Jeff Hemsley arrived for the keynote event early. The then-University of Washington doctoral student was attending the 2013 iConference and wanted to save a seat, so he put his belongings on a chair.

A woman walked up to him. She was petite, with cropped blonde hair and glasses. She wore no name tag, and he had never met her before. She introduced herself as Liz Liddy.

“I said, ‘So, so who are you? And I noticed you don’t have a name badge,’” Hemsley said. “And she says, ‘Well, most people around here know me.’”

A few minutes later, Hemsley realized he was speaking to the dean of the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University, the first-ever — and a top-ranked— iSchool in the United States. But Liddy had introduced herself simply with her name.

Hemsley said Liddy was warm, welcoming and friendly, especially to a doctoral student. She made him far more aware of SU’s iSchool, particularly as a possible job location.

Hemsley joined the iSchool faculty a year later, one of the many hires Liddy brought on as dean. When Liddy retires at the end of this academic year, she will be leaving a school that has been characterized by its growth during her 10-year tenure. She helped increase undergraduate enrollment by 71 percent and graduate enrollment by 66 percent, raised over $26 million for research and started numerous programs — including a data analytics minor and New York’s first graduate certificate program in data science.

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She earned both her master’s degree and doctorate from the iSchool. She successfully started her own company, TextWise, and was the founding director of the Center for Natural Language Processing. She taught as a faculty member and conducted research before becoming dean in 2008. She temporarily left her position in January 2015 to become interim vice chancellor and provost for SU, before returning to the iSchool in 2016. 

Faculty, staff and students describe her as a champion of innovation, entrepreneurship and women in technology. They have pointed out her openness to new ideas, her ability to enable people, her passion for students and her fierce loyalty to the iSchool.

“One thing that you can say about Liz for sure is she loves the iSchool,” Hemsley said. “And there is no bigger cheerleader for the iSchool than Liz Liddy.” 

“The golden girl”

Liddy grew up in Utica, New York, as the second of five siblings. Her family didn’t have a car, TV or large home, but was happy, she said. As a kid, Liddy played with her brothers and saved up $5 for a bicycle. On Saturdays, she would walk with her father to the library, check out a stack of books, take the bus home and return them the following week.

She watched her father successfully start a business. After buying a storefront that sold janitorial supplies, he realized the store wasn’t just a product but had the potential to be a service, she said. He turned the business into a janitorial service. Eventually her father’s clients included major corporations and the company serviced one of the Olympics. He was her mentor, she said.

“I’m of the belief that entrepreneurship sets in pretty early, and if you grow up in it, hearing it all day, all the time, that’s all you think about, you know,” she said. “You just become it.”

Liddy went to Daemen College, then an all-girls school, for her undergraduate degree in English. She was set to attend the University of Oxford in England for her master’s but instead got married and had three kids. When her oldest child started kindergarten, she went back to school for her master’s in library science and information studies and then later her doctorate in information transfer, both at the iSchool.

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Liddy began research in a then-new field known as natural language processing, which utilizes computers to analyze large quantities of language data. She started winning recognition and research grants from groups like the National Science Foundation.

“She was the golden girl, you know, when she was a student, because she had already gotten an NSF grant before she even got her dissertation,” said Barbara Kwasnik, a retired iSchool professor who became a faculty member around the same time Liddy did.

Eventually, Liddy found herself interested in  companies involved with natural language processing. In 1994, she started her own company located in the iSchool — TextWise — which used language algorithms to search for information in documents, and had clients like the United States Patent and Trademark Office. She left when she found herself unsatisfied in the creative work and became the founding director of the Center for Natural Language Processing at the iSchool in 1999. 

“The Liz intuition”

After former iSchool Dean Raymond von Dran stepped down, Liddy was appointed interim dean in 2007. She was close to von Dran, and when he died in July 2007 she initially didn’t want to apply for his former position, she said. But she enjoyed the work and on the last possible day to apply, she submitted an application. She was appointed dean in February 2008. 

Liddy carried on the leadership style that von Dran built, maintaining a school culture that faculty describe as a “School of One,” as there are no departments in the iSchool. Liddy has created a family-like culture between faculty and staff, said Sheila Clifford-Bova, the iSchool’s undergraduate program manager.

Anyone can go and talk to Liddy to run an idea by her, and if she thinks there’s potential she’ll make sure it gets done, several professors said. If a faculty member wants to take students to a conference, she’ll find room in the budget, Clifford-Bova said. If the iSchool is hiring a new faculty member, she will listen to everyone’s input.

Even if faculty or staff disagreed with Liddy, she wouldn’t make decisions top down, Kwasnik said — she listens to everyone’s perspective. 

Liddy is able to sense when something will be big or important — like how the iSchool was among the first to begin teaching social media courses. Liddy said her intuition is based on gut instinct and the entrepreneurial environment she grew up in. Those that know her call it “the Liz intuition,” said Art Thomas, the schools’ associate dean for academic affairs.

“I think you learn to trust after you’ve had successes,” Liddy said.

And even when things did go wrong, she wasn’t one to reprimand someone in her office, Thomas said.

“What she’ll do is to say, ‘What did we learn? How do we fix this, you know, help me figure this out,’” Thomas said.

