Innovator Vol. 37 No. 1 - Fall 06: Legacy of Leadership
Return to contentsLinda Rayle
The phones don’t ring nearly as often as they did eighteen years ago, when she first started working at the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education, says Senior Administrative Assistant Linda Rayle. Not because the Center is less busy—hardly!—but because most people now e-mail. Another change she’s observed is that as the Center’s reputation has grown, more of its graduate students come from out of state and from overseas. “We get a lot of exceptional people applying to our programs,” emphasizes Rayle, who staffs the admissions committee.
Her “favorite part of the job” is working with the students, says Rayle, who gives them advice on everything from how to sign up for classes to where to buy a watch. She keeps a busy schedule: assuming the job a year ago, she took the place of two people. Rayle’s arrival was good news to people who knew her, like Professor Marvin Peterson. “She had the reputation of someone who learned new things fast,” e-mails Peterson. “I think I speak for the other faculty in saying we have not been disappointed.”
Rayle is highly visible in the Center, in contrast to her previous job at the former Consortium for Community College Development, where for fifteen years she was “tucked away in a part of the building where we didn’t get any traffic at all.” Still, Rayle had her work cut out as the organization grew from a membership of 18 community colleges to, at its peak, 160. Rayle possesses a “rare mix of people skills and financial acumen,” says her former boss, Professor Richard Alfred. “We couldn’t afford to have things dropping through the cracks. And with Linda there, nothing did.”
A native of Detroit, Rayle received her degree from U-M in 1972, marrying her husband, Roger Rayle, when she was still an undergrad. Rayle smiles when she recalls that she met him early in her freshman year, at a mixer at the Mosher Jordan dorm where Roger had brashly gone to recruit female students to his off-campus party. “Being the cautious type,” Rayle recalls, she consulted her resident advisor before she and several other girls “squished into my future husband’s Corvair” and drove to his party.
After she graduated, Rayle received a library science degree from U-M but couldn’t find work near Ann Arbor, where she and Roger, who works in computers, settled. A few years later she received an M.B.A. from U-M, with a concentration in marketing. She then bought car parts for Ford but disliked the “high-pressure atmosphere” and quit after less than a year, moving to a computer company. Eventually, after taking several years off to raise her two children, she started at the Center as a research secretary, and, when grant money for her job ran out, moved on to the Consortium.
Her ties to U-M have only strengthened, says Rayle, since her daughter, Lisa, graduated from the university and her son, Michael, is now a junior. Although she has started to ponder retirement, she acknowledges she’s not sure what she’d do with her time. That’s never been a problem at the Center. “I’ve enjoyed all my jobs here,” she says. “I’ve never been bored.”
