Fallen tree: Former dean dies
Joy Pavelski
Issue date: 9/4/08 Section: News
CarolAnn Barker stood before Central Hall and cried when workers cut down towering trees to build Delp Hall. They rooted campus with beauty and stability, she said.
After Barker's death this summer at age 68, intimate friend and English Lecturer Melinda vonSydow cannot help but remember Barker each morning when walking into her Delp office. Barker, like those trees, is gone.
"She was the trunk of the tree," vonSydow said. "It's hard to articulate. She was a presence, a bulwark in time of need. Things went down on campus and she was always calm, always knew how to run interference for the administration and talk to worried parents. She knew how to let students know they were valuable."
Barker served as Hillsdale College's dean of women for 26 years and as vice president of student affairs for 19 years. She died June 8 of an aneurism from the giant-cell arteritis that troubled her since 1999.
Though health problems pained her, particularly in her last few years, Barker kept her cheery hardworking habit, said Diane Watkins, Barker's longest-running executive secretary of 10 years.
"I don't know if she ever sat still," Watkins said.
Barker's specialty as dean was personal attention to students, even before they arrived on campus, said current Dean of Women Diane Philipp. She took the green freshman housing forms home and spread them out, matching roommates by background and personality but without looking at their pictures. She insisted on meeting every entering female student in the first semester, sometimes seeing as many as 15 students per day in her office.
"She knew every student," vonSydow said. "Many a night she was on the phone with a student until 2 a.m. She knew a student needed help before the student knew she needed help."
Barker grew up the eldest of five children on the family farm in Carey, Ohio, where her 95-year-old father still lives. She entered Hillsdale College in 1958, graduating with an English major and music minor. There she met her husband, Jack. She became dean of women at Hillsdale College in 1980 after teaching English at Hillsdale High School and working for a New York magazine.
Barker would cook days before large family gatherings at the farm, knitted caps and sweaters for alumni babies, owned more pairs of shoes than her husband could count and loved to visit her only daughter, Shawn-Laree, in Chicago for a weekend of shopping and theater.
"For me it still seems like she's going to pop in," said current Dean of Women Diane Philipp. Though now impossible for Barker, she still shows in the thousands of friends and students she grounded and watered.
After Barker's death this summer at age 68, intimate friend and English Lecturer Melinda vonSydow cannot help but remember Barker each morning when walking into her Delp office. Barker, like those trees, is gone.
"She was the trunk of the tree," vonSydow said. "It's hard to articulate. She was a presence, a bulwark in time of need. Things went down on campus and she was always calm, always knew how to run interference for the administration and talk to worried parents. She knew how to let students know they were valuable."
Barker served as Hillsdale College's dean of women for 26 years and as vice president of student affairs for 19 years. She died June 8 of an aneurism from the giant-cell arteritis that troubled her since 1999.
Though health problems pained her, particularly in her last few years, Barker kept her cheery hardworking habit, said Diane Watkins, Barker's longest-running executive secretary of 10 years.
"I don't know if she ever sat still," Watkins said.
Barker's specialty as dean was personal attention to students, even before they arrived on campus, said current Dean of Women Diane Philipp. She took the green freshman housing forms home and spread them out, matching roommates by background and personality but without looking at their pictures. She insisted on meeting every entering female student in the first semester, sometimes seeing as many as 15 students per day in her office.
"She knew every student," vonSydow said. "Many a night she was on the phone with a student until 2 a.m. She knew a student needed help before the student knew she needed help."
Barker grew up the eldest of five children on the family farm in Carey, Ohio, where her 95-year-old father still lives. She entered Hillsdale College in 1958, graduating with an English major and music minor. There she met her husband, Jack. She became dean of women at Hillsdale College in 1980 after teaching English at Hillsdale High School and working for a New York magazine.
Barker would cook days before large family gatherings at the farm, knitted caps and sweaters for alumni babies, owned more pairs of shoes than her husband could count and loved to visit her only daughter, Shawn-Laree, in Chicago for a weekend of shopping and theater.
"For me it still seems like she's going to pop in," said current Dean of Women Diane Philipp. Though now impossible for Barker, she still shows in the thousands of friends and students she grounded and watered.
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