Three Women Who Have Announced Their Retirements From High-Level Posts in the Academic World

Carol Jean Vale, president of Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia, announced that she will retire in June 2022. At that time, she will have served as president of the college for 30 years. She is a member of the college’s founding order, the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Philadelphia. Chestnut Hill College was a women’s college when President Vale first took office. It went co-educational in 2003 and has since seen its enrollment double.

President Vale is a graduate of Chestnut Hill College, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in English. She earned a master’s degree in theology and a Ph.D. in historical theology from Fordham University in New York.

Trudy Turner, secretary of the university and a distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, has announced she will retire from the university after more than four decades of service. Dr. Turner came to the university in 1977. She served as chair of the department of anthropology from 1996 to 2000. Dr. Turner has been secretary of the university since 2008.

In 2019, Dr. Turner became editor of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. She is a graduate of Northwestern University and earned a Ph.D. at New York University.

Paula Volent, senior vice president and chief investment officer at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, will retire at the end of the current academic year. In her 21 years of service as chief investment officer, Volent has grown the college’s endowment from $465 million to $1.8 billion.

Volent is a graduate of the University of New Hampshire. She holds an M.B.A. from the Yale School of Management and a master’s degree from the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University.