Photos by L.G. Patterson
Shannon Lundeen is on her way to Columbia from Denver, leaving behind mountains and familiar ski slopes for the plains and rolling hills of Missouri. Lundeen will be beginning a new phase of an impactful career in higher education and her family will be beginning a new adventure in a small town they will eventually call home. A moving van will transport the family’s furniture and possessions, but it’s the intangible things that Lundeen carries with her that will be just as necessary — she’ll be taking with her all the experience, skills and personal attributes she’s developed over nearly 20 years in higher education academic affairs. She’ll need and use every bit of what she brings as she assumes her new role as the 25th president of Stephens College.
Lundeen will be living in Columbia as part of an extended family, which includes her 80-year-old mother, Judy, who will continue her grandmothering responsibilities with Lundeen’s two youngest sons, ages 14 and 7. Her partner, John Bauder, will resume his career in the field of climate change remediation after helping settle everyone into their new life. Lundeen’s oldest son, age 17, is returning to Colorado in the fall to live with family friends while finishing his senior year of high school in the International Baccalaureate Diploma program.
When speaking about her family, Lundeen is open and casual, personable, not stuffy. Nothing about her — from her faux mohawk hairstyle to her experience as a woman in the academic universe — fits the stereotypical image of college presidents, most of whom are men and a decade or so older. At 48 years old, Lundeen presents herself with the confident, crisp style of someone who is prepared to shape the future of the nation’s second-oldest women’s college.
Lundeen will succeed current Stephens President Dianne Lynch, who retires after 16 years at the end of this academic year. Among the milestones of Lynch’s tenure are the doubling of the college’s endowment fund due to a $2.5 million annual gift and an increase in enrollment this past year of 60% — a response to the broader range of educational programs she ushered in.
Although friends and colleagues describe Lundeen as a dreamer with a bold vision, she looks to the challenges ahead realistically. “Ensuring the future financial viability of the institution, which means ensuring it is financially stable and sustainable, is going to be key to its success,” she says. Building on the foundation of her predecessors, she wants to continue “fund- and friend-raising, strategic enrollment management and innovative partnerships.” Raising the institution’s visibility is also a priority of hers. “An important part of the legacy that I’d like to leave behind is to ensure that Stephens is included in national conversations about distinctive higher education environments,” she says. “The college is actually a pioneer in thinking through how a women’s college can change and expand to meet the evolving needs of our students.”
If anyone is already in a position to motivate college-age women and build a supportive and challenging environment in the classroom and on campus, that would be Lundeen. Her career path makes her position at Stephens seem inevitable, which is exactly what Stephens student Kate Stevens felt when she first met Lundeen during a Zoom interview. Stevens, who is president of the Stephens student body government, was included on the search committee for the new president.
“After hearing Dr. Lundeen, it was difficult to sit through the other interviews because I was just so excited for the future of Stephens,” she said. “It takes a very specific type of person who can come here and who will become part of the Stephens community. I almost cried, realizing what she would do for the future of the college.”
Lundeen inspires enthusiasm in Stephens faculty as well as in students. Sara Linde-Patel, associate professor and program coordinator of Stephens’ equestrian studies, met Lundeen during her campus visit in March. “Her dynamic energy and her passion for student success impressed me,” Linde-Patel says. “She puts students at the heart of all of her decisions, and I was reassured that she prioritizes not just academic rigor but the students’ well-being.”
Linde-Patel’s impressions pinpoint two major aspects of Lundeen’s approach to her profession — her academic rigor and her concern for the development of students. Lundeen started expressing those deep roots early on in her life. She was raised in Chicago, where she attended a Catholic school, although her family was not Catholic. She says that she absorbed the Jesuit commitment to addressing social injustices but also couldn’t help but to be troubled by church traditions that differentiated females (who could become nuns) from males (who could become priests). After high school, she went to Colgate University, where she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and women’s studies. “I wanted to really understand gender discrimination and grapple with really big questions about the meaning of life,” she says.
Lundeen found part of the answer — at least in terms of finding meaning in her own life — when she taught a year of public high school in Kenosha, Wisconsin. “I just fell in love with teaching,” she says. “I saw how you could have an impact on somebody by showing them their potential and letting them know that you believed in them.”
