Catch Her If You Can
Sharon Herzberger likes to walk and talk, but she slowed down to discuss small colleges, a liberal education and her hopes for Whittier College.
Whittier College President, Dr. Sharon D. Herzberger isn’t the kind of mother who relishes the opportunity to say, ‘I told you so!” Or, at least that’s what she tells me as we sit in the sitting corner of her Mendenhall office. Heavy curtains are drawn across the wide front window, dimming the afternoon sun and dulling the traffic noise coming in from Painter Avenue. The lamp on the table between our cushioned wood chairs gives the room a cozy glow.
Herzberger recalls how she refrained from saying “I told you so” to her two sons when they struggled with large class sizes and inaccessible professors after they chose to go to Cornell University instead of a small, liberal arts college as she advised. “My older son was in engineering and he had huge classes… with very little interaction with faculty members,” says Herzberger, finding time in her hectic schedule for a relaxed conversation, “and my younger son had small classes. He was a philosophy major, but when it was time for him to do his senior thesis, no one was available. He actually had to go get help from a professor at a small college down the road, Ithaca College.”
Her soft, slightly accented voice — possibly the result of moving around a lot as a child — contrasts with the formal, white sweater and khaki skirt set she wears. Herzberger crosses her legs and leans in closer to tell me about how she also struggled while attending a large university, Penn State, as an undergrad. “It was so different [from Whittier]. I didn’t have to speak in class. I was too shy and I wasn’t forced to get over that.”
Looking back now, she says she felt unprepared for both graduate school and the world outside the academy because she didn’t have the small, liberal arts education provided by schools such as Whittier. “The education here is so personal and so much richer in the sense of being an active learner rather than passively sitting there and taking notes and then regurgitating them on the exam. The professors here get to know students so well. Our biggest draw at Whittier is our small class sizes and liberal-arts education.”
After getting a bachelor’s degree in psychology at Penn State and earning a doctorate in social psychology at the University of Illinois, Herzberger authored numerous articles and several books, writing about family, race, affirmative action, and domestic violence.
She taught psychology at Northwestern University, a school with large class sizes that left Herzberger feeling disconnected from her students. She left Northwestern and went to teach at Trinity College, a small, liberal-arts college in Connecticut. There, she fell in love with liberal-arts education, which she wrote about in an essay for The Huffington Post in 2013: “[A liberal education] is one that helps students learn to think critically and communicate effectively. It integrates ideas from multiple disciples, builds competence and confidence, and teaches students how to analyze situations from various vantage points. It teaches students to recognize the complexity of problems and to offer innovative solutions, and it provides opportunity to apply learning in work settings and across the globe.”
She remained at Trinity for 25 years until a headhunter called her and told her that she had the perfect match for Herzberger. She became Whittier’s 14th president in July, 2005. “I was thrilled as soon as I came here and learned about Whittier’s values and the kinds of students we serve,” she says. “It was spectacular.”
Herzberger looked to her hero, Freeman Hrabowski, for inspiration. He is the president of University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Hrabowski is focused on student success — he has authored two books on the topic and gave a TED talk on student success, in which he outlined things that help students succeed: high expectations, building a community among the students, and a faculty that is willing “to get involved with those students, even in the classroom.”
Throughout Herzberger’s academic life, Hrabowski is someone that she has tried to emulate. The awareness of student success and her background in teaching small classes prompted her to start her signature “Walk and Talks with the President.” Herzberger often invites students via email to come for a walk with her and to chat about anything. “I wanted to find a way that I could connect with students and hear about their lives on a regular basis,” she explains. “I always enjoy hearing about their lives and who their favorite professors are and any problems they’re having and it’s been wonderful.”
“I was thrilled as soon as I came here and learned about Whittier’s values and the kinds of students we serve. It was spectacular.”
Junior Mackenzie Hillman recently went on her first walk and talk with the president. “She walks really fast. Like really fast,” laughs Hillman. Herzberger made an impression on Hillman. “[She] is really cool. I came to her with a problem and she was really easy to talk to… it was as if my problem was a priority for her.”
