For This College Administrator, Attitude Is Everything

For more than three decades before Carol Leary arrived as president of Bay Path College, administrators at the school had arranged spring-break trips for willing students and faculty members to Bermuda.
When Leary came to the Longmeadow campus in the fall of 1994, the trip for the following March had already been booked. So she and her husband, Noel, went along.
“I think it rained just about every day,” said Leary, noting that, to her, more depressing than the weather was the fact that there was seemingly little for students to learn on this sojourn, and little to do besides sit on the beach — if the sun ever did come out.
So when she returned to the Longmeadow campus, Leary set out to change the pattern for spring break, and in a big way. She created the so-called Capitals of the World program, which has taken groups of as many as 80 to cities such as Rome, London, Athens, Madrid, Prague, Vienna, and Dublin, which was the most popular stop to date. Paris is the destination next March.
“Back then, we knew that it would be very important for our students to have international exposure, experience, and an opportunity to travel,” she explained, adding that these trips are combined with a class at the college called Nations and Cultures, which many participants take. But they’re also open to alumni, faculty, and some parents.
The World Capitals initiative is just one small, yet significant, way in which Bay Path’s programs and overall culture reflect the philosophy, or attitude (that’s a word you’ll read many times in this piece), of its president. Leary, who said she never traveled much while growing up Niagara Falls, N.Y., has been all over Europe, the Far East, and many other regions with Noel over the past 30 years. Some trips have been business-oriented, most have been for pleasure, but all have been learning experiences, and she wanted the spring-break trips to become similar in nature.
But there are many other ways in which Leary’s influence can be seen, heard, and experienced.
For starters, there appears to be more dancing on the campus, especially line dancing at any formal or informal event where there’s music — a nod to Leary’s passion for the activity, which she developed as a young child. “I’ll get them to do the Electric Slide or the Macarena,” she told BusinessWest, adding that perhaps her favorite song is Lee Ann Womack’s “I Hope You Dance” — meaning that rarely, if ever, will she ‘sit it out.’
Overall, and more importantly, though, the school has become much more entrepreneurial during Leary’s tenure, and also more focused on raising the bar when it comes to women’s higher education — a mindset that has seemingly defined Leary’s career and its other stops, at Simmons College and, well before that, at Siena, where she ran women’s studies after the school went coed in 1969.
There’s also more outreach into the community, another reflection of Leary’s personality. “When Noel and I came here, we said that, if we were going to move into a community, we’d be part of that community; we wouldn’t just be sleeping here, we’d be investing our lives here,” she said, adding that many of Bay Path’s students have become involved as well, in this area code, but also far outside it. Indeed, through a program called One America, students have spent intersessions and spring breaks taking “community-service road trips” through several southern states, doing everything from working in soup kitchens to getting personal history lessons at Harper’s Ferry.
And another program has involved students in hands-on development work at the Sajuka Community School in the African nation of Gambia. A book drive that garnered nearly 6,000 books for the school’s library, as well as a scholarship program that will help girls in Gambia attend Bay Path, have earned the college an award from the Higher Education Task Force and the U.S. Center for Citizen Diplomacy.
“We got a letter from the president of Gambia praising the college,” said Leary. “He wanted to know if they could name the library the Bay Path Library. We said, ‘no, but you can call it the Bay Path Collection,’ which I believe they have.”
For this, the latest installment in its profile series, BusinessWest talked at length with Leary about her career path, what’s been accomplished at Bay Path, and what’s still left to do.

