ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a case study of Jacquelyn Mattfeld is now associate provost and dean of academic affairs at Brown University—the top woman academic officer in the Ivy League. The dramatic change in Mattfeld's career fortunes is the result of two separate but not independent series of events—the emergence of an extraordinarily able and talented administrator and the slow, painful, often grudging, still incomplete acceptance of women in high-prestige academic circles. In her own career, Mattfeld reveals a kind of encapsulated current history of women in higher education. She is responsible for the development and evaluation of curriculum, is the primary administration contact with the faculty and supervises the dean's office concerned with the academic counseling of undergraduates. She has recently proposed that Brown establishes an Office for Resumed and Continuing Education to bring back older men and women who want to start new careers or change old ones.
