She received that summer research grant money, a Joel Dean Research Grant, which enabled her to do field work in San Francisco and Philadelphia on the topic of welcoming congregations in the United Methodist Church. Through this project, which culminated in her thesis, she discovered how much she loved research — meeting people, learning their stories, organizing data — and writing.

Cadge laughs as she recalls how one of her friends observed that she was happiest when she was sitting at her desk writing her thesis. “That’s actually true,” she says, “and that’s another valuable thing friends do for us — help us to see things we might not see ourselves.”

After working at Bowdoin, Cadge took a position at Brandeis University, where she was able to combine research and teaching. When she accepted an invitation to chair the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Brandeis, she discovered how much she also enjoys the creativity and broad-based collaboration of administrative leadership.

“For all of my academic experience, I’m a kid from Delaware County, and we get stuff done,” she says.

Working with colleagues to build programs and encourage student leadership, in this and subsequent positions of responsibility, gave Cadge opportunities to think about new ways of teaching and bringing different people and groups together. As graduate dean, for example, she hired the first faculty director of professional development to prepare graduate students to work as the social scientists, humanists, and scientists the world needs — both inside and outside the academy.

“We want to build on understanding the legacies of our foremothers and prepare these things for our daughters in a world that’s as complicated as this one is.”

—Wendy Cadge ’97, President and Professor of Sociology at Bryn Mawr College

“You can’t think about higher education apart from understanding changes in how and where people are seeking meaning and purpose,” she says.

Cadge’s approach to leadership stems from her experience as a teacher and as a researcher, and has a deep ethical base and mission commitment.

“Part of what drew me to Bryn Mawr is that the mission is very clear,” she says.

“My job in this role is to operationalize mission and to imagine collaboratively what the next chapter looks like. We want to build on understanding the legacies of our foremothers and prepare these things for our daughters in a world that’s as complicated as this one is.”

The move to Bryn Mawr began a new chapter for her family, too. Cadge, her wife, and their two middle school-aged children — along with three pugs, two cats, and a frog — left Boston last summer to embark on this fresh adventure.

Living in the president’s house, navigating new schools, and being near extended family for the first time are all part of it. “We laugh a lot and try to keep it real,” Cadge says. The dogs, who have become campus celebrities, have been a fun source of connection with students.

As Bryn Mawr’s 10th president, Cadge says, “It’s an honor and a pleasure to continue the work of my predecessor and fellow Swarthmorean Kim Cassidy ’85. We are very aligned in our values and very different in our styles. And that’s fun and interesting.”

An ethnographer at heart, Cadge has often surprised people as she’s walked around campus, shown up at events, or poked her nose in the basement of a building.

“Bryn Mawr is an amazing place filled with passionate people, and my job this year has been to listen and learn,” she says.

She’s getting to know everyone from board members to campus employees, faculty, and students. Reflections that she offered to the campus in January, sharing some of what she learned in her first six months, coalesced around four themes — academic excellence, student experience, access and inclusion, and a transformation in physical and operational systems.

Some initial pilot projects around student space, for example, are experimenting with ways to meet students where they are and help ensure that the facilities themselves support in-person connections.

“Students want welcoming, flexible gathering spaces where they can be alone and together,” Cadge says. “They want environments where they can be social and get work done.”

From their years on campus to their lives beyond, Cadge says, “I’m excited about the opportunities ahead for thinking about what it means to support women, cis and transgender and those who do not navigate within the gender binary, in this political context. We’re educating students today who are going to enter the job market in the 2030s. What do they need to know — not just to enter the job market, but to live lives of meaning and purpose?”

The answers to that question, of course, lie as much in friendships and engaging with the community — locally as well as nationally and internationally — as they do in what happens in the classroom as faculty build intellectual relationships with students and introduce them to intellectual communities.

Cadge speaks from deep personal gratitude for her Swarthmore community when she tells Bryn Mawr students, “You’re now in the network … talking to and engaging with Bryn Mawr students, alumni, and faculty for the rest of your life. That is your great privilege.”