Patricia Thrash was a longtime administrator at Northwestern University — including the university’s final dean of women — before shaping nationwide higher education policy at what is now The Higher Learning Commission, an accrediting body based in Chicago that operated across a 19-state region.
“Patsy was a national higher education leader who broke the glass ceiling for future female presidents of The Higher Learning Commission,” said current Higher Learning Commission President Barbara Gellman-Danley. “Everyone in higher education knew of her during her tenure, affirming the impact a leader can have on things.”
Thrash, 97, died of pneumonia on Aug. 4 at her home in Evanston, said Sheila Macomber, her executive assistant and caregiver. Thrash also had been battling dementia, Macomber said.
Born Patricia Ann Thrash in 1929 in Grenada, a town in Mississippi, Thrash grew up about an hour west of her birthplace in Boyle, Mississippi. After earning a bachelor’s degree in English in 1950 from Delta State University, Thrash taught high school English in Clarksdale, Mississippi, from 1950 until 1952.
Thrash returned to school in 1952, enrolling at Northwestern University and earning a master’s degree in education in 1953, followed by a doctoral degree in education and counseling from Northwestern in 1959.
While in graduate school, Thrash served as a head resident from 1953 until 1955 and as an assistant dean of women from 1958 until 1960. She also began teaching classes at Northwestern, first as a lecturer from 1959 until 1965 and then as an associate professor from 1965 until 1972.
In 1960, Thrash took on a concurrent appointment as Northwestern’s dean of women, succeeding her close friend, Claudine Mason, who was Macomber’s grandmother. During her time as dean of women, Thrash worked to manage the structural integration of gender-segregated campus life.
Thrash was also something of a public face for Northwestern when it came to women in education, speaking out about how things were changing for women in the 1960s.
“There’s more to life than dancing around because you have the whitest washes on the block,” she told the Tribune’s Mary Middleton in 1963. “Women in America have been sold a bill of goods, there’s no doubt about it. They are taught to feel guilty if housework and child tending bore them. Yet every woman needs to find her identity as a person as much as a man.”
More Top Picks Best Blue Light Glasses For Kids
Throughout the 1960s, the university wrestled with whether undergraduate men should be permitted to visit undergraduate women’s dorms. In 1968, Northwestern for the first time set hours for room visitation for members of the opposite sex in dormitories. Thrash told the Tribune’s Clarence Petersen in 1969 that she initially had had misgivings about the student self-determination policy because she wasn’t comfortable with how violations of that policy would be adjudicated, but even so, one year in, she said she was not displeased with how things had unfolded.
“Northwestern women are more mature — studies show at least two years more mature, physiologically and emotionally — than earlier generations,” she said. “And they are more experienced. By the time we get them, they have already made some significant choices about how they want to live their lives. The high schools are getting the problems we used to get.”
In 1969, Northwestern eliminated the position of dean of women. At that point, Thrash became an associate dean, which was a role she held until 1972. In that job, she contributed to a 1970 McGraw-Hill book called “Handbook of College and University Administration.”
In 1972, Thrash shifted gears, taking a job with The Higher Learning Commission — then known as the Commission on Institutions of Higher Education for the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools — as its assistant executive secretary. In her work at Northwestern, she had built a relationship with that accrediting group, and she became interested in working there, Macomber said.
Thrash’s work with the group, which continued as The Higher Learning Commission as part of a 2014 dissolution and reorganization, included helping with the accreditation process at numerous community colleges that had begun sprouting up in the 1960s and 1970s across her region. She was promoted to be the group’s associate executive director in 1973 and then its associate director in 1976 before she was named the group’s first-ever female executive director in 1988.
“She lived a long life, and at (The Higher Learning Commission), we are very grateful she gave a big part of that to our organization,” Gellman-Danley said.
After retiring in 1996, Thrash enjoyed volunteering with Community Animal Rescue Effort, as well as writing, drawing, traveling and watching “Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy!”, Macomber said. Thrash also took numerous courses for older learners at Northwestern University’s Institute for Learning in Retirement — now known as the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute — and she helped edit the institute’s journal, the ILR Journal. In her work for the ILR Journal, Thrash also penned poems, along with an account of her formative years in Mississippi.
“She poured herself into her volunteer work at Community Animal Rescue Effort,” Macomber said.
In 2018, Northwestern honored Thrash as part of its “Hidden No More” initiative, which was set up to celebrate unheralded women who made significant historical contributions to the university.
There were no immediate survivors.
Services were held.
Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.