The Reinvention of Rebecca Chopp – The Chronicle of Higher Education

Rebecca S. Chopp had a plan: Shed leave the chancellorship at the University of Denver after about 10 years, then return to the faculty and teach classes.

It would be a fitting cap to her career, returning to her first loves teaching and scholarship after years in administration, where shed often been the first woman to occupy a given post.

But in 2019, her fifth year as chancellor, she abandoned that timeline and announced her retirement.

In a message to the Denver community, Chopp said she was stepping down because of a complex neurological disorder, one that shed recently been diagnosed with and that she needed to attend to sooner rather than later.

Only a few in her inner circle knew what she wasnt yet ready to say publicly: Rebecca Chopp had Alzheimers disease.

Its a devastating diagnosis for anyone, but particularly for Chopp, now 69, whod spent her adult life in academe, a field that prizes the mind above all else. A feminist theologian by training, she was known for her stellar memory, whether she was reciting paragraphs of Hegel or supplying some forgotten detail during a meeting. Her friends jokingly called her a brain with a body attached.

Chopp never saw herself as consumed by her job, the way academics and business leaders can sometimes be. Still, much of her days and many of her dreams were dictated by her work and by the intellect that made that work possible.

Gradually, her mental faculties will dissipate, a striking irony for a woman who has spent a lifetime in thought. Who will she be then?

Chopp has long cast her lot with the underdogs.

People underestimate me. And I kind of enjoy that people underestimate me, she says.

Shes used smarts and a studied savvy to take control of her circumstances, from becoming the first in her working-class Kansas family to attend college to breaking glass ceilings in ministry and academe. Not one to lead marches or throw bottles through windows, she made her way as a quiet radical, a charismatic, witty leader with a stiff backbone.

In girlhood, Chopp brought home straight-A elementary-school report cards. She took solace in books because a severe speech impediment left her unable to speak well as a child, and she made regular treks to the pea-green bookmobile that stopped in her neighborhood. Captivated by the tales of Trixie Belden, Nancy Drews fictional girl-detective contemporary, she daydreamed of becoming a detective and solving mysteries.

But the environment Chopp was born into a tiny tract house in 1950s Salina, Kan., felt more limiting than that. Neither of her parents went to college; they were distrustful of education, which they felt smacked of elitism and often took young people away from their families. In their view, women werent supposed to work outside the home, and their daughters destiny was to marry, which is why Chopp took home economics, sewing, and typing, rather than college-prep classes, in high school.

So Chopp created her own curriculum. While she wasnt raised in a church, shed always been interested in spirituality. I just started reading everything I could at our local library, she says, which in Salina, Kan., was not a whole lot. She dug into Christian scriptures, the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita. And she joined the high-school debate team, drawing on her penchant for research and developing arguments.

Theo Stroomer, Redux for The Chronicle

Despite her parents misgivings, Chopp enrolled at Kansas Wesleyan University. There, in a first-year anthropology lecture on family systems, something clicked. It was as though her intellectual world and the more insular one shed been raised in exploded. More epiphanies followed. She saw a Mark Rothko painting that made words in a textbook come alive. In a course on religion and the environment, she caught a glimpse of how her self-designed high-school curriculum might turn into a college major, even a career.

This, Chopp began to think, is going to be my life.

And so it was. Chopp went on to seminary at the Saint Paul School of Theology, spent several years serving in churches as an ordained Methodist minister, and then headed to the University of Chicago for a Ph.D. For a kid from Kansas, Chicago was Disneyland for intellects, where, at a restaurant, she might find herself seated next to a famous cultural anthropologist or rhetorician or scientist.

Chopp joined the faculty of Chicagos divinity school, teaching feminist and liberation theology and running the theology program. She got married and became the mother of an artistic and sensitive son named Nate. When it rained at his baseball practices, hed often look over to see his mother pulling out an umbrella and a philosophy book.

