Top women campus leaders share key lessons.(Discussion)

What kind of leader are you? Picturing yourself as an ordinary kitchen ingredient may help you to determine your style.

Imagine that you submerge a carrot, an egg and a coffee bean in a cup of boiling water. The carrot enters the water strong and hard--unrelenting--but becomes soft and mushy. The egg is fragile, with a thin shell protecting a liquid interior, but it emerges hardboiled. The coffee bean, however, doesn't change--it changes the water around it, making it rich and strong.

In difficult circumstances, like being thrown into boiling water, do you get softer, or harder, or change the world around you?

That question was posed by Amy Levine, director of the Center for Gender Equity at the University of California-San Francisco, as she introduced a panel of three senior women leaders at the Northern California network coordinator's annual meeting in San Francisco in March, an American Council on Education's Office of Women in Higher Education program.

The session "Where There's a Woman There's a Way: The Path to Leadership in Higher Education" featured three "coffee bean" type of leaders from California: Dr. Marye Anne Fox, chancellor at UC-San Diego; Dr. Norma Rees, president of CSU-East Bay, and Dr. Fran White, president of College of Marin.

Using a question-and-answer style, it included these exchanges which are presented here as paraphrases of the speakers' words.

Do you agree that, 'Whatever you do, you must do twice as well and half as fast as a man' to succeed?