This insight led Lundeen back to graduate school to prepare for a future in education. At Stony Brook University in New York, she earned a Ph.D. in philosophy with a graduate certificate in women’s studies. Kelly Oliver, who was her dissertation director at Stony Brook, recalls Lundeen’s academic prowess and her lightheartedness. “When you think of philosophy Ph.D.s, you might imagine the stereotype of anti-social, egg-heads stuck in their own minds or introverted Eeyores, wallowing in their own nihilism,” Oliver says. “(Lundeen) is the exact opposite; she is positive, fun-loving, outgoing, caring and committed to helping others. Even as a grad student, she was a leader, always organizing special events, including, my favorite, karaoke parties.”
As a newly minted Ph.D., Lundeen took her first step into higher education as associate director of the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies Program and the Alice Paul Center for Research on Gender, Sexuality and Women at the University of Pennsylvania. While there, she taught and, for six of her eight years, lived in residence in a first-year college house as a faculty fellow and living-learning community advisor. During those years, her two oldest sons were born. “We just loved the experience, and it gave me this real view of how critical all the other work that happens outside of the traditional four walls of the academic classroom is for getting students ready and able to learn,” she says.
Leaving UPenn, she accepted a position as the director of the Flora Stone Mather Center for Women at Case Western Reserve University, where she was appointed to faculty in the School of Medicine (bioethics) and College of Arts and Sciences (philosophy). Suzanne Rivera, currently president of Macalester College in St. Paul, started as a colleague of Lundeen’s at Case Western, and went on to become a longtime friend. She admires her friend’s administrative skills as well as her ability to relate to others. “Dr. Lundeen can see the big picture and attend to details in order to get things done. This is rare. She also is a powerful motivator— because of her charisma, people want to follow her lead,” she says. “People who get to know her will appreciate her authenticity, her passion and her sense of humor.”
If it seems as if Lundeen can’t possibly have packed even more academic experiences into her background to prepare for leading Stephens, that would be a misconception. After Case Western, she moved to North Carolina to work at Elon University, where she served as the inaugural director of academic-residential partnerships and associate professor of philosophy. Once again, she was able to ensure that students’ experiences outside the classroom contributed to their development as individuals and scholars. Lundeen has had a positive impact on hundreds, probably thousands, of college students while teaching and leading programs that help students become more capable, confident and knowledgeable.
She added another dimension to that career in 2022, when she left life on campus and headed to Denver, the headquarters of the Higher Education Resources Center, a national organization whose mission is to prepare women and gender-diverse individuals for roles in higher education leadership and to provide them the tools to advance in their careers. As the vice president of programs and operations for HERS, she created and carried out programs impacting women in academic leadership positions throughout the nation’s colleges and universities.
The HERS philosophy of bridging the gap between the world as it exists and the world as it could be is summed up on their website under the heading, “A Force for Change,” which states, “We shape and support bold leaders for an equal voice in the future of higher education.” Lundeen will be applying that same philosophy as she leads Stephens faculty. “I want to invest in the development of faculty and staff,” she says. “I want to get them in front of microphones, presenting at professional conferences, so that people can hear the Stephens story from the people who are making it happen.”
Lundeen’s enthusiasm for Stephens and her new role is leavened with an awareness of the challenges facing women’s colleges. Back in the ‘60s, there were close to 300 women’s colleges in the United States; today there are fewer than 30. Stephens College is not exclusively for women; its performing arts conservatory, master’s programs and workforce development programs educate men alongside women. But for women who seek an educational environment designed to maximize their potential, a single-sex education can provide a unique mixture of challenge and support.
“I think that one of the values of a women’s college is that for women in particular, those classroom spaces are designed to empower them in a setting that reduces sexist stereotypes and their negative effects,” Lundeen says.
Transitioning from her role at HERS to her position at Stephens doesn’t leave much time for Lundeen to indulge in leisure reading. In those rare moments when she puts aside professional journals or work-related reports, she likes to pick up novels, usually from local authors. “I love stories that are rooted in place and have any kind of central focus on an empowered woman or a woman who is coming into her own power,” she says. This describes her tastes in fiction, but is also a good description of where she is in her own life.