Again and again, Chopp, who divorced when Nate was a preteen, confronted vestiges of the patriarchal system shed grown up in. Chopp says the United Methodist Church initially refused to ordain her, though shed graduated first in her seminary class, and UMC administrators delayed assigning her a church because, they told her, no one would want a female minister. At one point, she recalls, a church official tried to slash Chopps salary because she had a child. Chopp says she asked the official to hand her the phone so she could call the bishop and get a new appointment. Rather than hand over the phone, she says, the man restored her salary.

At the time, Chopp didnt tell anyone about the discrimination she was facing, fearing retaliation. She and the few women shed gone to seminary with struggled largely in silence, she says.

As Chopp transitioned into academe, she was determined not to let sexism stand in her way there, either. She remembers being the only woman in a meeting she attended at Emory, where she became an assistant professor after leaving Chicago. Her male colleagues were arguing, vying to be the loudest voice in the room. She was being ignored, except by one man who asked her to get him a cup of coffee.

Chopp decided she would not be ignored any longer. So she 5-foot-4 and petite stood up and stopped the meeting. Gentlemen, gentlemen oh, you arent behaving like gentlemen, she told her colleagues. Im going to my office, and when you are behaving like gentlemen again, please let me know, because Id so like to continue this meeting.

At the time, Chopp had just started at Emory. Some of the men in the room, she figured, hadnt even known who she was. But if you want to be heard, she reasoned, youve got to assert yourself.

Sometimes her very presence was assertion enough: Chopp was the first woman to be president of Colgate University, then Swarthmore College, and to be chancellor at the University of Denver.

At her side during her ascension into administration was Fred Thibodeau, whom she had met in seminary. Theyd reconnected after their respective divorces and gotten married, Thibodeaus two sons joining their blended family. Thibodeau followed Chopp, first to Atlanta and Emory and then to New Haven for Chopps one-year stint as dean of Yale Divinity School. As Chopp assumed the top posts at Colgate, Swarthmore, and Denver, he played a supporting role, using his background in university development to help her raise funds. Their days were full and frenetic, but they liked it that way.

That was life before everything changed.

In October 2018, Chopp was driving to her physicians office for an annual checkup when she got lost. Her GPS was on, and the drive wasnt a difficult one, but she couldnt make sense of where she was. She pulled into a parking lot and called Thibodeau for directions. Over the cars speaker, he guided her to the doctors office: Turn around here, go past the Texaco. Thibodeau chalked it up to her being busy and tired.

That day, the doctor ran through a list of routine questions. Has anything changed? she asked.

Yes, as a matter of fact, Chopp said. It was great: Lately shed been getting eight or nine hours of sleep every night. All her life, shed run on something more like five hours of sleep, and shed always joked that one reason she got so much done was that the nighttime hours gave her eight days a week, compared with everybody elses seven.

The sleep, the momentary disorientation on the way to the appointment something wasnt right, the doctor said. A physicians assistant gave Chopp a 10-minute test that day. Over the next few months, she saw a memory-care specialist and underwent several more rounds of testing, continuing her grueling work schedule and thinking of her medical trouble only occasionally. A PET scan in March 2019 gave Chopp the most definitive answer possible without an autopsy: Her results were consistent with a diagnosis of Alzheimers dementia.

For Chopp, the word dementia brought to mind images of her mother, Marion, who had struggled for years with paranoia and delusions. Could she have inherited the same affliction? The answer turned out to be no. Her doctors took an extensive family history, then concluded her mother probably had suffered from Lewy body dementia, a disease different from Alzheimers. That was a relief.

Still, Chopps doctor advised her to quit her job, and soon. Much of her new life would be built around delaying symptoms. Stress part and parcel of a university leaders job is not good for neurological conditions.

Chopp, who had come with a list of questions for the doctor, held herself together during the appointment. Only when she and Thibodeau got to the car did the tears flow. That night, in a booth at the back of the Mexican restaurant across the street from their apartment in downtown Denver, they drank too many margaritas, helped each other home.

Within days, Chopp got in touch with Denise M. OLeary, the chair of Denvers Board of Trustees. I need to see you, she told OLeary, and it needs to happen right away.

The two sat on OLearys back patio. It was a typical, beautiful Denver day, warm even in March. The morning shade was gone, and the sky was a vibrant blue. I hope everythings OK, OLeary said.

