Five Women Who Have Stepped Down From High-Level Posts in the Academic World

Anne Prisco has stepped down as president of Felician University in New Jersey. Family reasons were the explanation for the president’s departure. Dr. Prisco was named president of the university in 2012. Earlier, she was vice president for enrollment management at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. She held that position from 2006 to 2012. Previously, she was vice provost at Hunter College, a campus of the City University of New York. Dr. Prisco is a summa cum laude graduate of the University of Arizona. She holds an MBA from Fordham University in New York and a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from Columbia University.

Mary Larson Diaz, vice president for university relations at the University of Texas at San Antonio has retired. Larson Diaz joined UTSA in 2018 as chief of staff to the university’s president and held that role for two years before being named the university’s inaugural vice president for university relations in February 2020. Earlier in her career, she was associate vice president for external relations and chief communications officer at Texas Tech University from 2009 to 2012. Larson Diaz is a graduate of Hastings College in Nebraska and holds a master’s degree from Baker University in Baldwin City, Kansas.

Holly Hanson, professor of history at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, has stepped down after more than a quarter century on the college’s faculty. She will become director of the research department at the Baha’i World Centre in Haifa, Israel. Professor Hanson is the author of Landed Obligation: The Practice of Power in Buganda (Heinemann, 2003). Dr. Hanson is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from the University of Florida.

After a career that spanned over a half-century, Frances N. Coleman, dean of libraries at Mississippi State University, is retiring from the university. Coleman joined the Mississippi State University faculty in 1969. She earned a bachelor’s degree in education at Mississippi State and a master of library science degree from George Peabody College for Teachers at Vanderbilt University.

Jane Hegland, associate dean of the College of Education and Human Sciences and head of the department of apparel merchandising and interior design at South Dakota State University, is retiring after 19 years on the faculty. Dr. Hegland is a graduate of St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, where she double majored in psychology and design. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in apparel and textiles from the University of Minnesota.