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BY RUBY ROSENTHAL M.F.A. ’24

Two Hollins alumnae have devoted their professional lives to higher education, one in advancement and the other in academic administration, both because of beliefs borne from their Hollins experiences.

Photo: Left to right, Michelle DeRussy Dodenhoff ’85 and Christa Davis Acampora ’90

When Michelle DeRussy Dodenhoff ’85 was a senior at Hollins, the only thing she knew she wanted to do after graduation was move to New York. “I was senior class president. We were at convocation, and Hollins had just hired a new vice president for institutional advancement (Executive Director of Development and College Relations Nena Whittemore),” she said. “We were talking, and she asked, ‘Why don’t you come intern in the development office?’ So I did.” And through her internship, Dodenhoff was sent to a CASE (Council for the Advancement and Support of Education) conference as a student delegate. “And I thought, ‘Okay, this is really fun,’” Dodenhoff remembers.

“So I graduated, I went to New York, and within three weeks, I had a fundraising job,” she said. “And I’ve been doing it ever since. But without that initial conversation with the VPIA at convocation, if she hadn’t given me that opportunity to learn about a field that I had no idea existed, I would be on a different path. I attribute 100% of my career to Hollins.”

Christa Davis Acampora ’90 also forged her path to a career in higher education a bit unconventionally. “I wasn’t destined to be an academic. I’m the first in my family to even attend, much less graduate from, college,” she said. “I loved learning as a young person and as a student, so I probably always imagined that I might go to college, but I had no sense of what college life was like.”

While at Hollins, Acampora was a Hollins Scholar, which included an advisory program with a faculty mentor. She recalls this as being “tremendously formative” for her, especially her relationship with her advisor, the late English Professor John Cunningham, who worked at Hollins from 1969 to 2003. “John spent a great deal of time asking me a lot of questions that at first seemed irrelevant, but he really took a lot of time to understand me as a person,” Acampora said. “He wanted to know what I found interesting and what types of academic activities I enjoyed. He really got to know me as a person. And he made recommendations for me—I wouldn’t say that it was focused on career or professional goals—it was more questions about the kinds of things I like to think about and trying to assess those.”

“I was introduced to a whole new way of thinking, a whole new way of being a student and engaging with my colleagues and professors. It taught me a lot about how to be a learner, how to be a thinker, and it changed my life.”

Through Cunningham, Acampora was able to discover her love of philosophy, majoring in it at Hollins and later getting a Ph.D. from Emory University. “I was introduced to a whole new way of thinking, a whole new way of being a student and engaging with my colleagues and professors,” she said. “It taught me a lot about how to be a learner, how to be a thinker, and it changed my life.”

Today, both alumnae are leaders in higher education. Dodenhoff is the University of South Carolina’s vice president for development and Acampora is the dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Virginia.

Dodenhoff’s first job after graduation ended up being the alumni coordinator of the annual fund at Marymount Manhattan College. Later, she went back to her hometown, New Orleans, and did alumni work at Tulane for 11 years. Then she was recruited and hired by USC and helped organize the launch of Carolina’s Promise in 2011, the university’s first billion-dollar campaign.

Dodenhoff instantly lights up when she talks about her job.

“Of course, working in health [for example] is incredibly noble, changing and saving lives every day. But you know, we’re doing the same thing in higher ed, but in a different way,” Dodenhoff said. “I think there’s not a week that goes by that I don’t cry at something. Just the stories that the students [tell me], they’re so energizing. I tell my team, ‘If you’re having a bad day, go walk in a classroom building, just walk the halls, just go sit outside in the hallway and listen to a class, just remind yourself why you’re here.’ I love it.”

To motivate her team, Dodenhoff tells them she wants them to feel valued; she wants them to come to work and leave every day knowing that they’re doing something bigger than themselves; and she wants them to have fun. “This is a donor-centered program. Every decision we make and every act we perform is done with our students’ and faculty’s best interests at heart, because that’s why we’re here. It’s not about the money, it’s about the impact. And so rarely do we talk money, or even say “fundraising.” It’s about matching individuals’ passions to priorities and needs, finding ways to be creative and innovative for the benefit of our students and faculty.”

Acampora is similarly passionate. She worked at Emory University as a deputy provost and professor of philosophy. Prior to Emory, she taught at Hunter College and the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. Acampora was also Hunter’s associate provost for faculty affairs and research, as well as the editor of The Journal of Nietzsche Studies. Through her many experiences at universities around the country, she believes that a liberal arts education matters more today than ever before, and she learned that from Hollins.

“Hollins taught me quite a lot about how to ask big and important questions. The kinds of questions that we’re confronting when we look at the inevitability of global climate change, the explosion of data, the ability to draw on and make important policies and conclusions, using artificial intelligence, the emergence of synthetic biology that will essentially allow us to create new forms of life—these are challenges that we’re facing as human beings that are of scale and that were unfathomable, even a generation ago,” Acampora said. “We need the arts and sciences to tackle the complexity, and the scale of challenges that we face today.”

Acampora knows that with modern technology, higher education is changing rapidly before our eyes, but that our academic institutions are more enduring than we sometimes give them credit for. Even with more traditional institutions closing, she notes that new ways to learn and connect have emerged that enable people to be a students across a lifespan.

“We’re also seeing public skepticism about the value of higher education. Some of this is healthy. Some of it is also connected with some other social and political challenges that we’re facing, where higher education kind of gets caught up in those disputes and disagreements,” Acampora said. “But I also think there’s no better place than our colleges and universities to serve as an example of how you can disagree with each other fiercely and intensely yet nevertheless pursue common goals and common ends, which is what we need to do together in a democracy. So higher education generally needs to demonstrate and defend its value. It should be held accountable by the public. I also think it’s the most likely source for preserving our democratic institutions.”

Get involved. Plain and simple. If I had not done that … I would never have had the conversation that started me on my professional course. You never know when those kinds of unexpected opportunities will land if you’re not out there, if you’re not engaged.”

Both Dodenhoff and Acampora cite their Hollins experiences as impactful in their current careers. Dodenhoff recommends active engagement in college. “Get involved. Plain and simple. If I had not done that, [if I was not] the senior class president, I would never have had the conversation that started me on my professional course,” she said. “You never know when those kinds of unexpected opportunities will land if you’re not out there, if you’re not engaged.” Dodenhoff reflects that she was not the best student, but the skills she learned by being a student leader, by being active and having a lot of interaction with administration taught her skills that she carried through her entire career.

Acampora thinks about inclusive excellence when she reflects on her Hollins experience. As a dean at UVA, she says she asks herself and her colleagues, “What does it really mean to belong here? One of the things that I continue to draw on as an academic leader is thinking about what inclusive excellence looks like in the contemporary world, what achieving it would demand of us,” she said. “And something that was tremendously powerful for me at Hollins, and is deeply important to me now, is how is the vision of inclusive excellence really stretched in a maximal way? When we think about what it means to belong, to actually contribute to the presence and meaning of a place, that was part of my Hollins experience—all of the special ways in which an intentional community, like the one at Hollins, can create senses of belonging and can be reimagined to fit our current circumstances.”

Ruby Rosenthal is a current student in the creative writing M.F.A. program, currently on course to graduate May 2024.