Well, no, its not, Chopp told her.

For a few minutes, they held hands and cried.

Then, OLeary, whose mother has advanced Alzheimers, had questions: What tests had she had done? How was Fred doing? What about Chopps son, Nate?

Eventually, the conversation morphed to work: Chopp had already decided she needed to step down that summer, in just three months, to preserve her own quality of life, and to avoid putting the university at risk if her condition suddenly deteriorated.

University of Denver

Couldnt Chopp stay on just a few more months, OLeary asked, as Denver searched for a new chancellor? Others could relieve Chopp of many of her duties in the meantime.

The answer was a firm no. This has to be it, Chopp told OLeary, worried that if she were to experience a rapid decline, there would be no room for error.

That day on the back patio, Chopp and OLeary sketched out the beginnings of a plan. Meetings would be scheduled, a draft statement prepared. Chopp would tell the board at its next meeting in April. The list went on, with Chopp working through the next steps, detached, almost clinical.

The conversation was one of the saddest of OLearys life.

Any terminal illness Chopp could have contracted would have been terrible, no doubt. But this one carried a particular kind of brutality. Chopp was a true academic, whose office was lined with books, who could readily recall passages shed read 20 years ago. For her to slowly lose her mind would, OLeary thought, be like a marathoner losing her legs.

For her to know that the way she is going to die, in all likelihood, is going to be by losing the thing that she has valued most her entire life just seemed like such a cruel, cruel twist of fate, OLeary says.

Its like, What do you do? Its your life.

In private conversations, friends and colleagues say, Chopp was unflinchingly candid about her diagnosis, and her feelings, from the start. But that was not, and to some degree could not, be the case for the public Rebecca Chopp, the one at the helm of a major private research university.

Thats why the campus announcement that Chopp sent on April 19, 2019, did not contain the word Alzheimers, and why she requested in that same announcement that no one ask for more details about this unexpected turn of events.

Chopp needed time to process her diagnosis, and stereotypes about the disease loomed large. When she started telling people she had Alzheimers, they would talk louder to her, or turn to Thibodeau instead. People seemed to think shed gone deaf, or had utterly lost her ability to form thoughts, just like that.

As she observed those reactions, and as she read and thought about Alzheimers, Chopp felt compelled to do something. Shed been diagnosed early, and her status as a university administrator and public figure had habituated her to public speaking and to advocating for important causes. Raising money for Alzheimers research and awareness of the importance of testing and early detection may not have been among the issues on her higher-ed agenda, but she saw no reason why they couldnt be added to her docket in retirement.

People are rightly fearful of this disease. But they also need to know that its not an immediate death sentence, that there are things you can do to help prevent it, Chopp says. On a personal level, both my husband and I thought, What do we have to lose?

Rebecca Chopp

In December 2019, nine months after her diagnosis, Chopp spoke publicly for the first time about having Alzheimers while accepting an award from DUs Knoebel Institute for Healthy Aging, which she co-founded. Even that disclosure, she recalls, was a spur-of-the-moment decision, made on the way to the event.

The audience stood and applauded, giving Chopp the encouragement she needed to keep going. She became a full-on advocate for Alzheimers awareness, motivated in large part by the scientific promise and importance of early detection. She wrote blog posts for the Colorado chapter of the Alzheimers Association, and appeared with Thibodeau in a video that was shown at the chapters annual gala.

Her reasoning for doing so is simple: Once an educator, always an educator, Chopp, now chancellor emerita of DU, says. She sees Alzheimers education as a continuation of purpose in this new life of hers.

Purpose, she reasons, is an ever-evolving kind of thing.

When her time at Denver ended, Chopp wrestled with existential dread. She and Thibodeau went on vacation that August, and she wondered, What am I going to do with myself?

Advice from her doctors provided some answers. Shed been told to do as much as she could to build new neural pathways, a task she threw herself into with the same gusto Thibodeau had seen her employ so many times in academic leadership. Already an avid hiker, she redoubled her lifelong commitment to fitness and spent hours lifting weights. She took classes in ballroom dancing with Thibodeau. She committed to a Mediterranean diet designed to promote brain health.

