Cathy Trower
- Elected 2015
- Board Chair
- Executive Committee
- Governance Committee Chair
Dr. Cathy A. Trower is President of Trower & Trower, Inc., a board governance consulting firm, through which she has provided consulting and coaching services to more than 125 nonprofits. Cathy is the author of The Practitioner’s Guide to Governance as Leadership: Building High Performing Nonprofit Boards (Jossey Bass 2013) and the second edition of Govern More, Manage Less (BoardSource 2010). She is co-author with R. Barbara Gitenstein of What Board Members Need to Know about Faculty (Association of Governing Boards of Colleges and Universities, 2013), and she has written several articles for the AGB’s Trusteeship magazine—most recently “Flipping the Boardroom for Trustee Engagement: Why and How” (March/April 2015).
Formerly Research Director at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Trower studied academic leadership, shared governance, faculty work life, employment issues, policies, and practices including the experiences of faculty through a generational lens, women in STEM disciplines, and underrepresented minorities for sixteen years. Prior to Harvard, Cathy served as a senior-level administrator of business degree programs at Johns Hopkins University; she has also been a faculty member and department chair at a liberal arts college.
Trower has published an edited volume on faculty policies, dozens of book chapters, articles, and case studies. Cathy’s latest book about faculty work life and policies is called Success on the Tenure-Track: Five Keys to Faculty Satisfaction (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). Cathy serves on two additional not-for-profit boards: Wheaton College, MA in 2012, and BoardSource, Washington, DC. She has a BBA (1981) and an MBA (1985) from the University of Iowa and a PhD (1996) in higher education administration and leadership from the University of Maryland, College Park.