Sporting a red Rutgers pin, Phoebe A. Haddon exudes an aura of staunch leadership and certainty about her institution’s transformational role in the lives of students. She is the first African-American woman to lead the Camden campus of the state university.
Under her leadership, students, faculty and staff are completing more than 432,000 hours of community service in the surrounding Camden area. Many first-generation and low-income students are conducting extensive research with faculty and going abroad for the first time, and many students are paying less for a world-renowned education.
Rutgers University President Robert Barchi describes Haddon as a “brilliant scholar and gifted administrator,” and from 2012 to 2015, she was named as one of the “25 Most Influential People in Legal Education” by the National Jurist.
Before assuming her role as chancellor in July 2014, Haddon served as dean of the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. During her tenure, the institution benefitted from new academic resources, a climate of intellectual vigor and a $30 million gift.
Haddon was also a distinguished faculty member and scholar of constitutional and tort law at the Temple University Beasley School of Law for more than 25 years. Here, she met another female faculty member who encouraged her to attend HERS, a women’s leadership institute that trains women to become leaders in higher education.
“That was a pathway that really was created by my being among other people who were thinking about higher education administration, and really saying, ‘Well, I think I’d like to be dean,’ and then, ‘I think I’d like to be the president,’” Haddon says.
She was also inspired by her maternal aunt, whose testimony as a school board chair was used in the Keyes v. Denver Public Schools Supreme Court decision for desegregation in Denver. “She was an educator,” Haddon shares about her aunt. “She was not a lawyer. But she used the law in a way that was reflective of what I aspired to do.”
