Shalala, Donna Edna

▪ 1995

      As the debate over health care came to centre court in the U.S. Congress in 1994, one of the Clinton administration's key players was Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Donna Shalala. Whether battling Beltway gridlock or opponents as a teenaged tennis champion, Shalala, a respected academic and the first woman to head a Big Ten university, had always been a fierce, principled competitor. Born on Feb. 14, 1941, in Cleveland, Ohio, where her father, a real-estate salesman, was one of the leaders of the Syrian-Lebanese community, Shalala had a strong female role model in her mother, a physical education teacher who attained a law degree while holding two jobs and raising Shalala and her twin sister.

      After graduating from Western College for Women, Oxford, Ohio (B.A., 1962), Shalala served two years in the Peace Corps in Iran, then attended Syracuse (N.Y.) University (master of social sciences, 1968; Ph.D., 1970). She aspired to a career in journalism, but when a job interview with the New York Times ended with the advice that she seek a position with a small-town newspaper, Shalala pursued an academic career, teaching at the City University of New York's (CUNY's) Bernard M. Baruch College, then at Columbia University, New York City. She also served as a director and treasurer of the Municipal Assistance Corp., which helped rescue New York City from bankruptcy. From 1977 to 1980 she served in the administration of Pres. Jimmy Carter as an assistant secretary in the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

      Returning to academia, Shalala became, at age 39, the president of Hunter College, CUNY. At Hunter she added to her reputation as a committed feminist by overseeing dramatic increases in the percentages of female and minority faculty and administrators. In 1988 she became the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, one of the largest universities in the U.S. Confronted by a campus afflicted with racial tension, she instituted the "Madison Plan," which increased recruitment of minority students and faculty and reflected her commitment to a "multiethnic, multiracial, multicultural" academic environment. Also seeking to improve the university's image by reversing the woeful fortunes of its football team, she hired a new athletic director and a new head coach, who led the team to a Rose Bowl victory in January 1994. By that time, however, Shalala had moved on to head HHS, the nation's principal agency for protecting health and providing human services, with responsibility for administering Social Security, Medicare, the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration. Shalala has faced every challenge with the same determination that prompted New York Yankees' owner George Steinbrenner, the coach of the girls' softball team that Shalala once led to the city championship in Cleveland, to call her "one of the toughest competitors that I have ever seen."

      (JEFF WALLENFELDT)

* * *