Claire Gaudiani, Embattled Connecticut College President, Dies at 79
Her unusual approach to building bridges between her wealthy campus and its beleaguered hometown led to a Supreme Court case and a faculty revolt.
Claire Gaudiani, who as president of Connecticut College sought to implement a sweeping vision of redeveloping the college’s host city, New London, which led to a landmark Supreme Court case on eminent domain — and to a faculty revolt that helped force her resignation after 13 years — died on Oct. 16 in Manhattan. She was 79.
Her son, D. Graham Burnett, said the cause of her death, in a hospital, was leukemia.
During Ms. Gaudiani’s tenure as the hard-charging president of Connecticut College, a small liberal arts school, its endowment grew fivefold, its national profile soared, and applications for admission rose significantly.
Like many college presidents, she wanted to build bridges between her wealthy campus on a hill and its beleaguered hometown.
Unlike most college presidents, she actively donned a second hat, becoming chief executive of the New London Development Corporation, a quasi-public entity that used taxpayer money to revitalize the city, one of the poorest in Connecticut.
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A scholar of 17th-century French literature, Ms. Gaudiani possessed a charismatic personality and a decisive style that would have been at home in a corporate suite. She lured the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer to build a $294 million research campus on the site of a burned-down linoleum factory in New London. She then sought to bulldoze a decaying neighborhood to make way for a hotel, condominiums and an “urban village” for office workers.
Most homeowners willingly sold. But when a handful in the Fort Trumbull neighborhood resisted, the development corporation moved to seize their properties using the power of eminent domain.
Several sued, including Susette Kelo, a nurse who wanted to stay in the cute pink Victorian she had renovated, which had a view of the Thames River.
The Supreme Court, in Kelo v. City of New London, ruled in 2005 that it was permissible for the city to seize private homes for use by a private developer under the “takings clause” of the Fifth Amendment.
The decision was a legal landmark, though it set off a prairie fire of resistance across the nation and the ideological spectrum. More than 40 states revised their eminent domain laws to protect the rights of property owners.
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The case inspired a book, “Little Pink House” (2009), by Jeff Benedict, and a 2017 movie of the same name, starring Catherine Keener, that portrayed Ms. Kelo as a citizen activist in the mold of Erin Brockovich. Reviewing the book in The New York Times, Dahlia Lithwick noted that it cast Ms. Gaudiani, hyperbolically, as a “Cruella de Vil” character.
The standoff between Ms. Gaudiani and the Fort Trumbull holdouts drew national attention. Ms. Gaudiani defended herself as a champion of social justice, willing, as she put it, to leave “skin on the sidewalk” to better people’s lives. Clearing dilapidated housing for new development, she said, would raise tax revenues for New London schools and hospitals.
“You are building economic assets in a city that has no options,” she told The Hartford Courant in 2001. The newspaper noted her “fiery zeal” for redevelopment.
She envisioned turning struggling New London into a “hip little city” — a phrase that sounded like a declaration of class warfare to her opponents. After stepping down under pressure from Connecticut College in 2001, she received $898,410 in compensation for the year, including severance pay, the highest of any private college president in the country. She left the development group soon after.
Then, in 2009, as its tax abatements ran out, Pfizer ended up abandoning the city. The Fort Trumbull neighborhood, much of it leveled, sat mostly undeveloped for more than 20 years.
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Ms. Kelo said that both she and Ms. Gaudiani had been “pawns” of the city’s political leaders in the 1990s.
“Myself and my Fort Trumbull neighbors, we have not forgiven or forgotten what the City of New London did to us,’’ she said in a text message. “We simply have learned to live our lives around the tragedy.”
Damon Hemmerdinger, who worked under Ms. Gaudiani at the New London Development Corporation, said in an email that the revitalization of Fort Trumbull came to a halt because of the lengthy litigation and a limit on the State of Connecticut’s funding. “Claire,” he added, “was deeply committed to creating economic opportunity for New Londoners.”
Well before the Supreme Court sided with the developers, Ms. Gaudiani faced a backlash from Connecticut College’s faculty and students.
Her take-charge style irritated professors, who felt left out of the decision-making process about college affairs. Students protested the school’s efforts to bulldoze longtime city residents’ homes. Ms. Kelo joined one protest on campus.
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In May 2000, three-fourths of the college’s tenured professors signed a petition calling for Ms. Gaudiani’s resignation.
“Faculty members and townspeople are both upset about her highhanded management style,” a history professor, Michael A. Burlingame, told The Chronicle of Higher Education at the time.
In October 2000, Ms. Gaudiani announced that she would step down at the end of the academic year. She said her choice was unrelated to the faculty uprising, but Mr. Benedict, in “Little Pink House,” maintained that it clearly was.
Claire Lynn Gaudiani was born on Nov. 10, 1944, in Venice, Fla., the eldest of six children of Vera (Rossano) Gaudiani and Vincent Gaudiani Jr. Her father was a fighter pilot in World War II who later went to work as an executive for RCA. Her mother managed the household.
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Ms. Gaudiani earned a B.A. in French language and literature from Connecticut College in 1966 and a master’s and Ph.D. from Indiana University.
She met David Burnett when they were both graduate students; they married in 1968. He became a dean at the University of Pennsylvania and an executive with Pfizer.
Besides their son, she is survived by her husband; their daughter, Maria Burnett; five grandchildren; her mother; a sister, Linda Gaudiani; and two brothers, Vincent and Michael.
Ms. Gaudiani was the acting associate director of the Joseph H. Lauder Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, a program for management and international studies, before becoming president of Connecticut College in 1988, at 43. She was the first woman and the first alumna to head the school.
Under her leadership, the college’s endowment grew to almost $166 million from $32 million. She raised the funds for 26 endowed professorships, and during her tenure the college spent $60 million on new construction and building upgrades.
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After stepping down, Ms. Gaudiani published a book about philanthropy, “The Greater Good” (2003), and, with her husband, “Daughters of the Declaration: How Women Social Entrepreneurs Built the American Dream” (2011).
She was a longtime board member of the Henry Luce Foundation and taught, beginning in 2007, at New York University’s George H. Heyman Jr. Program for Philanthropy and Fundraising.
In 2001, Ms. Gaudiani told The Hartford Courant that being a college president was like having “a 6-week-old who stayed 6 weeks old.”
“They want to eat all the time, they want to be in your arms, they don’t want to sleep,” she explained. “And anytime they’re quiet for five minutes and you start to do something, they wake up or they need to be changed or fed. Being a college president, the way I tried to do it, was like having a permanent 6-week-old.”
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