In northwest Indiana, where Joan Leitzel grew up, they have a saying: "Leave the woodpile higher than you found it."

"I think," says Leitzel, who will retire at the end of June after six years as president of the University of New Hampshire, "I can be confident that I have."

This is not a woman given to overstatement. By almost any measure, UNH is better and stronger than it was when she arrived. Leitzel has initiated changes to strengthen the university's financial condition, improve the physical plant, increase private support, enhance academic programs and expand research opportunities. She has also consolidated the university's Manchester programs on a new campus in the city's historic mill yard, expanded graduate programs in Manchester and Durham and promoted a more diverse student body. (See sidebar, page 27.)

Steve Taylor '62, New Hampshire's commissioner of agriculture and a university trustee, has seen a lot of UNH presidents come and go. Ask Taylor where Leitzel ranks among them, and he does not hesitate. "In terms of impact and achievement, number one," he says, "easy."

John Seavey, a professor of health management and policy and former chair of the faculty senate, agrees. "She's really turned this into a great place to be," he says. "Her focus has been on UNH and how to improve it. ... She's kept academic quality as her highest priority, focusing on faculty and academics and turning UNH into more of a research institution. ... I think one of the highest compliments that can be paid to her is that there is a general sense from all parts of UNH and the board of trustees that we would have been better off if she could have stayed a few more years."

"I think she's the most effective president that I've seen here," says Jim Varn, who graduated from UNH in 1976 and is now assistant to the provost. "She has a lot of integrity, and she stays positive. I think she figures out the most important things that need to be done and sticks with them. She uses a combination of charm and firmness to get where the institution needs to go--and she does all of that without focusing on herself."

Leitzel is the first to diffuse credit for the positive changes that have occurred at UNH during her tenure. "It's hard for me to think of this as my work of art," she says. When she speaks of achievements, she does so in the first person plural--"we," rarely "I." She gives a lot of credit to her administrative team, including Candace Corvey, vice president for finance and administration; David Hiley, provost and vice president for academic affairs; Don Sundberg, vice president for research and public service; Leila Moore, vice president for student affairs; and Young Dawkins, president of the UNH Foundation. They, along with a solid and long-standing staff, were critical to the university's recent successes, she observes.

Some might use the word "schoolmarm" to describe Leitzel, and they would not be too far off. She is "of retirement age," but seems entirely of a different era, from sometime long ago. Her mother, who died in childbirth when Leitzel was 4, had been a teacher of mathematics and Latin. Her father was a school superintendent, while her stepmother was superintendent of a county hospital before her marriage. Leitzel is a woman of precision--in everything from diction to posture to policy. When she says the word "autumn," you can hear every letter.

Leitzel is a mathematician, and sees the world like one. She can focus intently on one matter and then instantly switch focus, with no less intensity, to another. She can do this five hundred times a day, so keep up. She is not given to fiery oratory. When something pleases her dearly, she crinkles about the eyes.

Leitzel understands many things, and what she does not understand, she goes about learning--deliberately, mathematically. Take hockey. When she came to Durham, Leitzel couldn't tell offsides from icing. She knew that this would simply not do. So she enlisted former UNH hockey coach Charlie Holt to sit with her in the president's box at every hockey game. He drew charts and formations and explained the rules. She listened and read books about hockey and watched hockey videos, then listened some more until she understood. It is a rare game--men's or women's--that finds her absent from the box at the Whittemore Center.

One thing about the UNH hockey operation really caught her fancy: the Zamboni. She wanted to ride on the Zamboni. During the Wildcats' last home game of the season at the Whittemore Center, Leitzel was asked to come onto the ice between periods--ostensibly to give an award to a student. Out came the Zamboni. The driver wore a jacket and tie. Captain Darren Haydar '02 presented a "Leitzel #1" hockey jersey to the president. She pulled the jersey over her blouse and skirt and was hoisted atop the Zamboni for a spin around the ice. Haydar skated alongside, lest the president topple. "It was a delightful and wonderful gesture on their part, and I think I may be the first university president to have ridden on the Zamboni," Leitzel says.

Leitzel has won scores of professional honors and academic accolades. Two of the most recent ones, framed and on display in her office, are the "pink triangle" award from the gay, lesbian and bisexual faculty and staff for her work on securing domestic partnership benefits at UNH and the NAACP Community Leadership Award for "implementation of outreach to students of diverse and multicultural backgrounds."

