by Margaret Williams
photo by Matt Rose

You might never guess that Anne Ponder, a tall, poised woman who seems ageless (but is actually 58), wrote her dissertation on film adaptations of detective fiction. The Asheville native spent hours lost in the classics of the genre, such as Chandler’s The Maltese Falcon and Hammett’s The Big Sleep. These days, she hasn’t been to a movie for at least a year. “I’m challenged in the fun department,” Ponder jokes. “Being chancellor…can take the entirety of one’s energy.”

Around 23 percent of university presidents were female in 2006, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. In the 200-year history of the North Carolina public university system, Ponder is just the seventh female chancellor in the state and the second to take the helm at UNC-Asheville (former UNCA Chancellor Patsy Reed was the fourth in the state). Known for her dedication to liberal arts programs and her ability to fundraise and find other valuable resources, Ponder, previously the president of Colby-Sawyer College in New Hampshire, took office in the fall of 2005. Criticized by some for staff changes in her first year, she has been working on UNC-Asheville’s long-range plans and its place in the community at large.

Why are there so few women chancellors?
There are more than there used to be. Women of the second half of the 20th century were often still “the first woman this” or “the only woman that,” and I certainly had some pioneering opportunities myself, as the first woman ever in the history of Kenyon College [in Gambier, Ohio] to be vice president.

What obstacles have you faced on the way?
I am, and I always have been, a really fortunate woman. When it was my time to go to college, UNC-Chapel Hill admitted women for the first time into the freshman class in 1967. Think about it as the privilege that I enjoyed, that women just a few years older than I did not. One of the most precious themes for me is that I had parents who believed I could do anything, and there were no limits. Indeed, they had very high expectations.

Your family has been in Buncombe County since the 1780s. Why do you think folks call Asheville “the Paris of the South”?
I would draw three parallels. Paris has been, for multiple centuries, an intersection of the arts, with the small family-owned shops and the tradition of arts and museums and the like. There is, in Paris and in Asheville, a literary and arts culture. Writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald went to that alternative universe in early 20th-century Paris when they could have just come to Asheville!
Asheville also has multiple distinctive neighborhoods, like Paris. Whether it is the “San Francisco of the South” or the “Paris of the South,” whether it is “The Bliss Capital” of the world, this is someplace special.

Is that part of what brought you back home?
I never thought this role would come open at a time that would work for me. But former Chancellor Jim Mullen decided to go serve a small Catholic college near his home. My husband was entirely supportive and I was very gratified that many of the things that I do best are precisely the things that UNC-Asheville needs done.

For example?
It needed…investing in people. It needed planning and it needed someone who had the liberal arts in her bones…so that no translation was required! It needed someone who could help bring resources. I had been successful in raising money at private universities.

I also wanted to be of broader public service at this stage in my life. Last fall, I asked the principal at Roberson High if I could come to the first opening faculty meeting of the year and thank…this year’s teachers for what they do for all the people who have gone there—and I took my mother with me. No other UNCA chancellor has ever been someone for whom that action would have made any sense. But it was perfect for me, and it felt just right.

Given your experience as as a frequent faculty member for the Harvard Institutes for Higher Education, we were curious to know your take on the Larry Summers controversy there a couple years ago. Summers, the former Harvard president, got into hot water over comments about women’s possible lack of an “innate ability” to excel in science.
Larry Summers is an economist and he forgot that he was the president of Harvard. It is perfectly appropriate for any academic to raise an academic question or academic inquiry. But a president of Harvard or a chancellor at UNC-Asheville speaks, always in part, for the university we serve.

After he stepped down, Harvard appointed a woman, Drew Faust.
Don’t you love it that a Civil War historian who is a woman is president of Harvard University? She is just a remarkable presence. She is a remarkable intellect. She will do well.

How have your studies in English literature helped you in your career?
One is, I write all my own stuff. So I have the opportunity to give the university a voice that tells its character, that tells its story, that tells its identity. The other is a rich understanding of narrative helps me interpret and analyze and consequently serve the unfolding narrative of the university. It is a very interesting story, and I am trained to be endlessly curious both about the unfolding narrative of our university community and the individual characters and story within it.

What is the biggest challenge UNCA faces now?
Resources. We are a small, under-funded campus and no matter how effective we are with state funding, we won’t be able to compete with the best public and private universities without private support. But we don’t act poor. We have remained affordable and students who graduate from UNC-Asheville have much less debt than others. But the state legislators are looking at significantly less funding than this time a year ago. The economy will have a direct impact on UNC-Asheville.

If you had to associate UNC-Asheville with a book or novel or other classic work of literature, what would you pick?
I would choose a bildungsroman novel (concerning the development of a youthful protagonist)—probably Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. UNC-Asheville is of Asheville, in Asheville, for Asheville, in its greatest reach. There is something exuberant and passionate and—some say about Wolfe—purple about that prose. The book is about the formation of intellectual and academic identity, told by a native son. Wolfe is out of fashion at the moment, but UNC-Asheville is not.

So what do you read these days?
My father died in December. My mother’s health has been declining. For the last several weeks, what I have been reading is, you know, Shakespeare and Jane Austen. In times of turbulence, I go and visit touchstones of characters and places that I find reassuring. I learn something new every time.