Anne Ponder, sixth Chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Asheville.

by Tommy Hays

Whether she’s been aware of it or not, Anne Ponder has spent most of her life working her way back home.

She left Asheville in 1967 bound for UNC-Chapel Hill, where she received an undergraduate degree in English, followed by a master’s and then a doctorate. She went on to become an English professor at Elon University in 1977, professor and associate academic dean at Guilford College in 1986, professor and academic dean at Kenyon College in Ohio in 1989, and in 1996 president of Colby-Sawyer College in New Hampshire. From professor to administrator, from mid-state to Midwest to New England, Ponder has traveled a long and distinguished professional odyssey.



Now
she’s home. And on September 15th, thirty-nine years after she left for
Chapel Hill, Ponder will be officially installed as the sixth
Chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Asheville. She has
been working at UNCA since October of last year, but the installation
ceremony will underscore what a true homecoming this is. For one thing,
her mother, Eleanor Ponder, a legendary high school English teacher in
Buncombe County, will hold the Bible upon which her daughter takes the
oath of office.


“The facilities
manager at UNC-Asheville,” says Anne Ponder, “had my mother in high
school. He said, ‘Any oath taken in front of Eleanor Ponder will
stick.’” 



Ponder’s father
Herschel was a World War II fighter pilot who went to work for Southern
Railway and then retired into active volunteer work. She describes her
family as a family of teachers “where the importance of education was
as available as air.” She attended T.C. Roberson, where her mother
taught. She participated in drama, played basketball, danced on the
square dance team, and edited the yearbook. Her two sisters are both
involved with youth – Schell Alexander lives in Madison County and
directs ABYSA (Asheville-Buncombe Youth Soccer Association), and Carol
Ponder is an arts educator and singer who lives in Nashville.



Fifty-six years
old, Anne Ponder is tall, five-feet eleven inches, though shorter than
her two younger sisters. When she walks into her office at UNCA, she
has a presence about her, an air of authority mixed with a thoughtful
attentiveness. She speaks with a charming and earnest formality that
makes one feel listened to and respected. Once in her presence, it’s
easy to understand why the school and the greater community of Western
North Carolina are so charged to have this native daughter take the
helm of one its most prized universities.



Ponder thrived
in Chapel Hill, first as an undergraduate student and then a graduate
student. She found herself thrown into the middle of the anti-war
movement. “There was an intellectual fervor on campus that wasn’t in
Asheville yet,” she says. “A very heady environment for a sweet kid
from Buncombe County.”



Perhaps the most
important thing that happened to her in Chapel Hill was meeting
Christopher Brookhouse, an English professor at UNC, whom she married
in 1973. Brookhouse, a publisher as well as author of two books of
poetry and several works of fiction, eventually took early retirement
from UNC and followed Ponder to her job at Kenyon College. This past
March, the couple celebrated their thirty-third anniversary, which they
decided to call their Gravel Anniversary: they gave themselves gravel
as a mutual anniversary present for the driveway of the new weekend
house they built in Madison County.



When Ponder
speaks of her husband it is with warmth and profound respect. She says
Brookhouse was completely supportive when the vacancy at UNC-Asheville
came open. “He said, ‘This job is made for you.’ I give him a great
deal of credit. If he wasn’t willing to move here, I couldn’t have
undertaken it.” She says that he was similarly supportive when she was
tapped to be president of Colby-Sawyer College. “He knew he would be
the spouse of a university president. His personal generosity has
allowed me to do this.”



But she says
that her work has allowed Brookhouse “a parallel freedom. He can teach
less and write more,” she says. “[He’s] always working on a book. He
goes to his desk every day just like I come to school every day.”



Brookhouse
speaks of his wife in the same warm, respectful tones. “No matter how
long her hours, she has always been supportive and enthusiastic and
encouraging about my work. I am awed by her accomplishments and
abilities. From enrollment management, to building codes, to federal
mandates, to how much weight a Commencement tent can bear, Anne knows
what has been, what is, and what needs to be.”



Ponder believes
in place and in the creativity that arises from thoroughly knowing a
place. She couldn’t be happier or more innervated by the challenges of
her new position and the move back to her hometown. She describes her
new role as “a blessing, but a heavy blessing.” She says it’s her
responsibility to focus on the present and the future of UNC-Asheville,
yet all the time she finds herself experiencing the Asheville she grew
up in.



She can’t go to
the church of her childhood, All Souls Episcopal, without “remembering
exactly where my grandparents stood in the choir loft.” At a meeting in
Asheville City Hall, she couldn’t help thinking back to her first
summer job as a clerk for the sanitation department housed on the
second floor. Until the new chancellor’s home is built on campus, she
and her husband are living in a condominium in the second floor of the
Grove Arcade Building downtown, where her mother once worked for the
U.S. Climatic Center.  



Since she’s been
back in Asheville she has often felt as if she lives in parallel
worlds. “The world of the present and the world of all these images of
the past.” She says it makes her uniquely qualified to lead, that she
knows where the university and Asheville need to go, in part because
she knows so well where they have been.



Ponder’s family
isn’t surprised by her success. Carol remembers Anne as a leader even
as a child. “There were several families who had kids in the
neighborhood, and when Anne spoke, all kids listened – not because she
was the oldest, but because she took responsibility for her world and
had very definite ideas about what was right or wrong, good or bad.”



She also recalls
that when she was about ten years old her “beloved corgi had gotten
himself stuck in the drainpipe. He had probably chased something into
one end,” Carol says, “and when he tried to exit, had wedged himself
into the other end of the pipe, which had been partially crushed and
filled with dirt and gravel. I found him there, frantically struggling
to get out, and beginning to go into shock. I was terrified.



“I don’t
remember how 14-year-old Anne got there, but I remember that she took
in the situation, saw how far gone the dog was, then began digging
under and above the dog to work enough dirt loose and get enough weight
off the top of the drainpipe so we could lift it to let him wriggle
free. I remember she had begun taking care of her beautiful hands,
shaping and polishing the nails. Another teenager might have hesitated
before wrecking her manicure, but Anne dug right in.”



A version of
this article was previously published in Our State magazine, September
2006, by Tommy Hays. Hays teaches creative writing at UNC-Asheville.
His most recent novel is The Pleasure Was Mine.”