[gentle music] - [Tony] Dorothy Horrell was the president of a community college.

The president of the entire community college system, the chair of the board of the state's land-grant university and went on to head one of the campuses of the University of Colorado.

That's a remarkable educational impact for one individual.

- [Hal] She's done so many things and done them well in education in our community college system and Bonfils-Stanton Foundation.

Knowing her story will be an inspiration for many others.

- [Reynelda] As strong and enduring as the Rocky Mountains they stood beside, as visionary as the views of the Grand Plains they looked across, the women inducted into the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame are trailblazers whose work has improved and enriched our lives.

They are teachers, scientists, ranchers, leaders in business, education, religion and the arts, women who have been recognized for their many contributions to our state, our country, and the world.

I'm Reynelda Muse and these are the stories of great Colorado women.

- [Linda] There are so many people who have benefited because of Dorothy's leadership.

There are students who were the first in their families to earn a degree.

- Dorothy is a wonderful example of pursuit of education, hard work, and seeking out achievement and opportunities to make her life better and the community better.

- Education has always been really, really important to Dorothy.

- I believe that it is the great equalizer.

It's the foundation of a democratic society is to have an educated populace.

- [Linda] You can look at the people that she has helped to find their own strengths, find their own passions.

- What is so compelling to me about Dorothy's story is that wherever you're from, whatever that background is, you can take that talent and that motivation.

You can harness it and you can make the world around you a better place.

You can literally change the lives of a great number of people that you'll come into contact with.

- Dorothy Horrell is in some sense American dream.

Growing up in a small town and raised on a farm and working her way out into a bachelor's, master's, PhD, and so many positions of great responsibility.

- She's been a trailblazer and a trailblazer for women.

She was the second woman president in the community colleges when she went to Red Rocks and she was the first woman president of the community college system.

- She had terrific leadership skills.

She served on many city and state education panels.

- I became very involved in the community.

I chaired the chamber in Jefferson County.

It was on the hospital board, the local bank board.

One of the labors of love that I did was served on the early stages of the founding of a Arrupe Jesuit High School in northwest Denver, a school that was designed for economically disadvantaged young people who had a lot of potential, but just didn't have the kind of support and all that they needed.

I grew up in Holyoke, Colorado in the northeastern corner of the state.

I'm one of eight, I have two older sisters and four younger brothers and one younger sister.

We lived on the farm that my grandfather had when he came from Austria.

[upbeat music] May not have been rich in the traditional sense of the word, but I was rich in all of the things that really mattered.

- [Sister] Our dad was a farmer rancher and our mom luckily was able to be a stay at home mom.

- I remember one of the things my mom would say was, "You know, if you give to the world the best you have, the best will come back to you."

And I've seen that, you know, come to fruition in my life.

- [Sister] She was a great student.

She was always part of the committees that were planning dances or activities.

- I was also very involved in 4- H. I was an officer in our local club probably from the time I was 10- years-old.

In the summer times our lives revolved around the county fair and getting all of our projects done.

My brothers were all involved in the ag projects, like livestock and feeding and that sort of thing, and we girls concentrated more on the domestic side of things.

One of my favorite was the creative cooks where we would plan a meal on a budget and actually prepare in a guest kitchen and then serve it to some officials from the county.

While it was a little bit stressful, it was also really fun.

- Those experiences did two things.

They laid the foundation for her leadership, but they also gave us experiences that opened up our world.

We were from these very small towns, right?

And 4-H and organizations like that offered us the chance to see a much greater world in a way that was more difficult to see back then before the communications revolution that we've experienced today.

- I grew up in a very strong Catholic family.

We were very involved in our church.

That was just something that was a part of our lives and I think defined who we are and what we are here for.

- We spent a lot of our high school summers at CSU through the 4-H activities that we did.

Colorado State was best known for its agriculture and its home economics.

- I started at CSU in the fall of 1969.

I majored in home economics getting an education degree to go along with it so that I would have lots of options.

Because I'd been a 4-H or growing up.

