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Woman of the Year Nominee: Act III
Fabulous femme Bette Siegel, Ph.D., is about to retire from her leadership role at Kennesaw State University. Here's what she's planning on doing for her next act.
by H.M. Cauley
March 1, 2006
T
he story of how Betty Siegel, PhD, took a small suburban college and turned it into one
of the most successful universities in the Georgia state system has been told and retold since she
announced she was stepping down this year as president of Kennesaw State University. After 25 years
of transforming KSU from a school of 3,900 to one of more than 19,000 enrolled in various levels of
degree programs, Siegel is set to move on.
But she will continue to be a force in education with her new mission,
fashioned out of the old.
"Yes, we have been very successful here; I can give you a litany of honors this
institution has won," says Siegel, 75, nodding to the array of plaques, statutes and other awards
that line her office overlooking KSU's growing campus. "It all began when we started thinking about
service, leadership and ethics."
The energetic Siegel, the daughter of a Kentucky coal miner with deep Scots-Irish roots, is
about to launch the next stage of her career, one that focuses on the three success points she
implemented at Kennesaw. She has developed a model of ethical leadership based on the theory that
all people are able, viable and responsible and in possession of enormous untapped potential. It's
part of her crusade to bring ethics back into education, healthcare and nonprofit fields that she
launched in 2001 with the creation of the RTM Institute for Leadership, Ethics and Character at
Kennesaw.
"I went to RTM [restaurant group] and was turned down when I asked for a baseball field,"
she recalls with a laugh. "But when I asked about funding an ethics program, I got $1 million."
The money endowed the Betty L. Siegel Chair for Ethical Leadership at KSU, where Siegel will
devote her considerable energy in the coming years. Through the RTM Institute, she has recruited
other scholars to support the work; organized ethics awareness workshops; and assembled a conclave
on global ethics that was held in Oxford, England.
"What we're trying to do is transform institutions with ethical leadership," explains
Siegel, whose enthusiasm for the subject energizes her to speak for hours on the topic. "I wouldn't
want Kennesaw to be known just for its growth and size; that isn't enough. I want us to grow in
stature, service, sophistication and significance as well. We want to be a university with meaning,
not just a collection of courses or a ticket to a trade."
But of all the areas where the much-lauded academician could devote her intellect,
experience and energy, why ethics?
"I believe we are all hungry for the things that have meaning," says Siegel, who regularly
spends a night in the KSU dorms talking about the topic with undergraduates.
Anyone who knows Siegel's history sees her current work in the ethics arena as just another
way she breaks new ground. She has a long history of doing so, going back to the late 1960s when
she was hired as the only woman in a department of 35 men at the University of Florida. And then
she got pregnant.
"I told them I was going to have the baby during the spring break, and I did," she says,
still laughing over the reaction of her male colleagues. But two years later, she was named one of
the three most distinguished faculty and three years after that, she became Florida's Dean of
Academic Affairs. It was the beginning of a lifelong love of learning and growing that isn't about
to end just because she's leaving her current presidential post.
"I tell people I'm in the third act of my life. Ethel Barrymore used to say that a good play
should have a satisfying third act. Well, the third act for me is a great stage of moving, growing
and evolving. It's also one of wisdom - using who you are to be a sage."
Some things won't change, though. She still intends to start as many mornings as possible at
her favorite Waffle House across from the KSU campus, where her devotion as a daily diner was
recently rewarded with a lifetime of free breakfasts. And she'll still be a force on the state's
educational scene, proposing to add a service component to the HOPE scholarship and working to
expand the reach of the RTM Institute.
"Work must be joyful," she says. "Mine certainly is; it keeps me going so I don't understand
boredom."
Meanwhile, keep an eye out for the senior citizen with the blonde hair and red-rimmed
glasses cruising around Cobb County on her motorcycle.
"It's a compliment to me," she says with a smile, "when people say I don't act my age."
Photography by Daemon Baizan
