DePauw Stories

Lori S. White underwent intensive vetting before she was named DePauw University’s 21st president in March, but her former boss thinks “the DePauw community doesn’t even know yet how lucky it is.

“Lori White is a compelling leader in every respect,” said Holden Thorp, who was her boss when he was provost and executive vice chancellor for academic affairs at Washington University. She was WashU’s vice chancellor for student affairs for five years before assuming the DePauw presidency July 1. 

“She is extremely knowledgeable about higher education; she is a very experienced manager; and she can rally people around her better than anyone I have ever worked with,” said Thorp, now editor in chief of the Science family of journals. “She is about to set DePauw on fire. The students and alumni will be enthused like they never have been before. Get ready for record crowds at your events.”

Two stories about White – one personal, one professional – provide more insight into DePauw’s new president. 

It was 1995, and White had traveled for her doctoral work from Stanford University in California to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. She was having dinner with friends, when Tony Tillman, a colleague of one of them, spotted them through the restaurant window. Too shy to step inside, he later asked their mutual friend if White would share a phone number. She acceded, they had a pleasant phone chat and, when she was in New York City several months later, they “spent a nice day together and I thought he was quite a nice guy.”

Here, White explained: “The other thing you should know about me is I’m very focused. Focus is one of my strengths, so when I decide there’s a goal in mind, I’m going to put all of my attention on achieving that particular goal, whatever that might be. The goal was to be complete with my dissertation, my graduate work, by 1995 because, in 1991, I had bought a license plate for my car that said ‘PHD 1995.’ So come 1995, I was determined to finish. …

“I couldn’t imagine how I could date somebody who lived all the way across the country when I was trying to finish my dissertation. This was before email and FaceTime and all the ways with which now we keep in touch with people. So we lost touch.”

White met her goal that year and secured her Ph.D. in education administration and policy analysis, with an emphasis in higher education. A decade later, she and Tillman reconnected, though he had by then moved to Washington D.C. and she to Los Angeles. They forged a two-year, long-distance relationship. Both eventually went to work for Southern Methodist University and, nine years ago, they were married.

In April 2018 the student newspaper at WashU published the latest of several “gut-wrenching” op eds – White’s description – written by students who reported that they had been sexually assaulted and found little sympathy or justice in the reporting process required by Title IX, a federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex.

A day later, the newspaper published an op ed by White in which she revealed that she too had been a victim of sexual misconduct.

“I was inspired by our students and their bravery to tell their own stories, and this also was happening against the backdrop of the emerging ‘Me Too’ movement, where not only were our students coming forward to tell their stories, but other women were coming forward, much more openly, to tell their stories,” she said. “And I thought, I have a story to tell also. Why am I afraid to tell my own story?”

She consulted with several colleagues who encouraged her to write the op ed. “Students often see the administration as this kind of nameless, faceless blob of people who make decisions,” she said. “I wanted them to also understand that there were women on the campus who may have also experienced what the students were, sadly, experiencing and I wanted students to know that we stood in solidarity and empathy with them, and that we were human beings also.”

Soon thereafter, students – led by Title Mine, the self-styled “trauma-informed, survivor-centered activist movement” – staged a protest and, several weeks later, issued several demands.

White went to the university’s chancellor – equivalent to DePauw’s president – and volunteered to lead the school’s response, starting with formation of a working group of people whose jobs touched on some aspect of Title IX. A week later, White and the director of the Relationship and Sexual Violence Prevention Center met with the Title Mine leaders. 

“They could not have been more welcoming and understanding,” said Candace Hayes, now a rising senior at WashU and founder of Title Mine. “They, from the beginning and since, treated us as peers and colleagues who were working with them to make a safer and more inclusive campus learning environment, not as though we were existing in a clear hierarchical structure with an imbalance of power dynamics. They wanted to make us feel comfortable with voicing our concerns and voicing our opinions. … Fortunately, over the course of the past two years, we’ve been able to build deep interpersonal relationships with the administrators whom we’ve been working with and have been able also to build trust.”

Over that summer, White’s team evaluated the students’ demands – which she prefers to call “requests” – and agreed to most of them. “’Demand’ implies an adversarial relationship between students and administrators,” she said. “I really believe that mostly, when students ask us for things, they’re asking us for things that are not unreasonable. And if there is a way for us to work with students to get to ‘yes,’ I think that’s where we should focus.”

WashU ultimately added six full-time positions and committed to speedier investigations, longer counseling hours, timely accommodations, more staff training and other steps.

Throughout her career, White has worked on issues of diversity, equity and inclusion, beginning with her first professional job almost 40 years ago as the director of the Cross Cultural Center at the University of California, Irvine. “These are issues that all of us are struggling with in higher education across the country and, really, we’re struggling with as a nation and as a world,” she said. “So I don’t think one person can come in with her Super Woman cape and solve all of that. … I hope that I can be a role model for talking about how important this is at DePauw and that students will see me as somebody who feels personally and professionally really committed to these really important issues.”

She may not wear a Super Woman cape, but a former colleague expects White will make a significant difference at DePauw. She is “one of the most visionary leaders I have ever worked alongside,” said Robert Wild, WashU’s associate vice chancellor for student transition and engagement and dean of students. “She nurtured and recruited a strong, diverse and student-centered team of leaders. More than anyone I have ever worked for, Dr. White sees potential in people.”

She also “cares deeply about students,” Wild said. “She gets to know students on an individual level and is always seeking out those who many not have a voice at the table to understand their experience.”