Janet L. Holmgren *74
Oakland, CA

Graduate Alumni Candidate

President of Mills College, one of the country’s oldest undergraduate schools for women, Janet L. Holmgren (known at Princeton as Janet Holmgren McKay) began her ongoing journey as a leader in higher education at Princeton, first as a graduate student and later as a senior administrator.
           
Holmgren first arrived at Princeton in the fall of 1968 to pursue an advanced Linguistics degree.  “Not only was I among the early pioneering women in graduate studies,” she recalls, “but I also experienced the transition from an all-male undergraduate population to co-education in 1969.” In addition to engaging with “extraordinary professors and fellow graduate students,” she says, “I also learned how to negotiate in a world in which I was basically an outsider—a woman preparing for the professoriate and a life that had been until very recently off limits for women and for people of color.”   She earned her MA in 1971 and her PhD in 1974.
           
After Princeton, Holmgren moved to Washington, D.C., where she was Assistant Professor of English Studies at Federal City College, now known as the University of the District of Columbia.  In 1976 she joined the University of Maryland at College Park as a professor and Assistant Director of English Graduate Studies, and in 1982 she was named Assistant to the Chancellor of the University, a post she held for six years.
           
Holmgren made a move both significant and symbolic in 1988:  “Twenty years after I began my graduate studies at Princeton,” she says, “I returned to the University as a senior administrator in the capacity of Associate and then Vice Provost.”    Her responsibilities in these roles “ranged across facilities, budget, institutional and curricular change, and faculty and administrative staffing,” she says, and gave her the experience she would need for her next endeavor.  “I was one of many Princeton vice provosts/provosts who developed the capacity through the extraordinary standards set by Princeton to lead institutions of higher education,” she reflects.
           
In 1991 Holmgren became President of Mills College in Oakland, California.  Since she has been there, she has overseen a highly successful sesquicentennial campaign ($32 million over the $100 million goal), has significantly increased faculty diversity (from 3% faculty of color to 25%), and has spearheaded the addition of several of the school’s new co-ed graduate programs.  Her emphasis as President, she says, is on the importance of “opening new areas of knowledge and research, connecting to the community both local and global, enhancing diversity in the faculty and student body, and keeping the doors of higher education open in times of limited resources for students.”  She is also Susan Mills Professor, an honor held by Mills College presidents who remain in the classroom.
           
Author of numerous articles and two books, including Narration and Discourse in American Realistic Fiction (1982), Holmgren is a recognized speaker on higher education—its social responsibilities and contributions—and on women’s education, in particular. In 1988 she was named Outstanding Woman Administrator while at the University of Maryland and in 1998 became a member of her high school’s Hall of Fame, Hinsdale Central in Illinois. She is the recipient of the American Council on Education’s Award for Lifetime Service and a California National Organization for Women’s Award for Excellence in Education.
           
Holmgren has sat on the boards of many educational and non-profit organizations and has served as Chair of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the National Council for Research on Women, the Women’s College Coalition, and the American Council on Education, to name only a few.  She has also returned to Princeton, not only as Vice Provost, but also as a Reunion Alumni-Faculty Forum panelist.  “I believe I owe a great deal of my leadership capacity to my Princeton education and experience,” she says.