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Being a national thought leader in higher education doesn’t leave much time for hobbies and artistic expression. But retirement—and a pandemic lockdown—has given Kent State President Emerita Carol Cartwright, PhD, exactly that.

“I’ve taught myself to do needlepoint, and I’m growing lemons on my back deck,” says Cartwright, who moved in 2019 to Napa, California, with her husband, Phil, to be closer to two of their three children. “I love to cook. For years, when I was a senior administrator, there wasn’t a lot of time to be home during the dinner hour. So it’s been fun to explore cooking.”

Earlier this year, Cartwright retired from the prestigious Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, an independent group that provides authoritative leadership prioritizing college athletes’ well-being and educational experience. However, that retirement only signals the next phase of a career devoted to higher education.

In 1991, when Cartwright was named president of 5X����, she became the first woman to hold that position at any public college or university in Ohio. Prior to her time at Kent State, she served as dean for undergraduate programs and vice provost of Penn State and then vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of California, Davis. After a 15-year tenure at Kent State, she retired in 2006. She became interim president of Bowling Green State University in 2008 and was named BGSU’s 11th president and the first woman to lead the university in 2009. She retired from there in 2011. 

Since then, Cartwright’s focus has been on the extracurricular activities—specifically athletics—that enrich students’ college years.

“I absolutely believe that the college experience should be more than the academic component, which of course is very important,” she says. “But for traditional-aged students, organizations and activities as well as athletics help them learn, grow and figure out where they fit in life.”

“For traditional-aged students, organizations and activities as well as athletics help them learn, grow and figure out where they fit in life.”

Cartwright was a prominent voice on the Knight Commission for more than 20 years. During that time, she served for several years as co-chair with Arne Duncan, who was secretary of education during the Obama administration.

The Knight Commission has no decision-making authority, but its research and recommendations often guide National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) policy. Under Cartwright’s leadership, the commission made bold recommendations that resulted in major transformation in college sports for the benefit of college athletes. It encouraged colleges to devote a greater portion of their athletics department budgets to scholarships and financial aid and put more focus on health and safety precautions.

Cartwright also contributed to the commission’s recommendation that institutions be rewarded for their teams’ academic and graduation success through a change in the distribution of a portion of revenue from the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament, known as March Madness. She also helped frame the commission’s recommendations for principles to guide new rules on the use of college athletes’ names, images and likenesses.

This December, in one of Cartwright’s last projects with the commission, the group recommended that the NCAA change the Division I model to spin off the top-tier football programs—the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS)—from the rest of the association. The FBS’s lucrative tournaments are already governed separately.

In an unusually direct statement explaining its recommendation, the commission asserted that “separating the sport of FBS football from the NCAA would end Division I’s financially dysfunctional system of governance, in which the NCAA absorbs all national expenses for FBS football, without receiving any financial benefits from the sport or its College Football Playoff.”

According to the statement, those expenses include enforcement, catastrophic insurance, legal services, health and safety administration, and research. Because of this growing financial burden, the commission felt an urgency to address the situation.

“We decided to take a more assertive approach than you’ve seen in past reports,” says Cartwright, noting that the work of the commission dates back to the early 1990s, when the group was first formed as a project of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. “In the past we were more willing to keep ‘working through the system.’ But now, the [commission’s] tone is that the stakes are too high. We need to be more assertive about getting people on board and having a more explicit path forward.”

The Knight Commission recommended that this path forward include the creation of a new governing entity—the proposed National College Football Association—that would be funded by College Football Playoff revenues and would manage all issues related to the FBS.

In addition to the Knight Commission, Cartwright has held leadership positions in higher education’s most renowned organizations, chairing the board of directors of the American Association for Higher Education and serving on the boards of the American Council on Education, the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, and the American Association of Colleges and Universities. She also has been a leading member of numerous regional and statewide cultural, civic and economic development organizations, including the boards of NPR, KeyCorp, PolyOne Corp. and FirstEnergy Corp.

Highly regarded throughout the world of higher education, Cartwright holds a special place of honor at Kent State. When she left in 2006, the university renamed its auditorium building Carol A. Cartwright Hall.

For Cartwright, the appreciation is mutual. In 2017, she and her family made a $1 million estate gift to establish the Cartwright Family Fund for Opportunities in the Arts, an endowment aimed at giving students from underrepresented populations the chance to participate in the arts. The Cartwrights also make an annual gift to the fund to ensure that the scholarship can benefit students right away. To mark her retirement, the Knight Foundation made a $25,000 gift to the fund in her honor.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made these post–Knight Commission days look more like actual retirement than Cartwright ever intended. But she’s enjoying the novelty of unscheduled time. She says she has completed a few needlepoint projects, and she particularly values her daily 2-mile walks with her husband.

However, that doesn’t mean retirement is in Cartwright’s long-term plans. She continues to serve as senior fellow and consultant for the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges and sits on the board of directors for the Collegiate Women Sports Awards and co-chairs the NCAA Committee on Infractions.

“I have been looking in the local Napa area for somewhere to volunteer. Before the pandemic hit, I was exploring something in literacy,” she says. “As you can guess, I’m just not well wired for retirement.”

Learn more about the Cartwright Family Fund for Opportunities in the Arts.

Learn more about estate and planned gifts.

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