While Leitzel has accomplished much, she has rarely done so with sweeping gesture or bold proclamation. But on any given issue, Taylor says, Leitzel "would bring people in, hear their side, talk to ... everybody who had a stake in something and make a decision and say: 'This is what we're going to do; this is where we're going to go.'" In an environment of perpetually tight budgets, she has made decisions that were unpopular. "A lot of decisions she made, people didn't like, but they respected her because she explained why she made the decision that she did," says Taylor. Taylor gives Leitzel a huge chunk of the credit for UNH's unprecedented fund-raising success: "A lot of it was her hard work and the respect and confidence that she inspired in major donors," he observes.

Leitzel's immediate post-retirement plan is to return to Ohio, where she was a faculty member and administrator at Ohio State for 25 years, to spend time with her sons, daughters-in-law and two granddaughters. But no one believes she will stop working. "There are those who predict I will be a complete failure in retirement," she allows. In a recent interview with the president, we asked about her tenure at UNH, what has been accomplished and what remains to be done. Here is what she had to say:

Why is it time for you to retire? Well, it seems to me that the only thing worse than leaving too soon is staying too long. ... Many of the things that I felt needed to be done when I came [to UNH] are at a place where they can be handed to the next president. We're completing the capital campaign. We designed a new budget model [and] budget processes, and they've been implemented. We undertook a very comprehensive academic-planning process that's now into the implementation phase. We reshaped the recruitment and retention of students ... and it's working well. Enrollments are strong. So it's a time when this transfer of leadership can take place with essentially no disruption to the institution.

You must have come in the door with a long list: "Top 10 Things to Do at UNH." Oh, maybe it wasn't that long. Not top 10 things, because many of the critical components of a successful university were already in place. The faculty was and is exceptionally strong. The students are eager and engaged with their faculty. The alumni are faithful and committed to the institution. But we did need to redesign, repair or initiate some processes, and it was pretty clear to me what those were. It will never be the case that the work is done at UNH. A university is always a work in process, and UNH will always require aggressive leadership.

What were the things that you knew you wanted to accomplish when you arrived? I said, initially, that we needed to do three things. The first was to change our approach to student recruitment. We needed to bring into a single community all of the people who are responsible for admissions, financial aid, registration, student academic support and career planning, so that those would become seamless operations and not mysterious units in the university. And we needed to do some long-range enrollment planning. So we hired Mark Rubinstein [vice provost for enrollment management], who is exceptional, and he undertook to do that.

The second thing I wanted to do was to change the manner in which the university was distributing its resources to programs. When I arrived, UNH was still using a budget process that was left over from a time when the university was much smaller and not as research-intensive. We needed a process that moved budget decisions closer to the units responsible for teaching and research. ... Not only did we change the model, but we also changed the processes for decision-making.

The third area I wanted to address was private support. It appeared to me that there was substantial potential for private fund raising that the university was not aggressively pursuing. We committed ourselves to a major campaign to increase private support in specific areas that make a critical difference in the university's overall excellence. ... The campaign has four main goals: to make a UNH education accessible to talented students, regardless of their family income; to recruit and retain outstanding faculty members; to strengthen selected academic programs of distinction; and to provide modern technology and other essential learning tools to all members of the campus community. We had a fifth underlying goal: to maintain a campus environment that fosters discovery, creativity and community. And we are succeeding in meeting all those goals. We have received gifts for student scholarships and student-based programs like the university undergraduate research program. We have created faculty chairs and professorships and provided endowments for some of our hallmark programs. And we've received gifts for what we call tools of learning--equipment, technology, electronic library collections, classrooms equipped with the latest technology, even a playground for the Child Study and Development Center. We started with those three things because they were sort of screaming at us, and then we moved to other things that clearly can benefit the university. The campus at Manchester is very important for us, and now that we have the campus consolidated in the mill yard, we can begin to have distinctly and authentically urban programs. We can also offer part-time professional master's degree programs in business, public administration, social work, education and engineering in the part of the state where the population is greatest.

Another area of emphasis: The quality of the faculty suggested to me that we should be able to leverage more external research support than the university was getting when I first arrived. So we organized ourselves to do that, and now the external funding is at a high level [$81.9 million]--an unusually high level for a faculty that doesn't have a medical school. And we continue to develop the entrepreneurial campus, where faculty members and students work on research funded by industry quite directly. What was the strategy for the capital campaign? Why did it work so well? It worked because the cause was a good one--not because we were clever, but because we were clear. And we were also disciplined. We chose not to put bricks and mortar into this campaign. We said we would invest in academic programs, and we chose as targets for gifts those programs that either were at the top of their fields or close enough that with private funds they could reach the top of their fields. Some of our very strongest research programs are cross-disciplinary. In this campaign, we focused on programs which have high visibility and reputation and also have connections to many other programs across the institution. So we expect the campaign to benefit almost every program at UNH directly or indirectly.