Anne Fraley has been named interim director of MTSU’s June Anderson Center for Women and Nontraditional Students. Fraley replaces Terri Johnson, who resigned effective July 1 to become assistant dean for student multicultural affairs at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Tex.
A nationwide search will be conducted for a permanent replacement at the Anderson Center. Fraley said she expects to hold the interim position for six to eight months.
A native of Hartford, Conn., who has lived in Tennessee nearly 12 years, Fraley is entering academia from a career largely spent in parish ministry in the Episcopal Church. Most recently, she was vicar of The Church of the Epiphany in Lebanon, Tenn., becoming rector when the church obtained parish status and later accepting the post of priest-in-charge.
Fraley said she believes both her work with the Young Women’s Christian Association and her experience as a priest will help her serve MTSU students.
“Churches face the same issues of how to meet the needs of people who go there voluntarily and with something in mind for themselves,” said Fraley.
Her clerical experience also will come in handy in serving MTSU’s female faculty and staff, she added, noting that women in the priesthood is “still a fairly new thing in this country, particularly in this part of the world. In that context, I ran into resistance related to issues of gender in the workplace and as a woman in authority pretty regularly.”
Reared in a Quaker household, Fraley now refers to herself as a “Quakopalian” who retains many Quaker values, including pacifism. She said she has a unique appreciation for diversity, however, thanks to family members that include one agnostic brother married to a Jew, another brother who married a Roman Catholic and then converted to Buddhism, a husband retired from the United States Army and a stepson and stepson-in-law still in the Army.
“My thinking certainly has been expanded and my compassion deepened for people of different beliefs and feelings that may seem opposed to one another,” Fraley said.
Fraley earned her bachelor’s degree from Earlham College in Richmond, Ind., in 1979 and her master’s degree in divinity from Yale University in 1994. She lives in Lebanon with her husband, Ken, and three dogs. |
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