Herzberger says she was slightly surprised more students didn’t use the walk and talks to air grievances. “Rarely do students bring complaints,” she says. “Occasionally I’ll have a student who wants to make a suggestion, but they’re not using it as a complaint session to gripe about things.” She says it’s mostly first-years students who brave the brisk and early-morning (7:30 a.m.!) walks. “I think they’re just intrigued with the notion of getting up and walking with the president… I get to hear about their excitement and being at Whittier and their classes, so it’s very fun.”
In deference to students who aren’t as early risers as she, Herzberger has started experimenting with opening her office once-a-month to students. Attendence has been light so far, but Herzberger is confident that the word will spread and more students will begin to show up.
“It’s so fun to see the confidence they’ve developed and their expertise on some subjects. That’s the best part of my job.”
When she’s not working or walking and talking with students, Herzberger can often be found at Whittier College events. She loves to “see students in action,” which she considers a chance to really observe students growing and maturing during their stay at Whittier. She tries to attend as many senior presentations as possible. “It’s so fun to see the confidence they’ve developed and their expertise on some subjects. That’s the best part of my job.”
Herzberger leans back in her chair as she begins to talk about the hardest part of her job: renovating the venerable campus. “When I arrived, I knew the education was great, the faculty-student relationship was fabulous — the big problem was that we have a 125 year-old campus and the facilities were in pretty bad shape,” she explains.
Recent projects include renovating the Ettinger Lounge and the Science and Learning Center (SLC). In an article for the Quaker Campus, Herzberger is quoted saying that she really took time to go through student feedback when planning the Ettinger Lounge. Students said that Ettinger was too loud, so she incorporated sound-dampening materials in the rennovation with the goal of creating a community space for students to gather in, whether it’s for studying or just fun. A “living room” for students, as she puts it.
The $46 million Science and Learning Center, which now boasts labs for both teaching and research, a rooftop lookout deck, multipurpose classrooms and adaptable spaces, has been the school’s largest capital improvement project in years.“This goes right to the heart of what defines an exceptional liberal arts education: teaching students to see the world and its challenges and opportunities from multiple perspectives,” said Herzberger during her ribbon cutting speech:
One of the main challenges to rennovating campus facilites that people may not be aware of is that the City of Whittier often designates buildings more than 50 years old as historic. “After 50 years, which is kind of unbelievable because 50 years goes by pretty quickly, it’s kind of like there’s the presumption that it’s a historic building,” says Herzberger, adding that the city has been accomodating to the college. “And we are faced sometimes with the issue of, ‘Do we tear it down in the 49th year, or are we willing to live with this building forever?’”
At a small college such as this, the demands of funding top-notch faculty, staff and facilities while providing a world-class education at the best value possible is never far from the President’s mind.
“My biggest worry is that people will stop supporting higher education.”
“I hope that there’s someone out there who wants to leave us $100 million,” she laughs, before striking a more serious tone, “My real hope is that there’s someone in our orbit who really loves this institution and knows what a difference they could make for students here.” She admits she’s concerned about the trend of less money being earmarked for education these days, citing cutbacks in public funding support such as PELL (federal) and CAL (state) grants, in an age of rising student debt and the increasing cost of college. “My biggest worry is that people will stop supporting higher education,” she says, adding that it’s wise to invest in higher education as college students boost the entire economy.
In 2013, Herzberger wrote an essay to parents in Huffington Post laying out the need to liberal education: “Parents, in difficult economic times, it is tempting to steer sons and daughters to focus, narrow their interests, and learn a specific set of skills that seem designed for a particular job. To thrive in the world ahead [a liberal arts education] is needed!”
Herzberger found herself reaffirming Whittier College’s values and sense of community following the recent presidential election. She joined with more than 100 other presidents of leading liberal arts colleges in the US to sign a letter to President-elect Donald Trump that spoke of the “core values of our democratic nation: human decency, equal rights, freedom of expression, and freedom from discrimination,” and which asked the president-elect to “condemn and work to prevent the harassment, hate and acts of violence that are being perpetrated across our nation.”
Her ultimate goal, says Herzberger, is to provide the kind of experience here that makes students want to give back when they are able. “Whether it’s financially or whether it’s coming to talk with students about how they got into their careers or offering an internship to a student,” says Herzberger, “I hope they will do so.”
