Janet Lucas Whitman ?59 named chair-elect of Skidmore board

Janet Lucas Whitman '59

Janet Lucas Whitman '59, a member of the Skidmore College Board of Trustees since 1994, has been named chair-elect. She will succeed Suzanne Corbet Thomas '62, who will step down in October after six years.

A resident of Summit, N.J., and Sharon, Conn., Whitman is known as a distinguished community activist and volunteer, and the former mayor of Summit.

"I'm truly delighted that Janet Whitman will be the College's next board chair," said Thomas. "The range of her experience in management and the arts, her passionate commitment to Skidmore and her innate good sense are wonderful assets that will serve Skidmore well. I know she will provide outstanding leadership at a time of tremendous promise for the College."

As a Skidmore trustee, Whitman has served as chair, vice-chair, and member of numerous Skidmore committees, assisting the college on such issues as infrastructure, budget and finance, compensation, special programs, trusteeship, strategic planning, academic affairs, advancement, and the Presidential Search Committee that brought Philip A. Glotzbach to the Skidmore presidency in 2003. She has served in numerous roles as a volunteer including Class Fund chair, reunion volunteer, and as a member of the national leadership gifts committee.

"Community service has been the focus of my volunteerism," said Whitman, who has channeled her energy, business acumen, and love of the arts into fostering the creative energy of the Skidmore campus. An artist who works in oils and pastels, Whitman chairs the National Advisory Committee of the college's Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, a role in which she helped choose the new museum's architect in the late 1990s. With her husband, Stephen, she has provided the college with the Whitman Family Scholarship and the Whitman Family Prize in Art History at Skidmore, awarded annually to an outstanding student graduating in the field of art history. In 1999, when the college honored her with an Outstanding Service Award, Whitman said that working for Skidmore always helped "renew and re-inspire her."

In the late 1980s, Whitman was elected to two terms in the unpaid position of mayor of Summit, a small city located about 30 miles west of New York City, after working as a community volunteer for 26 years. A 1994 profile in the Skidmore publication, Scope, described Whitman as venturing into politics "via the PTA-volunteer mode," where she combined "a motherly spirit with a hard-nosed approach to tackling government red tape, voter apathy, and the costs of plowing snow, fixing sewers, and collecting garbage."

As Summit's mayor, she was instrumental in raising funds for a new Summit City Hall, where a room is named in her honor, and for renovations to the Summit Free Public Library. In 1997, she led a volunteer group that raised funds for a pioneer project to provide high school teachers and students in the Summit public schools with computers for home use through the Mayor's Partnership for Technology.

President of her freshman class at Skidmore, Whitman withdrew before graduation but later completed her degree in Management and Business in 1982, through Skidmore's University Without Walls program. The Whitmans are the parents of three children?sons Stephen and David, and daughter, Sally, who earned a degree in art history at Skidmore in 1987. They also have six grandchildren.