President Granberg Offers Lessons of Leadership

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George Washington University President Ellen M. Granberg addressed a Elizabeth J. Sommers Women's Leadership Program(WLP) symposium Thursday, offering lessons in leadership and her vision for the university.

The event was held in Post Hall on GW's Mount Vernon campus. Granberg joined Interim Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs Emily Hammond for a wide-ranging discussion that included takeaways from her own career, from being editor in chief of her college student newspaper to working in the private sector to eventually being hired as GW's first female president.

WLP is a legacy of Elizabeth J. Somers and the Mount Vernon Seminary and College that was founded in 1875 and became part of GW in 1999. The program provides a living and learning experience for first year students. The evening symposium is a weekly session for students in the program to develop their leadership qualities and career paths, by meeting with distinguished women from a variety of fields-women such as Granberg.

Tazana Gordon, a rising senior who is majoring in criminal justice and cognitive neuroscience, introduced Granberg and Hammond. Gordon is also WLP mentor, the incoming chair of the WLP Student Advisory Board and a WLP mentor.

Hammond began by noting that it can be hard to imagine what college must have been like for a university president and asked Granberg what was on her mind at the time. The audience would then learn that Granberg's path to the F Street House, the official residence of GW presidents, was never linear.

A stint on her campus paper at the University of California, Davis, made it clear to her that she wasn't cut out to be the next Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate scandal that led to President Nixon's resignation.

"As it turns out, I was better at organizing things, leading things, running things," Granberg said. "I ended up as the editor in chief of the paper."

After graduation from UC Davis, she worked for 11 years in telecommunications at Pacific Bell in California. While there, a graduate studies program the company offered introduced her to a professor who "awoke in her something she'd forgotten, the sheer pleasure of learning."

This marked the beginning of her career in academic scholarship and leadership.

Granberg first moved across the country to Nashville to earn an M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from Vanderbilt University and then to South Carolina for what would turn out to be a 17-year career as a faculty member and later administrator at Clemson University. While Granberg was absorbed in her research and academic pursuits, the retiring chair of Clemson's Department of Sociology and Anthropology suggested she take it over in 2012. It was a key moment in her career.

"I really had no interest in supervising anybody other than my students and research," she said. "For me it was a turning point."

In that role, Granberg discovered something about herself when she helped a scholar secure a research grant.

"I got the biggest kick out of the opportunity to do things to help other people get where they want to go," she said.

That kick became a launching pad, as Granberg went on to become the first woman provost at the Rochester Institute of Technology and then, in July 2023, GW's first woman president.

Granberg said that while she wrestled internally with the risk of being criticized, especially as a woman in the field of academic leadership traditionally defined by the male perspective, she realized nothing would change if she didn't speak up.

"If you speak up on something that is very important, it's easy to be tagged with the 'woman's' point of view or having the 'soft' view of the issue," Granberg said. "Over time, being insistent about it, I did start to see the room change.

"That has been the greatest lesson of my professional life. Don't give up."

The symposium also included an audience Q and A session, where WLP students such as Nora Perez Ribio and Sarah Lopez took to the mic.

Asked what she does to keep the door open for other women, Granberg said, "When you're a president or a provost of a university, you have influence over policy, and policy is deeply gendered," she said.

Granberg said that GW is one of the most politically connected campuses in the country and has access to expert advice. She also acknowledged that times of uncertainty can create anxiety, but she emphasized that challenges can also reveal a capacity for resilience and that people find ways to step up and lead.

In navigating challenging moments, she said the university's leadership remains focused on three core priorities: keeping the community safe, preserving free expression and academic freedom, and maintaining the university's educational and research mission.

Granberg mentioned several initiatives in progress that she's excited about: one seeks to better integrate academic advising and career advising and another aims to make experiencing the District of Columbia more accessible through more large-scale partnerships with institutions such as the Smithsonian.

To wrap up the evening, WLP Program Director Carly Jordan thanked Granberg and said they were excited to hear about her career advice because it coincided with what WLP students experienced in masculine spaces.

Jordan then announced a new professional practice course offering created to help sophomore students develop professional communication, financial literacy, how to navigate professional relationships and how to self-advocate in those spaces that sometimes feel hard.