Johnnetta Betsch Cole (G59, G67)
President, Bennett College for Women

Johnnetta Betsch Cole, who led Bennett College for Women from 2002 through last spring, after having been president of Spelman College in Atlanta from 1987 to 1997, often teases that she wants her own page in the Guinness Book of World Records.

"I am the only person, living or dead, to have 'presidented' both of our nation's historically black colleges for women," Cole says, adding that the better-known Spelman, where she is president emerita, was easier to lead. "At Spelman, we simply had to put the icing on the cake. At Bennett, we've been baking the cake."

When Cole arrived at Bennett, in Greensboro, N.C., the college was on accreditation probation for fiscal instability, enrollment had plummeted, and "deferred maintenance was the order of the day," she says. But after the Revitalizing Bennett Campaign that Cole led, "No one is whispering now, 'Will Bennett cease to be?'"

As president emerita, Cole will continue as board chair of the Johnnetta B. Cole Global Diversity and Inclusion Institute, founded at Bennett. The institute's signature program involves an annual gathering of chief diversity officers from businesses, academic institutions, nonprofits and government agencies to exchange best practices. "The institute allows me to bring so much of my work as a scholar and administrator into a single frame," she says.

The focus of Cole's anthropological research has been on inequality along lines of race, gender, class and sexual orientation. "It allows you to see the complexity and the difficulty of creating change," she says. "Cultural anthropology has contributed to my understanding that there is no contradiction between diversity and excellence."