In the 1980s, when I enrolled at Cal State University Fullerton, the institution was described (often dismissively) as a “commuter school.” But as a first-gen undergraduate and a recruited student-athlete on the women’s basketball team, CSUF was my home away from home. 
Dr. Robin Holmes-Sullivan is the first woman and person of color to serve as president of Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore.
Decades later, as president of Lewis & Clark, a liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon, I draw every day on the lessons about leadership I learned from the slowest runner who spent those same years circling CSUF’s track: Jewel Plummer Cobb. These lessons, taught by one Black woman to another, are especially relevant given the increasing hostility to programs that improve educational opportunities and strengthen professional pathways for women and for underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities.
Like many undergraduates, during my years at CSUF I experienced the thrill and uncertainty of independence, and I navigated the highs and lows of new friendships. Alongside other students, I deepened my love of learning and ultimately found my calling in psychology. And as an athlete, I learned how to win and (just as importantly) how to lose with grace. I discovered how to refine a competitive spirit into a competitive advantage.
Team sports provide important ways for young people to learn leadership skills. I had the extraordinary privilege of being named a team captain as a first-year student. Running point on a team full of veterans in what was then the most competitive conference in the country was both exhilarating and humbling. If I could break the press against USC, with their back-to-back national championships, I figured the sky was the limit.
Basketball taught me that leadership isn’t about age or title. It's about accountability, preparation, and belief. It taught me how to hold myself steady in high-pressure moments. Those lessons have never left me. But one of the people who most shaped me as a leader never knew the impact she had on me.
At least once a week during my college years, I would make my way to the track to watch President Jewel Plummer Cobb during her daily run. President Cobb was a trailblazer in many ways. Appointed as CSUF’s third president in 1981, she was the first Black woman to lead a college anywhere west of the Mississippi River. Before arriving at Fullerton, she spent decades making an impact from which people across this country and the world still benefit today. Trained as a biologist, Dr. Cobb’s groundbreaking research on melanin, skin cells, and cancer remains central to the way melanoma, childhood leukemia, and many other cancers and autoimmune disorders are treated today.
Even as her research saved lives, her leadership transformed lives, as she became dean first at Connecticut College and then at Rutgers University. In these positions, she created programs to recruit and support people from underrepresented groups into science and mathematics, ensuring other women and members of minority groups could have the same educational opportunities and professional impact she had. As president of CSUF, she raised money for the construction of buildings dedicated to science and technology, and for the school’s first dormitory. Decades earlier, she had transferred out of University of Michigan, where she began her own undergraduate studies, because the campus housing was not open to her as a Black student. By giving every CSUF student a place to call home, she ensured we would thrive socially as well as intellectually.
But as much of a professional trailblazer as President Cobb was, she wasn’t the fastest one on the track. Truth be told, she might have been the slowest person making those laps. Watching her, I sometimes wondered, is she even running or just walking? But speed wasn’t the point. What mattered was that she was moving forward. Steadily. Persistently. Without apology.
Over the course of my own career as a clinical psychologist and academic leader, I have come to understand the joy, the audacity, and yes, the burden of being the first. In 2022, I became the first Black person and the first woman to serve as president of Lewis & Clark College in its 155-year history. More than forty years had passed since Jewel Cobb broke the same barrier at Fullerton. Yet today, even as we are experiencing attacks on the kind of programs she pioneered to ensure equitable access to education and careers for women and minorities, there are still many places where the glass ceiling remains firmly intact. But still I look forward to, and am working for, the day when being a Black woman president is no longer remarkable, because academic and professional excellence is unwaveringly recognized across race, gender, and sexuality.
From President Cobb, I learned that sometimes the key to success simply lies in having the discipline to keep going. From basketball, I learned something similar. My fellow Titans and I played in the toughest conference in the country. We didn’t often win, but I can assure you, no one enjoyed playing us. We were relentless. Tenacious on defense. We played as a team. What we lacked in star power, we made up for in grit.
Those years taught me that you may not always have the flashiest resources, the biggest crowd, or the most natural talent. But if you bring integrity, preparation, and determination, you can compete anywhere.
In many ways, the underdog mentality that we Titans carried on the basketball court, and perhaps even as an institution, taught me to lean into doubt rather than shrink from it. To use it as fuel. To exceed expectations not for applause, but for purpose. And it taught me that progress—whether on a track, on a court, or in a career—is about steady forward motion.
Dr. Robin H. Holmes-Sullivan is president of Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon and a practicing clinical psychologist. She recently received CSU Fullerton's 2026 Vision & Visionaries distinguished alumni award.
