Colorado College’s former executive VP and chief of staff took the helm as its interim leader in July. She never saw it coming. “We were just trucking along, doing our jobs,” she says. “I ended up on a Zoom call with the executive board, and then 10 minutes in, I was like, what is happening here? They’re asking me so many questions. Then it dawned on me: Oh—this is an interview.” President L. Song Richardson had stepped down, and following Whitaker’s interview the board named her to fill the opening for two years.

A psychology major who did her graduate work at Vanderbilt, Whitaker sports an arm tattoo of an ivy vine entwined around the words “Vox Clamantis.” In November she married Michael Sawyer, a former Colorado College English professor who now teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. “I go back and forth a lot,” she says.