Opportunity Knocks
From the day she arrived at Bay Path, Leary has had a sign on her desk that reads Attitude Is Everything.
In her case, that attitude is to take full advantage of the opportunities one is given — whether it be a college education (and she is the first in her family to attain one), visiting foreign countries, landing a career opportunity, or breaking new ground in higher education. And as far as perspective is concerned, for Leary that glass is always half full and never half empty.
“I am a first-generation college student, so that defines a lot of my passion as an educator, especially for first-generation college students and all the adult women we have at Bay Path,” she said. “That has defined me in a way that I consider a blessing in many ways, because I look at the world with all kinds of potential and I see the possibilities.
“When you are raised in that type of a family — my dad was an immigrant, my mother was born here, but we lived in a home with my grandparents, who were also immigrants — you see opportunity in a very different way than someone who may have had the advantage of attending the best schools in the community or the best colleges.”
Looking back on her early years, and how and when her current attitude was developed, Leary said she was greatly influenced by time spent at the local Girls Club, which opened her eyes, and her mind, to things she hadn’t experienced at home, especially travel.
“My first trip was to New York City at age 13,” she said. “It opened a world to me of travel and curiosity, I think, about other parts of our country. I worked at that Girls Club as a camp counselor, an after-school coordinator, in sports and dance … I learned so much, especially about myself.”
Well before the Girls Club, though, there was that developing passion for dance, which has never subsided, although Leary laments that there are seemingly fewer opportunities for people to dance today. “I took ballet, tap, and jazz as a little girl — I can remember recitals and the costumes we wore,” she said. “I grew up watching Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, and Ginger Rogers, and they’re still my favorites today.”
Leary said that, had some things gone differently, she might have pursued a career in choreography.
“I like the concept of watching the human body doing some graceful movements,” she explained, “and I marvel at how incredibly flexing the human body is when you look at dance in all its forms.”
Leary believes she’s doing a different kind of choreography at Bay Path. Instead of dancers, she’s coordinating administrators, faculty, and students, and appears to have everyone moving in the same direction — toward that “women’s college of the 21st century.”

Career Steps
How Leary came to Longmeadow is an intriguing story with a number of plot twists and turns. She told BusinessWest that, when she was nominated for the president’s job in 1994, she had barely heard of Bay Path and almost had to be talked into applying.
“The deadline to get your résumé in was June 30; I probably sent it in on June 29,” she recalled. “I loved my job [at Simmons] and loved Boston. I wasn’t really interested in leaving.”
Backing up a few lines on the résumé, Leary, who earned her bachelor’s at Boston University, a master’s in Student Personnel and Counseling at SUNY Albany, and a doctorate in Educational Administration from the American University, took her first job in higher education at Siena, as its first director of Women’s Programs.
“There were 700 men living on campus and 70 women; 2,000 students overall and just over 100 women,” she recalled. “I got the women involved in student government, I directed the first coed residence hall, I started their office of Community Activities. It was a great job; I worked there for two years and learned so much.”
From Siena, Leary returned to BU, and worked in the early years of John Silber’s administration, and later took a job at nearby Simmons as director of its residential campus, and was eventually promoted to associate dean of the college.
She stayed at Simmons for only a year, because shortly after she accepted that job, Noel took a position in Washington. Leary commuted to D.C. every weekend for a year, but decided that was enough of that, and gave up her job and moved to Washington.
Three years later, her husband would return the favor.
Leary was working at something called the Washington Campus, where she planned public-policy seminars for corporate executives and other constituencies. Later, she was awarded a fellowship and went to the American University to earn her doctorate. While there, the woman who promoted her at Simmons called to say she was retiring and that she wanted to Leary to take her job. And at first, she was rebuffed.
“It took me three years to settle into Washington, and I wasn’t going to move,” she explained, adding quickly that her former boss and the president of Simmons were persistent, to say the least, and she eventually took the job of vice president of Administration and assistant to the president.
She was in that position when Bay Path advertised for a president in early 1994, an opportunity that Leary and her husband eventually decided she couldn’t pass up.

