I was born in April, 1961, solidly rooted at the tail end of Generation Baby Boomer. Twenty-seven years and 363 days later, I arrived at Haverford as the first female alumni director. A serendipitous mish-mash of coincidences landed me in my Founders basement office, 018, where I surveyed my new digs with mixed feelings. It was April 17, 1989, a Monday.
A large office bookcase bolted into the plaster walls had come loose, and the shelving had tipped over; years’ worth of budget records and the office “library” lay on a floor that was not only moldy from recent flooding, but had mushrooms growing along its edges. Spores had been swept into the carpet, and were thriving. The desk lamp electrocuted me when I turned it on, and the curtains I pulled aside to let in some light came apart in my fingers, releasing a shower of circa-’50s polyester and maybe asbestos over my desk. Ahhh, the Director’s Desk—mounds of curling correspondence. Letters, memos, files, yearbooks. A letter on top had a yellow post-it note that read: “For Diane to Read and File.” It had been written by an alumnus to the President, and outlined why my appointment was a mistake.
Argument summary:
1. I was a woman.
2. I was not a graduate.
3. I would not be able to carry out Haverford’s alumni programs
due to 1 and 2.
Argh. But not everything was lousy that day. Peter Tannenbaum ’90, the Alumni Office student worker, patiently sat in front of our Personal Computer (one of two administrative pc’s on campus)! Peter and I worked companionably for several hours; he exuded level-headedness leavened with occasional snarky remarks, which I found reassuring. He told me his dad and uncle were Haverfordians who wouldn’t be concerned about my gender or educational background. He ministered to the Macintosh SE, while Tim Wilson ’87, a part-timer for both the Alumni and the Records Office, with whom I’d worked on a tri-college alumni event while I was a staff member at Swarthmore, stopped by and helped sort through the desk paperwork. He also filled me in on office politics.

New colleagues kept saying hello (it helped that the coffee machine for the entire floor was in our area), and viewed the wreckage of the bookshelves with useful comments about who might help from the Physical Plant. An unused lamp came down the hallway from Betty Davis, then Director of Non-Academic Scheduling, with a note that she’d heard my lamp had tried to kill me.

When I’d come in earlier that spring to interview—I’d worked in Swarthmore’s Alumni Office as an assistant, and at KYW Newsradio—I was toting a spotty working knowledge of Haverford, tidbits gleaned, then condensed, from Swarthmore, while David Fraser ’65 was President; I’d also gotten to know two Haverfordians, Jenny Kehne Lipman ’84 and Marty Lipman ’81. Combined with several days of reading and digesting an excellent history of the school, The Spirit and Intellect of Haverford College, 1833 – 1983, edited by Greg Kannerstein, I felt fairly well prepared. The job description handed to me at the beginning of my two-day interview ordeal read as follows:

“The Director of Alumni Relations will plan, implement, and coordinate activities and programs among Haverford’s more than 10,000 alumni. She will enthusiastically provide the leadership and organization to increase the number of alumni actively involved with the College, ensure that alumni requests and concerns about the College are promptly addressed, and continue to seek alumni volunteers from around the country.”

Nice touch. I applauded Haverford’s avant garde feminine pronoun approach in the description (I learned months later that incoming Alumni Association President Deborah Lafer Scher ’80, with other members of Alumni Council’s Executive Committee, insisted that “She” be used). Interviewers noted that there were several subsets of Haverfordians that they were particularly concerned about:

• Newly-minted male and female graduates were used to a fully-co-ed environment on campus, but were being thrown for a loop when they attended their first alumni events. Only 10 per cent of the alumni population were women, and alumni events had a decidedly hail-fellow-well-met feeling.
• We needed to reach out to those alumni who were upset that Haverford had decided to go co-ed rather than, as many had advocated, socially strengthening our relationship with Bryn Mawr.
• We needed to show alumni that the College, when it increased its size dramatically over a few years in the early to mid 1970s (656 in ’70 to 889 in 1977), had not lost the cachet and feel of being a “small” institution (small classroom size, knowing almost everybody on campus, developing close relationships with faculty).
I later learned that there were other Haverfordian riftees—those who felt strongly because their beloved major was no longer taught (engineers); their favorite sport had been axed (football); their favorite program eviscerated (Glee Club), or their favorite professor denied tenure.
I met with Haverford alumni, administrators and professors who were pondering my candidacy. I can’t remember them all—of course President Tom Kessinger ’63-’65, and Vice President of Institutional Advancement Hogie Hansen, and then Jerry Gollub, Bill Kaye ’54, Aryeh Kosman, Deborah Lafer Scher ’80, and Joel Lowenthal ’59 . . . the others, alas have blurred into featureless inquisitors. I do remember the two “theme” questions that kept coming up, though. The first struck me as nearly barmy:

Q: If I were Alumni Director and were at a Haverford vs. Swarthmore game (sport unspecified and sex of players, too), for whom would I cheer?
A. Ummmm?

