Dr. Virginia Roach, dean of Fordham University’s Graduate School of Education, started her career with a job as a dishwasher in an on-campus daycare center. There, as an aspiring chemical engineer, she was asked to tutor a child with learning difficulties and came to the realization that “this is for me.”
Roach discovered an internal “abiding commitment to supporting people in all walks of life in developing themselves to their full capacity,” she said, calling it a thread throughout her career.
Starting off as a special education teacher, she would later find herself in education leadership roles seldom held by women. She became the first female chair of the education leadership department at George Washington University and served as dean of the Graduate School of Education at Bank Street College. In 2015, she took her current position at Fordham, again the first woman in the position.
“One of the things I’m proud to say is I have always left a job on the top,” she said.
As she moved up in the higher education world, she met a lot of women like herself who were the first in their roles. She started to question why there weren’t more female leaders in positions of power in higher education, especially women of color.
As an academic, she tackled the issue with research, conducting a systematic survey on women’s leadership in education in the U.S. and abroad.
Roach used questions that came up in her own life to guide her study: “What does it mean when you’re the first? How do these women lead [in a way] that is different? How do they conceptualize their own leadership? What has brought them to the higher levels of leadership, and how do they persevere?”
