Jennifer Braaten announced her decision to retire earlier this January after fourteen years of service as Ferrum College’s first female president. Braaten, 68, decided to leave her post in light of severe medical issues within her family, but cherishes the time she spent at Ferrum.
“It’s been an honor and a privilege being at Ferrum,” Braaten said. “The best part of my life has been at Ferrum, I’ve loved it. I don’t even know how to describe it, other than to say there’s no place like Ferrum, and you’ll never find a better faculty, staff, student body, or sense of community than you do here.”
Braaten was in born in Minnesota but grew up in San Francisco, where she got her first job in education as an 8th grade middle school teacher.
“Middle school was my first job in education and also the most important,” Braaten said. “I say this not facetiously. If you can teach 8th grade you can do anything, just because of all the levels of emotional development, all the levels of engagement, and all the issues you have there.”
After middle school, Braaten spent a short time teaching high school before getting her master’s degree and teaching community college. Eventually she moved to Florida, where she worked as a history and sociology professor, a provost, an academic dean, and a vice president of student affairs in various universities.
“Teaching middle school is very interesting and engaging, but I was really interested in the development of the mind, and I wanted to work a little bit more with college students,” Braaten said. “I like freshman and sophomores because they’re in that transitional phase. It’s a really transformative time. Just like in middle school, everything is happening, but middle schoolers can’t sort it all out. For me, college was the place where you have an opportunity to find a path and accompany students on a path. That can be very exciting. I love it. I love college teaching, I still may go back to teaching.”
Braaten’s first job as a president was at Midland University in Nebraska, where she worked for three and a half years solely as an administrator, her first time completely separated from the classroom.
“I think having been in the classroom really helps when you’re an administrator,” Braaten said. “There’s a perception that you’re removed from it, or you don’t know it, and that’s why I think in higher education we’re seeing presidents who are coming from the corporate world, or business, or the political arena, or maybe they’re lawyers, and they all may be good, but they really don’t understand the classroom. They don’t understand students in a lot of the ways someone who’s been in the classroom understands students. If you come from the academic side of the house you’re more likely to understand what it means to be an administrator then if you come from the military or corporate, because it’s not like the military and it’s not like a business. It’s a people, a developmental process.”
Braaten made the decision to take a job at Ferrum to be closer to her family, who were living along the east coast at time; her daughter in Florida, her husband in Washington D.C., and her son in Boston.
“After 9/11, the direct flights from Omaha to DC stopped, and I needed to be closer to DC, so I started to look for colleges in Virginia,” Braaten said. “I didn’t know how far away Ferrum was from DC, but I said ‘Oh, a Virginia college, I’ll be closer to my husband!’ That was part of why I wanted to come, but also I love the motto, and I love the history.”
Braaten championed a great deal of progress and expansion throughout her time at Ferrum. Over the course of her presidency, approximately $45 million was raised in capital campaigns, the college endowment grew to $50 million, and around $30 million in facilities were added to campus. In addition, Braaten’s work with local businesses led to student facilities like the YMCA and the Tri-area clinic, both located on campus.
“I’d say my biggest area of initiative that’s visible was in the physical plan of the facilities,” Braaten said. “When I first came here, we had not been keeping up with facilities, so I’ve been doing that for residence halls. We’ve completely redone Franklin Hall, completely redone the library, built Clark and Dyer, built Arthur and Moore, and built the Hank Norton Center. A lot of energy went into facility upgrades for students. It’s such a beautiful setting, and we have great staff who take a lot of pride in presentation, so that was important to me.”
Aside from physical and financial upgrades, Braaten took her role as Ferrum’s first female president seriously, and made diversity and acceptance one of her primary goals.
“We’ve been very embracing of diversity at Ferrum since I’ve been here. We’ve increased in all areas,” Braaten said. “It’s just people, and it’s been important for us to be able to say that this is a welcoming place. How do you overcome prejudice and discrimination? The answer is through education. This is part of Ferrum’s historical legacy of opportunity and accessibility, keeping with our historic mission but in a contemporary context, so it isn’t just about opportunity, accessibility and affordability for our immediate region, but also who we are in the commonwealth and who are we in the country. I think we’ve become much more heterogenous, certainly ethnically, and I wanted our diversity statement to include gender identity, in terms of the LGBT community.”
Braaten believes it is important for Ferrum College to be a community leader in diversity. She feels that she has accomplished both that and her other goals as president with the help of a highly supportive faculty.
“We wanted to grow the college academically, we wanted to grow the college in enrollment, and we wanted to grow the college in reputation and aesthetics,” Braaten said. “I think we’ve achieved that in a very significant way. A high school counselor actually told me that Ferrum went from frumpy to fabulous in five years. At open houses people always tell me there’s no place better when it comes to friendly people. They’ll tell me they really feel like there is this family atmosphere, that people are here to help support you. An alum once said to me that a lot of us who came to Ferrum were broken in some way. It could’ve been financial, could’ve been emotional, could’ve been a relationship, could’ve been academically, but Ferrum made us whole again.”
Braaten hasn’t filled in the details of her retirement plans, but her primary goal is to be closer to her family. However, she also plans to stay at least somewhat involved in education, as well as to pursue passions that her career got in the way of. She’ll be keeping her traveling limited, but plans to make trips out to the west at some point or another.
“I probably will be still involved in higher education in a different capacity,” Braaten said. “I may teach a class or two, not here, I may be involved with some of these consulting firms that work in higher education, where they try to assist new administrators in understanding the trends and the challenges of higher education. probably still being involved with some art. I’m kind of a neophyte artist and photographer. I used to take a black and white photography class and do my own enlarging when I was in my twenties, so I’m very interested in doing more photography. I also used to do a lot of watercolor, and I’m interested in doing some of that. I’m really interested in anything related to nature, I love bird watching, and the aesthetic of the blue ridge mountains.”
Braaten plans to move down to Florida to be closer to her daughter, either by late July or early August. She helped select individuals from both in and outside of the Ferrum community for a search team to find a new president. They have not yet come to a decision.