Food for Thought
One the same day she talked with BusinessWest, Leary was scheduled to host 45 students for dinner at the president’s house on campus. The get-together was the continuation of a program she started soon after arriving at the school.
All 600 or so undergraduate students are invited to dine with Leary once each year. The number of those who accept the invitation, as well as the makeup of the group, varies each year, she explained.
“Not everyone comes every year,” she explained. “The freshmen are really anxious to come because they’ve never been. For the sophomore and junior years, it dwindles a little, though we still get good numbers, and then, for the senior year, nostalgia kicks in — we get a good crowd of seniors every year, and we really celebrate.”
The dinners are just one of many vehicles Leary uses to get to know all her students (traditional and non-traditional) better, get their input on matters impacting the school and higher education in general, and, most importantly, simply listen to what they’re saying.
Describing herself as a good listener, Leary said her interaction with students — everything from walking with them up the Spanish Steps in Rome to pausing for quick chats on the campus lawn — have helped her work with others to create and shape programs and develop a culture at Bay Path.
“I brought faculty and staff together and wrote a case study,” Leary recalled. “I said, ‘if we were to create the women’s college for the 21st century, what would it be like? Don’t use money as an excuse … just tell me what kinds of programs would we have, who would we hire, what kinds of students would we be recruiting?’ This is what’s been driving us.”
Over the past 15 years, the school has added a graduate school with nine master of science degrees, enriched and enlarged the curriculum with new baccalaureate programs and professional certificates, expanded and renovated buildings on campus, added two additional campus locations in Sturbridge and Burlington, Mass., and launched a unique one-day-a-week college for adult women.
Strides forward have come outside the classroom as well. “They used to play soccer and softball on the front lawn; we were club sports,” Leary recalled. Now, we’re NCAA Division III, we have eight varsity sports, and even have an ice hockey club. It’s a completely different place.”
And many of the most compelling developments have come in the realm of community involvement, with initiatives ranging from a lead role in a local building project for ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition to the One America road trips, to the Gambian project, which started with a Bay Path student from that nation, Nyillian Fye, and faculty member John Jarvis, professor of English and Communications, who engaged one of his classes in the initiative.
In addition to the books for the library, now said to be one of the largest in Gambia, the program has a number of other components, including the Bay Path Scholars Program, which will fund tuition costs at Bay Path for 10 young girls at Sajuka. A number of Bay Path students visited Gambia this year and carried out a needs assessment to begin a long-term effort to improve conditions at the school.
Upon returning to the U.S., Bay Path students and community members developed fund-raising efforts for Sajuka with the help of the Longmeadow High School Key Club, and a documentary film was made on a day in the life of a student at the school. More students at the college will be going to Gambia next year to continue the partership, with the long-term goal of providing the entrepreneurial and financial tools for Sajuka to become economically self-sustaining.
The sum of all these efforts has been more than enough to impress the Higher Education Task Force and the Center for Citizen Diplomacy, said Leary. “Ten universities in America were selected, and we were one of them — all these big, presitigious universities … and Bay Path College. I think that says a lot about how far we’ve come.”
Leary said headhunters have called numerous times over the past 15 years to gauge her interest in other positions, including posts at some of the nation’s most prestigious schools. She’s listened, but has never been intrigued enough to even interview for another job.
When asked why, she said, in essence, that the board, faculty, staff, and especially the students have continuously provided more than enough motivation to stay where she is.
“What kept us energized was the potential of this campus to be something that was very different, yet retained its original mission as a women’s college,” she said. “That’s what has kept me here; every year, and every five years or three years for vision, we’ve had a wonderful set of initiatives that have kept me energized and focused.”

The Write Stuff
Leary told BusinessWest that she took six weeks off this past summer to get a good start on a book she’s writing.
She declined to say what it is about — “someone will read this and steal my idea” — or speculate on a possible title. She did say that writing requires energy and focus, and that she won’t get much of it done unless she takes similar breaks, or sabbaticals. This means it may take a few more years.
Suffice it to say that, whatever the book is about, it should have plenty of attitude, because, as the plaque on Leary’s desk says — and her own career clearly shows — attitude is indeed everything.

George O’Brien can be reached at obrien@businesswest.com