I also was involved in the Collegiate 4-H program at CSU.

There was an opportunity, what was called the IFYE program, I-F-Y-E, International Farm Youth Exchange Program and they select two IFYE delegates from each state each year to go to another country, kind of as cultural ambassadors actually and to just build people-to-people understanding, so I decided to apply for that and was selected as the female for that year for Colorado.

Well, then I got my assignment.

I left for Taiwan 10 days after I graduated from college.

I was an oddity, certainly there in Taiwan because I'm fair skinned and tall.

At first it was one of those, what have I gotten myself into?

It was an amazing experience.

- She lived with families for about six months.

- These were families that didn't have a lot, but yet had very strong family relations.

Many of the homes in which I lived, the grandparents were there as well as the next generation and then the grandchildren all living together and the love that was, you know, expressed among them was very powerful.

- Anybody that works in a foreign country, you see how other people in the world live.

An experience like that I think really deepens a person, you know, helps them really appreciate everybody.

- I don't think I realized at the time, but it was really a transformational experience knowing that people everywhere have the same hopes and dreams that we have.

I returned from Taiwan and I became a part of the home economics department at Ranum High School and I became involved at that time in sponsoring their vocational student organization, which was called FHA, Future Homemakers of America.

I had been teaching for almost three years and there was an opening at the state board for community colleges and occupational education.

I was hired to be the assistant state supervisor of home economics, so left teaching at that point and moved into more of the administrative area.

It was in 1980 I decided to go to a dance that was sponsored by a Catholic social group.

- I saw Dorothy across the dance floor and I thought she was kind of cute.

- And so he eventually came over.

- [Ted] We had a good time dancing.

She had a really good personality, very engaging and fun to be with.

- That was the beginning of my relationship with Ted.

We dated for about a year and then we're married in 1981.

He's been just an incredible partner in my life and we'll celebrate our 44th wedding anniversary in a few months.

[gentle music] - I met Dorothy Horrell in 1986.

The legislature had just passed the transformative legislation signed by the Governor to create what now is known as the Colorado Community College and Occupational Education System, and I was being recruited to be the president and I met with individual board members asking about who the staff would be that I'd be working with, and the nine different members that I met with individually, each member said was a young woman on the staff named Dorothy Horrell, who is somebody who will help you guide through this.

I then met with her, I liked her instantly and appointed her as vice president for instructional affairs for the system.

Dorothy had incredible accomplishments on all sorts of levels at CCCOES.

- It was about a year and 1/2 or so into that that the president of Red Rocks Community College resigned, and so Jerry asked me if I would go out as the interim president.

And he said, "Just keep the wheels on the bus until we get the new president hired."

The students are very much like I was, they wouldn't have the opportunities, but for this institution existing, well, I got there and it was where I was meant to be.

The search committee did not find a person that they really wanted and I had been there long enough at that time that there was kind of a groundswell of support, and so I remember mustering up my courage and going to Jerry and saying, "Jerry, I think I could really do good things here."

It ended up that I then was their president for the next 10 years.

- There was some unrest really when Dorothy took the helm.

It was an institution with a lot of promise, but a lot of things had been neglected over the years.

about the quality of educational programs.

- We embarked on a process to really be a premier student-centered environment.

I remember doing an organization chart where I turned it upside down and put the students at the top and all of the other things that fell below it because that was the philosophy that we were creating.

- She really flattened the hierarchy, so that she had greater access and people had more access to her.

Whether you were on the staff or on the faculty or one of the students or in the community, you always knew that you could talk to Dorothy, that she would be listening and that she would engage with you.

One of her great skills was getting people who had different opinions to work together, parenthetically a skill that really could be helpful in today's society.

- In psych terms, they talk about task leaders and they talk about social-emotional leaders.

Well, Dorothy had a wonderful blend of both.

When it was business, it was business.

She was on task and and she got people motivated and moving.

She had this belief that everybody could work together.

As a result of that, she got a lot of things done wherever she was.