Liddy’s in her office when she needs to get work done, but otherwise she’s walking Hinds Hall, talking to professors, staff and students. When Liddy needs to use the restroom, she has to go down a floor because Hinds Hall was originally an engineering building, and women’s restrooms were only put on some floors, Kwasnik said. Liddy takes one path there and another one back so she can talk to more people.

When Liddy walks past the NEXIS lab, a student-run research lab, she’ll often be the one to wave hello through the window first, said Josh Konowitz, a junior marketing and information management and technology dual major and current director of NEXIS. At one of NEXIS’ events, students were playing virtual reality games, so Liddy came and put a headset on too, he said.

“She can talk to an undergraduate student every bit as well as she can talk to a Ph.D. or a brilliant scientist,” said Marcene Sonneborn, a professor of practice in the iSchool. 

“The era of Liz”

Liddy views the iSchool as the hub of information and collaboration at the university, Thomas said. While each college has its specialty, information fits into every other school’s curriculum, so the iSchool can’t claim ownership of it. 

“Her whole view of us is that we’re the collaborator,” Thomas said. “If no one else is, we are. If no one else is willing, we will be willing. If no one else sees the possibility, we’ll see the possibility. If no one else wants to clean up something, we’ll clean up something.”

It’s this trait of collaboration — along with innovation, entrepreneurship and seizing the moment — that have defined “the era of Liz,” Thomas said. 

She made iSchool immersion trips — where students get to visit company offices and mingle with alumni in various national and global cities — open to all SU students, not just those in the iSchool, said John Liddy, her son and adjunct faculty member in the iSchool. She also attends parts of these trips herself, usually attending the alumni networking day so she can catch up with former students.

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But while the iSchool has collaborated with other schools on campus, Liddy also recognizes the importance of the iSchool’s resources and identity and she is protective of the school, Sonneborn said. The Martin J. Whitman School of Management, the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and the iSchool each have their own entrepreneurship programs. Liddy has collaborated to an extent with these other schools, but still “protects her turf,” Sonneborn said.

Liddy has also “unabashedly” focused on growth for the iSchool, Kwasnik said, which isn’t something Kwasnik has personally agreed with. She said she believed the iSchool should be kept small and high quality, while Liddy believed the school needed to grow.

“She sometimes forges on ahead without lots of attention to the consequences,” she said. “But her arguments are, ‘We’ve got to do this because if we don’t grow, you know, we sink.’”

With her focus on growth for the school, Liddy has also dramatically shifted the school’s gender parity. She’s created IT Girls, an annual weekend event during which the iSchool busses in groups of high school girls to explore information technology, a hallmark of her tenure, Clifford-Bova said. This year’s incoming iSchool class was 47% women and 53% men.

“When I first came, we were lucky to have 20% female,” Clifford-Bova said. “So a lot of work has been done, and it was her pushing to have the work done.” 

“Reinvent retirement”

For years, Liddy’s kids weren’t allowed to utter “retire,” John Liddy said. And when Liddy finally decided it was time to retire, she decided in a day, she said. She only told her children, the chancellor and the provost until she made her official announcement at the iSchool’s opening convocation last September.

Liddy wanted to stay in her position while the dean search occured, because she was afraid that if an interim was hired strong candidates wouldn’t apply, John said.

She will stay on the boards of a few organizations she’s currently a part of, like Syracuse’s Milton J. Rubenstein Museum of Science and Technology. She plans on buying a place in Charlotte, North Carolina, where her daughters and some of her grandkids live, she said. When she’s in Syracuse, she’ll stay at her home in Skaneateles.

But in May, for the first time in more than 30 years, Liddy won’t be working at the iSchool.

“Since the minute I met her entering the doctoral program until today, she’s always been running at a real fast pace,” said David Lankes, director of the University of South Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science and former faculty member in the iSchool. “And so I don’t know how she’s going to reinvent retirement, but she will.”

When reflecting on her accomplishments during her time at SU, Liddy said she is an optimist and focuses on the positive. She doesn’t tend to remember negative memories or think too much about past possibilities, like if she had gone to Oxford.

“It’s like, well, my God, my whole life would have been different,” Liddy said. “You know, I look at my kids, I look at my grandkids. If I had gone to Oxford I wouldn’t have them.”

Her proudest accomplishment is simply the success of the students — particularly the growth in the undergraduate program. She said she has felt an obligation to parents to ensure that students are successful and prepared for their careers, and she points to data like the iSchool graduates’ starting salaries, which rank the highest of all SU colleges.

When Liddy leaves Hinds Hall in May, she’ll leave a school that has grown significantly in students, faculty, programs and research under her leadership. She’ll leave a school that she grew in, from graduate student to dean.

While Liddy has some plans of what she will do after SU, she hasn’t completely laid out what’s in her future. But the one constant thing in her life — entrepreneurship — will always continue. She’s focused on having an open mind to people and opportunities at SU, and the mindset that encourages possibility won’t change after retirement.

“Like people, if you have a first impression, don’t just stop with the first impression,” she said. “You know, what’s the next impression? Give people, give opportunities, give ideas a chance.”  

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Published on April 21, 2019 at 11:24 pm

Contact Haley: hykim100@syr.edu