm of gender discrimination have certainly improved over the years.
"One of the exciting things in my life is that I've seen less and less overt discriminatory behavior," Prager said with a faint smile running across her face.
As the first female law school dean in the history of the University of California system and the first long-term female provost at Dartmouth, Prager has been at the forefront of this change.
She added, however, that things today are far from perfect and the change must continue.
"The challenge is to try to expose and change the attitude deeply embedded in [some] people about whether a woman can be as effective in a particular setting as a man," she said.
Having held a top administrative post at two elite universities for over twenty years, Prager said that while she feels men and women are not judged by a separate standard, people often pay more attention to the success and failure of women in the professional world as opposed to the academic world.
