'On to the next adventure': Anne Kerr was Florida Southern's heart and mind for 20 years

In the depths of the pandemic, small colleges throughout the country struggled: collapsing enrollment, confusing guidance from the Centers for Disease Control, sick students, shrinking revenues.

Lockdowns. Massively expensive electronic solutions to keep classes at least online if not in the classroom. “Hybrid” classrooms, with half the students on Zoom or the dreaded Microsoft “Teams” and the other half, masked and worried, spaced around classrooms at 8-foot intervals, wiping their desks between seatings.

Braving the classrooms, teaching or learning from home if you were “at risk.”

And Dr. Anne Kerr never wavered. Not once.

Colleges and universities across the country were shedding faculty and staff in the name of the emergency. We never cut a single person. Kerr had not gone through the long, painful process of building a world-class team of faculty and administrators and support staff to start cutting them loose because of a virus.

During the dark night of the misery, the light in Kerr’s office – and the offices of her administrators – shone far into the night. She told us, firmly, “We will get through this, and when we do, we have to be ready for the next adventure” – her not-so-secret code for the next advancement in expanding the base, extending our academic reach, building new physical plant; moving a rose garden.

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In the midst of crisis, Kerr was planning – and expected all of us to be planning – for the next victory.

Florida Southern College is in Lakeland, Florida – Central Florida, the place where, during hurricanes, people evacuate to, not from.  Almost half our kids come from out of state – many from New England.

Hurricanes are iffy things. Those “cones of destruction” cut a wide swath on the weather maps, and it’s difficult, if not impossible, to predict when and where they’ll hit. We had already been missed by a couple of big storms when “Irma,” a monster of cinematic proportions, threatened from the gulf.

Against a lot of naysaying and Polly-Anna-ing, Kerr evacuated the campus, sending students home – some to sit it out safely back in the northeast, and Floridians to their family homes to help with preparations and eventual cleanup.

I live a few blocks from campus, and when Irma hit, trees went down, roofs were ripped off, powerlines crashed through windows, streets were flooded with wreckage. The eye of Irma passed directly over my office in Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Lucius Pond Ordway” building, taking out trees on both sides.

But our students were safe.

The next morning, around 8 a.m., I rode my bike over the campus for a look. Kerr was busy with a crew from our maintenance department, personally dragging tree limbs and wreckage from the plot next to the Roberts Academy.

“I think we might be able to improve this playground here,” she said.  Classic Kerr. By noon, half the faculty and staff were on campus, helping her clean up.

Anne Kerr has been the heart and soul and mind of Florida Southern for 20 years.  She’s been that unwavering inspiration to a generation of FSC students, staff, administrators and faculty. She’s built and rebuilt our campus – sometimes literally – from the ground up.

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Her exceptional ability to attract and keep the best and brightest is legendary.  She introduced tenure for the first time, created real job security for her team, and fashioned FSC’s environment of academic excellence that has drawn and engaged the best students in the nation. Her team, from our board, our donors, the proud alumni, and from the CFO on down, have repeatedly stabilized our finances, built an enviable endowment, and created the spaces for all of this to take place.

She has been transformative in the true meaning of the word.

But most of all, I will remember the late night calls, the chats in odd moments, when she’d end our conversation with “on to the next adventure.” You knew it would happen, you knew it would be amazing, and you knew success was on the way.

R. Bruce Anderson is the Dr. Sarah D. and L. Kirk McKay, Jr. Endowed Chair in American History, Government, and Civics and Miller Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Florida Southern College. He is also a columnist for The Ledger and political consultant and on-air commentator for WLKF Radio in Lakeland.

This article originally appeared on The Ledger: Anne Kerr dared to push forward during bleakest times | Anderson