- At at that time, there was a sense that in order to be a successful college president, you needed to have a doctorate degree and Dorothy enrolled at Colorado State University in a PhD program.

- [Dorothy] Our daughter Megan, had been born at that time.

- That was a super busy time and so I, I took a leave and kind of became Mr.

Mom.

- I would get up at five in the morning, drive up to Fort Collins, take classes, come back to the campus in the afternoons, go home, have a bite of dinner, and start studying and do it over again.

I was just grateful for the support to be able to do that and it was something that was meaningful to me and meaningful to the college as well.

- Dorothy's dissertation was really impactful.

She studied the success of community college students who moved on after two years to four year colleges and universities and one of the her goals and our goals at that time was to get the four year universities to accept community college students as juniors, and that was very controversial in some circles, but Dorothy's dissertation proved that students who spent two years at the community college were as successful or more successful in their final two years at the universities in Colorado as were the native students, and that was a huge breakthrough and it ended up with Dorothy beating to sign an agreement with the Colorado School of Mines, the most prestigious school, arguably, in the state at the time, to accept all the students from Red Rocks as juniors.

That was a breakthrough and eventually all of the rest of the colleges and universities Followed suit quite quickly.

- She started fundraising and connected with the community in ways that the school really had not been in previous years.

- Started a foundation as well.

We qualified for a federal grant where we were able to have some matching dollars.

Those were all for scholarships for our students and it was a transformative time for that college.

We did some great things, you know, just kind of putting Red Rocks on the map and instilling a pride both within the institution and within the community that this was a really treasured asset.

- In 1998, I retired as president of the community college system.

I knew that Dorothy would be a great person to replace me.

- He had visited with me and said, "You know, Dorothy, I think this is something that given your background and that you've been at the system and all that you ought to consider."

I think there were probably five or six of the other presidents that also put in applications for that job, and I ended up being selected.

- [Linda] She was the first woman president of the community college system.

In the early years of Dorothy's time, we were watching the decline of the rural colleges.

- When Dorothy came in as head of the community college system, there was tremendous competition for scarce resources in the legislature.

- The per-student funding was really dropping, and because she grew up in a rural area, she understood the need to think about the entire system of colleges and universities in the state of Colorado and to do so in a way that would advantage all students.

Dorothy tackled the state funding formulas knowing that students who attended those rural colleges deserved and needed the same quality education that those in the urban areas needed.

The politics were really very difficult.

There were also tensions between board members when it came to the philosophy around the role of higher education and the role of community colleges, specifically.

- With a new administration, there began being some different priorities and I realized there was a bit of a mismatch.

- Anyone who works for a board of any kind or a city council or a county commission understands that the support of that group and the alignment of that group is absolutely critical to being able to move forward with an agenda.

- There are some things you can control and some things you can't, and I knew myself well enough to know that I didn't have what I thought it would take to really be able to adjust my priorities and my vision that we've worked collectively on to have the system be successful under my leadership, and so I made a a pretty tough decision because I had really thought that that was probably going to be the job that I would have for the rest of my career.

When I had made the decision and announced that I was going to be leaving the community college system, I knew I wasn't quite finished yet [chuckling] and I happened to see an ad for the next executive director of the Bonfils Stanton Foundation.

I had some familiarity, certainly, with the nonprofit community, but not a lot.

I decided though, to go ahead and apply and I was selected to head that foundation.

- The Bonfils Stanton Foundation was formed in the early 1980s by May Bonfils.

- She had married Ed Stanton and after she passed away, Ed was the one who decided to use the corpus of her estate to establish this foundation, and early on they had decided that the focus would be arts and culture, community service, and science and medicine.

- We only had a staff of four people at Bonfils Stanton, so she did an awful lot with few resources, but the big thing was keeping Bonfils Stanton up to speed with the development growth of the Denver community and the cultural community.

- And 1st of May and Ed's real loves were arts, so we began spending a lot of time listening and talking to the leaders of the arts organizations and decided that an investment in leadership was something that we could do.

We went to the board with the idea of creating a fellowship program that eventually was named the Livingston Fellowship Program.

