The Resilient Academic: Barbara Gitenstein’s Journey

Yeah, now next we have a story of many kinds of resilience from Barbara Gittinstein, President Emerita of the College of New Jersey and the author of Experience is the Angled Road, Memoir of an Academic. She was raised by Jewish Yankee parents in the Deep South in the town of Florala, Alabama. Her life's journey to campus leadership was marked by wide-ranging challenges. Some of these helped her develop her professional skills and others opened her life up to greater joy. Let's take a look at my talk with her. Thank you so much, Kevin, for having me on the show. Well, yes, there were. I mean, part of it was just being such a different person from the circumstances that we grew up in. My parents were, as you mentioned, from Manhattan. They were Yankees, they were Jewish, and we were from a small town in South Alabama where the big difference was between Methodists and Baptists, and so we had to figure our way and people had to learn to deal with us. In addition, I was a child who was very interested in cultural and intellectual kinds of things, which was not typical, and that sort of created a sense of separation so that I was always in the periphery. I like to say I was the always the strange whatever in a room, either the only Jew, the only woman, the only Southerner. Right, so Bobbie, let's fast forward a bit. You overcame some personal obstacles as well as historical ones. Can you tell us about those and how they help you equip college administrators of our day to handle the challenges they face? Well, one of the things that I think is so important, not just for administrators but for young people, is to develop resilience, and developing resilience always comes from facing challenges and overcoming them and learning to look into yourself to gain strength. My first great loss was when I realized that I was not going to become an opera star. I thought I was going to be a great singer. I love classical music, but I just didn't have the voice. Academia needed you. Thank you very much. I hope that's the way others see it as well, but I also had personal challenges. One of the most painful challenges was dealing with my mother's Alzheimer's disease. My mother had early onset Alzheimer's, and she died at 69 after almost 12 years of diagnosis. So she was really losing her sense of self in her 50s, and that was a very painful loss for me. Well, and Bobby, I do want to point out a heartfelt moment in your life, one in which you took your wheelchair-bound mother gently, her face gently in your hands, and you told her that you had just published a book about literary criticism, and you dedicated it to her, and she pushed past her Alzheimer's to tell you, you could not have done anything that I would have appreciated more. What can people learn from your book? Well, I think that particular moment was a magical, but also a very painful moment, because of course, the moment, the minute later, she was gone again. But to learn to treasure those moments, and to grow from them, and to not give in to the pain. One of the things that I did, which was a huge mistake, was the way I learned to handle my sorrow, was to sort of erase my mother, and not be able to remember her for many years. That's not a healthy thing to do. You really have to confront those issues, and learn to dig deep into yourself, and find the joy that is out there. Well, it was really great hearing your story today. Barbara Gittinstein, President Emerita of the College of New Jersey, thank you. Pleasure. Have a great day.