LeAnn Pauley Heard
Vice President and Dean for Student Affairs
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Every day for 16 years, LeAnn Pauley Heard ‘91 has been coming back to her alma mater. “I just have a heart for this place,” says the first female member of the President’s Cabinet. “Every day I drive on campus I feel so blessed that this is the place God has called me to serve.”
And, unless she hears otherwise from above, this is where she’s staying.
LeAnn spent her first 18 years on a farm in Harlan, Iowa. Population: 5000. When she wasn’t at gymnastics or cheerleading practice, she was hanging out at the First Baptist Church of Harlan.
“When the doors of the Church were open, we were there,” she says.
When it came time to choose a college, there was really only one choice.
“Judson was the place for American Baptists at that time,” she says.
She came to Judson in 1974 as a freshman and loved every minute of it—the close relationships between students and faculty, the opportunities for growth in character and faith, the challenging classes, the fun of campus life. Coming from humble Harlan means, LeAnn helped pay for her education with odd jobs, working in catering at a local hotel, as a lunch lady in an at-risk elementary school, and returning home in the summers to weed bean fields and detassle corn.
Midway through her college career, LeAnn took a brief sabbatical from campus life to get married, start a family, and sing with an evangelical music group.
She returned in 1989 at the request of former Dean of Students (and later Judson’s fourth president), Dr. James Didier, to work in student development and also to finish her degree. She went directly on to graduate school at Trinity International to earn an M.A. in Counseling Psychology.
In 2000, LeAnn was appointed to the position of Dean of Students and, in 2004, served as interim chief student development officer while a search committee worked to fill the post of Vice President for Student Development.
A year-long, extensive national search led the committee back home to Judson, to LeAnn, to the first woman ever to serve on the President’s Cabinet—an accomplishment that LeAnn sees not as a tallymark for the female gender, but as God’s will for Judson.
“It is not a gender thing at all,” she says. “God has called these seven people to see the big picture and to lead Judson into the future. And I am blessed to be one of them.”
LeAnn says it all happened in God’s timing. Describing herself as an “almost empty-nester,” with children in high school and college, she is at the point in her life when she has the time to fully devote herself to the cause of helping students get to a higher place.
Small town girl. Big picture thinker. LeAnn Pauley Heard.
You may reach LeAnn Pauley Heard at 847-628-1561 or lpauleyheard@JudsonU.edu