From first-generation college student to Newman’s longest-serving president

Noreen Carrocci, the longest-serving and first laywoman president of 86-year-old Newman University, is retiring Dec. 31 from a job she’s called “the most joyful position” she’s ever had.

It almost didn’t happen because Carrocci, a native Ohioan who had earned her master’s and doctoral degrees at the University of Kansas, didn’t see herself living in Kansas again when she was initially offered the job at Newman, the only university founded by the Adorers of the Blood of Christ.

Now she doesn’t have plans to leave Kansas.

After becoming heavily involved in championing not only Newman University, but the city of Wichita and what it has to offer, Carrocci, 66, and her husband, Bob Benson, are planning to stick around after her retirement.

Benson, 76, a retired university information technology administrator and consultant, is devoting more time to his artistic career as a photographer with showings in Wichita galleries and will graduate from Newman in May with a master’s degree in theology.

“We just love the community,” she said during a break from cleaning out her second-floor office in Sacred Heart Hall earlier this month. “It’s been fun to be a part of it — the whole flag thing, pride in place, along with Together Wichita and the Difference Makers.”

Newman University has been a major player in Together Wichita and the Difference Makers, two community initiatives that have highlighted organizations and people in the area through community service projects, advertising campaigns and awards.

Her impact

During her 12 ½ -year tenure, Carrocci has been a vocal cheerleader and advocate for Newman University, touting its benefits of being an affordable small Catholic university that welcomes all faiths and helps students not only get an education for a career but become better people and citizens. The university calls that mission “empowering students to transform society.”

Under Carrocci’s leadership, the first-time student population grew 67 percent, the four-year graduation rate improved by 30 percent and student retention rates have been at an all-time high, according to university officials. The university also added more degree programs, including a seminary program, and built a new science center.

One of the top highlights during her presidency, Carrocci said, was having Newman’s accreditation reaffirmed for 10 years by the Higher Learning Commission, which sets standards from ethics to students to how the university is run.

“They found we met all criteria with no improvements needed,” she noted.

Carrocci, who became Newman’s president on July 1, 2007, said Newman’s accomplishments under her leadership really aren’t hers alone.

“That’s everybody’s responsibility here at Newman and everyone contributed,” she said. ‘It’s not what I did.”

But some have felt she’s earned a reputation of doing good at the university. When donors Bill and Pucci Allen gave large enough gifts to Newman to get naming rights to a building, they insisted the building be named after Carrocci instead.

“We’d only met face-to-face once when we went down (to Texas) to thank them for the first gift,” Carrocci said.

In 2016, a freshman residence hall was renamed in her honor. Carrocci, who helped students move into the hall, always enjoyed the surprised look they gave her when they realized the building’s namesake was helping them get settled in.

She’d respond, “Yeah, it’s me. Welcome to my house.”

She’d see some of those freshmen again when she would teach a freshman orientation class.

Teresa Hall Bartels, who attended Newman’s predecessor, Sacred Heart College, remembers her first meeting with Carrocci in 2010.

“I was immediately taken in by her infectiousness, her enthusiasm and affection for Newman,” said Bartels who owns a leadership consulting firm in Chicago and has been on Newman’s board of trustees for the past several years. Bartels will become Newman’s interim president Jan. 1.

“She’s made a mark in Wichita and the region and has brought more people to campus, too, through various outreach efforts,” Bartels said.

In 2013, when the university renewed Carrocci’s contract for five more years, she said she would focus on two initiatives: raise money for a major fundraising campaign and spread the word that an education at Newman could be affordable. Both ended up being successful, even as Carrocci underwent treatment for stage 2 lung cancer.

The campaign raised more than $30 million to build a new science center named in honor of the Catholic Diocese of Wichita’s Bishop Emeritus Eugene J. Gerber, renovate Eck Hall, and bolster student scholarships and endowment funds.

As far as Newman being affordable, Carrocci said, “People leave here with less debt than they do at (Wichita State University), KU and (Kansas State University).”

Her tenure hasn’t been without some controversy, however. Within the spread of a few months at the beginning of 2019, five employees had sued the university, with most claiming retaliation related to investigations of Title IX complaints. Title IX is a federal civil rights law that bars schools that receive federal funds from engaging in sex discrimination and retaliating against a person who files a complaint. Carrocci said she couldn’t comment on the cases since they dealt with personnel matters.

Catholic ties

A first-generation college student, Carrocci earned her bachelor’s degree in speech communications and psychology at Miami University in Ohio, considered a public Ivy school, and then attended graduate school at KU because she wanted to study with the professors who’d written the first textbook on interpersonal relations.

It took her 10 years, paying $90 a month, to pay off her student loans, Carrocci said. She considers it the best investment she ever made, and she tells students that too.

Carrocci, the daughter of a steel mill worker, had attended Catholic schools growing up in Steubenville, Ohio, but her first experience with Catholic higher education was when she became a communications professor at St. Louis University, a Jesuit university.

She got a taste for leadership and administration when she became president of the university’s faculty senate and an associate dean. She later became a college dean at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, and then provost and vice president at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama.

After she initially turned down the Newman presidency in 2007, Carrocci said, “I was having buyer’s remorse. I was teaching a leadership class at Spring Hill College for mainly seniors … and they were talking about taking risks, and I was feeling I hadn’t taken that risk.”

She got an email that night from a search committee member, “wondering if the Holy Spirit might be working on you,” she said, and asked if she’d reconsider. Then more calls came from others involved with the university, asking if she’d come for a second look.

Her Catholic faith is very important to her and during that visit, she said, she learned more about the passion the Adorers of the Blood of Christ has for education and the university.

This fall, she and her husband were among a Newman contingent that attended the canonization ceremony that made the university’s namesake a saint.

“That was pretty spectacular,” she said.

The group also visited the international headquarters of the Adorers of the Blood of Christ and saw the remains of the order’s founder, Saint Maria de Mattias. “I can’t even tell you how overcome I was to be in her presence,” Carrocci said.

A consultant with extensive experience finding presidents for Catholic colleges and universities has been hired to find Carrocci’s replacement, according to Newman spokesperson Clark Schafer. Board of trustees member Jason Searl is heading up the search committee.