- Named after Johnston Livingston who was a founding trustee for the Bonfils Stanton Foundation and he felt very strongly about identifying and training emerging leaders for organizations, particularly the nonprofit community.

- The notion was to select five high-potential nonprofit leaders and invest in their advanced development.

- We started off with five fellows and now there're over 90 emerging leaders and members of the community that have been through this program.

- There was a point when I was at Bonfils Stanton that Mayor Hickenlooper and Lewis Sharp, the head of the Denver Art Museum, came to the foundation board and they said, "We have a very exciting opportunity for you all to consider, an abstract expressionist artist by the name of Clyfford still had passed away.

It had been Clyfford Still's desire that his artworks stay together as a collection and that they would be given to the city that would build a standalone museum.

There were a number of cities that were interested, and so we had to put together a bid that was going to be reviewed by Mrs.

Still herself.

- Working with the Denver Art Museum and the Mayor's office, she played a central role convincing the Clyfford Still family that Denver was a good sponsor and home for the new museum.

- It was a real coup for the city of Denver to be selected and is a wonderful accompaniment to the Denver Art Museum that it's housed right next to.

When I was at Bonfils Stanton, I was asked to consider being appointed to the board of governors of CSU of my alma mater.

- Dorothy was chair during a time of a lot of growth for the university.

Enrollment was going up, we were redoing the entire campus, redeveloping it for the next generation of Coloradans, but the main point she wanted to get across was that there was an educational opportunity here in Colorado for every student with the talent and the motivation to earn a college degree, but in many ways that laid the foundation for the system as it exists today with the three campuses, CSU Pueblo, Colorado State University in Fort Collins, and in our new campus at Spur.

A part of that actually was the bringing of the football stadium back onto the main campus and building a new stadium, and that was a project with no small amount of controversy.

- We went through a very arduous and difficult process because there were a group of very active citizens who did not want that to happen.

A lot of the Board of Governors meetings that I was the chair of were spent in listening to community members and really trying to approach all of this with an open mind and looking at what was in the greater good for the university and the community.

Eventually, we did agree to support the building of the stadium and I think, you know, for the most part it's been a really good thing, but it was a very challenging time.

- Dorothy was so good at just very calmly, very quietly making sure that everybody's voice was heard, there was always a process in place, and when a decision was made, people might not have agreed with every step of it, but I don't think there were a lot of people that felt like their voice hadn't been heard in the process.

- I loved being on the board and I hadn't quite finished my term.

[laughing] I had had moved from the chair into the past chair at the time when I thought I was going to be retired full time and ended up moving on to the next chapter.

- Bruce Benson, who was the president of the University of Colorado at the time, describes how he was thinking about who the perfect chancellor would be, and as he ticked through these various traits that he was looking for in a person, he realized that who he was thinking of was Dorothy Horrell.

- CU Denver is Colorado's only public urban research university, and so the mission of that university really resonated for me.

I found again that the students at CU Denver were my kind of students.

They were students who were pulling themselves up by the bootstraps and hadn't had a lot of advantages along the way, so we kind of landed on that as being, "Okay, what does that mean and how are we going to manifest that in everything that we do and are?"

- One of the things that Dorothy was able to accomplish at CU Denver when she first started is there was no on-campus housing and she was able to get a dorm built so people could come from a distance and stay.

Again, it was all about success of students.

She wants to recognize and acknowledge diversity.

- I was really privileged to do that work as I was with every job that I had along the way.

That's why I think I was put here to use whatever gifts and talents I had in order to make more possible for others.

- [Ted] Every place she went, she was a great success.

- I just felt like I was one of the luckiest people in the world to be put in the positions that I was, and there were a lot of people who believed in me.

- [Ted] I think that one of the amazing things is how much she's able to get done at work as well as at home.

[light music] - My family is what my priority is now, and we're blessed to have three wonderful little granddaughters.

I once heard someone say that you can't be hopeless if you feel gratitude, and that's really what I feel at this point in my life.