Chopps days are still full, but no longer rushed. She wakes up at 5:30 better than 4:30, when her alarm went off in her days as a college leader and prunes through 20 emails a day instead of 300. She works out for an hour and trains her puppy, a Pomeranian-Siberian husky mix named Budhy. In the evening, she and Thibodeau read and listen to music. She still consults with college leaders, taking three or four calls a week to keep a foot in the higher-ed world. And for several hours a day, she paints.

Chopp started painting soon after her diagnosis, at the urging of a friend. At first she hated it. Shed spent a lifetime believing she was bad at art.

But Chopp warmed to the canvas. She realized she could lose herself in it the way she used to become absorbed in her religious-studies texts. In the quest to distinguish one shade of a shadow from the next, she feels content, whole.

Ever the researcher, Chopp tried all styles of painting, reading about techniques and watching videos online. She found a teacher with whom she takes a weekly seminar-style class over Zoom, the students uploading photos of their works-in-progress to be critiqued by the group.

Chopp eventually adopted expressive realism as her painting style, and she particularly enjoys practicing the portraiture techniques of the Old Masters, with many glazed layers allowing light to shine through. The mix of technicality and creativity reminds her of the balance she often tried to strike in the classroom. And shes joked with her art teacher that painting has become her second Ph.D.

Right now, Chopp is working on two paintings a portrait of a girl sitting in a park, petting her dog, that came from her weekly class, and a landscape of the Colorado sunset that will be a gift to Thibodeau. But she has in mind a magnum opus of sorts, which shell soon begin. She plans to paint portraits of her family members and close friends, to place nearby as her memory fades. Shell write a story about each person to accompany the painting, and eventually, the paintings will be given to the people they show.

That, though, is yet to come.

Theo Stroomer, Redux for The Chronicle

As a trained theologian, Chopp has thought a lot about death. Religion, she thinks, provides context for the sadness and mystery surrounding death. Rather than explain away what death or grieving mean, she says, religion offers words to talk about them, to navigate unfamiliar territory and maybe arrive somewhere new.

In her time as a minister, Chopp often officiated at funerals. Shed say, jokingly, that she preferred them to weddings because funerals were more real. They involved more words, in the form of stories told about the person whod died. Sometimes the stories were not happy ones, as Chopp witnessed while helping one family bury a patriarch who had caused them a lot of pain. But they were real stories, and ones told within the Christian narrative of ongoing life and resurrection.

At the same time, words and stories only go so far. As a theologian, Chopp is all too familiar with the debates about what happens when we die, but to her, those questions are beyond understanding. As a scholar and administrator, she was accustomed to precision, but she also doesnt see rationality and ambiguity as contradicting one another. Instead, she thinks, they work together.

So it has been in the two and half years since Chopps diagnosis. Her symptoms have been minor. She visits her neurologist every four months for a check-in; her cognitive test scores have been stable the last three times shes taken them. She hasnt gotten lost since that first day headed to the doctors office.

There are small signs. Chopps short-term memory isnt what it once was, and she forgets appointments she used to have no trouble recalling. Shes learned to write plans onto a paper calendar immediately after making them, and to consult the calendar once a day. Shes stopped going to large social gatherings, finding that they require too much energy and focus. And the slight lisp shes had all her life, a remnant of her childhood speech impediment, is becoming more pronounced.

On the day of her diagnosis, Chopps doctor gave her a prescription that began with a simple edict: Live with joy. The rhythms of her life are driven by things that fill that prescription, and for Chopp, theres not much more to want. I kind of want what I have, she says painting, hiking, the company of friends and family who will be there for the long haul.

Chopp is determined to define for herself a new sort of life, one attuned to the needs of her changing condition but not dictated by it. Shes not a fundamentally different person than she was before her diagnosis, because shes never believed in identity as a fixed concept. In each of her professional roles, she learned new things about herself, met new people, tried new things.

Shes reinvented herself so many times. This, she knows, is one more reinvention.

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The Reinvention of Rebecca Chopp - The Chronicle of Higher Education