The second question was easier:
Q: Did I understand that Haverford’s first fully-coed class was that of 1984, and that the alumni population was about 90% male?
A: Yes.

Q: Would I feel comfortable working with what was essentially an almost all-male alumni population for some time to come?
A: You bet!

I had attended a small private high school in Vermont that had chosen to open its boarding school doors to female day students when I was a freshman. Though well intentioned, Vermont Academy placed a tremendous burden on the small number of girls who were accepted. I, along with about 20 other young women, faced a culture that had spent decades shaping the lives of young men, and we co-existed uneasily with an institution that was arrogant enough to believe that there would be no problems if we were simply given what the boys had. My experiences were surreal. During my time there, I became extremely comfortable working closely with the boys, and early on chose to ignore that I was often the only female in my classes, on the cross country team, etc. Though perhaps more painful than my adolescence would have been otherwise, I was “made” at VA. I could empathize with the women who were the pioneering coeds at Haverford while also able to adjust easily to being the only woman in a room of Haverford men.

I was hired. I learned fast that it helps if you like people. When you think that you can’t face one more alumni volunteer committee, or plan one more Meet the President Show, you get a funny call out of the blue, and an alumnus sheepishly reveals that in 1948 he used his Founders Hall dormitory hallway as a bowling alley and destroyed a toilet (it’s a strike!). Or a letter arrives with an old diploma and an accompanying confessional note that the alum had cheated on an exam senior year and now wants to make amends for breaking the Honor Code: Can he schedule a trial with the current Honor Council? Their stories are funny or sometimes touching. It’s even better when you have a sufficient number of anecdotes with common threads—what we needed to focus on as we tried to make the current Haverford education and campus culture reverberate for older alumni generations. We heard a lot during my first few years in the Alumni Office—talking with and listening to as many alumni and students as possible. It helped that the first two alumni associates, Bobby and then Stephen Beltle ’90, with whom I worked, knew a lot of Haverfordians and brought their concerns and ideas back to be incorporated into our overall programming. Several themes tangential to co-education emerged: Younger alumni were not attending events at the same rate as older alumni; we needed to make such occasions more accessible, affordable and shorter. No languishing four-hour cocktail parties, puh-leze. And because most female graduates were in recent classes, if the younger classes were a no-show, the resulting alumni event looked pretty much like a good old boys’ club.

Somewhere in current Alumni Director Katie Alwart’s Alumni Association Executive Committee minutes are notes and calculations from meetings in the early 1990s. Consulting actuarial charts we predicted how many alumni would depart each year from the much smaller and older classes, and how many new alumni we would gain. We wanted to know at what point Haverford’s alumni population would look like the current student population, with a more or less equal split between men and women (there were 123 women in 1980 as compared to 499 in 1990. Male figures in those years were 937 and 648, respectively). The year 2012 sticks in my mind but that could be spurious synapse misfire. So our focus at that time was to involve a “sufficient” (though we did not set quotas) number of women in alumni events and activities so that they wouldn’t have to carry the negative consequences of alumni event tokenism. It wasn’t until about 10 years later, after I left the Alumni Office to begin work in the Advancement Office, that Alumni Director Violet Brown began to build alumnae-specific programs called “Women Excel”—tailored for women graduates. When I began working in Institutional Advancement in the late 1990s, these women were now well established in their careers, and we asked them to provide leadership throughout the volunteer structure of the “Educating to Lead, Educating to Serve” campaign. I think the increasing number of women who became engaged in these alumni and fundraising activities over the years was due to an active, consistent program, with more clearly defined paths, showing how one could travel up the volunteer ladder if you wanted to someday serve on the Board of Managers. And we had better overall communication from the College explaining what it wanted to accomplish in the campaign and how all alumni could help. Younger classes were very web-savvy and we pushed a lot of information about the campaign and the College to them via the web site, electronic news, e-mails to key volunteer groups, etc.

Alumni Directors get to hear all kinds of juicy tidbits. I’ve filed more than a decade’s worth of reminiscences and alumni, faculty, student and administrative observations into mental shoeboxes. I‘m convinced, having sorted through and replayed in my mind some of these past conversations relating to women at Haverford, that the College’s entry into co-education went as well as it did because alumni, faculty and students started in the late 1960s to convince the Board of Managers that it was the right thing to do. Frustrating for those who supported co-education, yes. But those 10-plus years of planning benefited those who matriculated in the Class of 1984.

So did the first female alumni relations director thrive at Haverford?

I did. To the hundreds of Haverfordians, male and female, who gave so generously of their time and expertise over the years to guide this Swarthmoron, thank you!

If you’d like to get in touch with Diane, e-mail her at wilderfrancone@yahoo.com.