The (Selfless) Queen of Selfies

Ed Caron ’06 remembers the day he met UNH Graduate School Dean Cari Moorhead, who was then an academic advisor in UNH’s business school.

“I went for advising help late at night, and she was holding court: there were dozens of kids in the same boat as I was,” recalls Caron, then a freshman lost in a bit of first-semester class-schedule confusion. “She explained everything to me and helped me get switched into the right courses. And the next day, when I went to class in a crowd of hundreds of kids, she remembered me. That really struck me from the beginning.”

Caron would go on to have a prominent career in UNH hockey: he transferred to Yale University for one semester in fall 2002, then returned to UNH the following semester, then left to play professional hockey for another year before finally returning to UNH to receive his bachelor’s in 2006. “I was one of Cari’s neediest students,” Caron said. “And she had the patience to help guide me through that.”

Like Caron, scores of students and colleagues have testified to Moorhead’s patience, support, dedication and resourcefulness during her 36-year career at UNH. Now, after spending the last eight years as dean of the Graduate School (including three as interim dean), Moorhead is retiring.

Few people’s identities are more deeply tied to the UNH campus and its inner workings than Moorhead’s, who has held numerous roles at UNH since she was first hired at the university in July 1988: academic counselor to business and economics students, associate director and program advisor at the Memorial Union Building, research associate for Student Affairs, director of undergraduate programs at the Whittemore School of Business (the predecessor of today’s Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics), associate dean of the Graduate School, interim dean of the Graduate School and her current role as dean.

An alumna of the Graduate School herself, Moorhead has overseen policy and program development, administrative operations, marketing, student admissions and recruitment. Her mission has been to build and maintain a standard of academic excellence at the university while ensuring that all students feel cared for — “and not just feel cared for but are cared for,” she says.

This mission is personal for Moorhead, an Irish immigrant and lesbian who was inducted to the UNH Diversity Hall of Fame in 2011, and who last year was named a Kidder Award recipient. Among Moorhead’s most significant accomplishments are the launch of campus-wide inclusivity initiatives like SafeZones, an educational program to raise awareness of LGBTQIA+ students, and the Pancake Breakfast, an annual event celebrating and recognizing the efforts of the LGBTQIA+ community at UNH. Both programs have thrived at UNH for more than 30 years. She was also a leader in the fight for same-sex couple benefits from the university, at a time before gay marriage was legal.

During Moorhead’s time as dean of the Graduate School, enrollments and graduation rates have steadily increased. But beyond numbers, she’s quick to assert that her biggest pride has been watching generations of students like Caron succeed.

“Lots of educators hope that the kinds of things you do day-in and day-out will make a difference in the lives of the people that you are serving,” Moorhead says. “Hearing it directly from one of those people, now with the benefit of time, is really tremendous. That’s what UNH is all about,” she added. “We genuinely care about people. … That’s what I have, in essence, invested in during my time at UNH.”

Caron and Moorhead’s connection extends beyond academics to sports — they still chat regularly: about life, work and hockey. Moorhead has loved athletics and extracurriculars since she was a young girl who watched her father lead a rugby club in Dublin, Ireland, and sparred about gender roles with her mother. She learned to cultivate community from her parents; her mother was known for “absolutely infamous” parties with family and friends, and her father was deeply embedded in team sports. As a young adult, Moorhead moved to Belfast in Northern Ireland to pursue a bachelor’s degree in sports studies and a graduate certificate in education at the University of Ulster.

She lived in Belfast during The Troubles, a violent sectarian conflict between 1968 and 1988, during which overwhelmingly Protestant unionists and overwhelmingly Catholic nationalists fought over whether Northern Ireland would remain part of the United Kingdom or become part of the Republic of Ireland. Moorhead’s sports studies program was rare in that it was “the only non-segregated teacher education program in the north of Ireland at the time, which meant there were Catholics and Protestants in the same class — the program was designed to mix us all together and try to create an environment where all students were learning various sports regardless of whether their sport was traditionally Protestant or Catholic,” Moorhead recalls. “That allowed me to better understand how sometimes people have very misunderstood experiences around people other than themselves, in part based on stereotypical ideas.”

Witnessing violence and conflict in Belfast fostered an urgency for Moorhead: to make a difference and create opportunities for people “based on who they wanted to be and what they wanted to do with their lives.

“If you’re in a war zone, and you know that you could get killed in the morning — that sounds a bit dramatic, but it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility — it changes how you live your life day-to-day,” Moorhead says. “It was powerful to have that experience where you think, ‘What do I really care about, and who am I, and what role can I play in this?’”

Moorhead left Ireland for the U.S. in 1985 to pursue her master’s degree in recreation management and a certificate of advanced graduate studies at Northeastern University in Boston. One year later, she applied for a green card in the 1987 Diversity Immigrant Visa Program. At that time, people applied to the program via handwritten or typed postcards: Moorhead said she used a typewriter to send 250 postcards to Washington, D.C., that year — 150 for her and 50 each for her brother and sister, who were both living in Ireland at the time.

Effort and luck paid off: She and her sister’s cards were both pulled.

At the time that she had come out as gay to herself and her family several years prior, she recalls gay people as being “invisible” in Ireland, and their job opportunities were limited, especially in the field of teaching. Just over a decade before Moorhead immigrated and took her first job at UNH as an academic advisor in the business school, the university had made national news over former New Hampshire Governor Meldrim Thomson’s infamous opposition to UNH’s first-ever Gay Student Organization. Twenty years after Thomson would deny the group a seat at his own “pancake breakfast,” Moorhead led the campaign to kick off UNH’s annual LGBTQIA+ event. In 2013, she achieved one of her “bucket list goals” — then-Governor Maggie Hassan attended and presented at the event (learn more about Moorhead’s involvement in this recent article: magazine.unh.edu/issue/summer-2023/#pride). Moorhead is also known for one of the simplest but most effective means of education: mentorship. Dr. Brent Bell ’89 ’05G, a professor of outdoor leadership and management, says he’s revered Moorhead since he was a student, working as a residential assistant in the ’80s. He recalls Moorhead in those days as part of a group that seemed so “young, wise, together and ethical — just trying to do good in the world.” In each of her roles, she has been remarkably “pro-student and committed to UNH.” Those descriptions ring true today, some three decades later.

Pro-student efforts are key milestones of Moorhead’s Graduate School tenure, including her launch of the Three-Minute Thesis competition, through which students learn to better communicate their research, as well as the Graduate Research Conference and the winter Writing Retreat — an event that’s been key to helping grad students “get over the finish lines” with doctorates and dissertations, says Dovev Levine ’01 ’15Ph.D., assistant dean for graduate student affairs and assistant vice provost for outreach and engagement.

There is no shortage of students and colleagues who will attest to Moorhead’s ability to adapt. One of the things that’s so impactful about her leadership, says Stephanie Bramlett ’06G ’11Ph.D., director of equity and inclusion at Phillips Exeter Academy, “is her willingness to put herself on the line,” but also her “willingness to pass the mic when someone else knows more about a topic or has a capacity to lead or has a great idea and they’re not being heard.

“As a grad student, I got the mic passed way before I knew what to do with it,” Bramlett says. “But I felt like I could speak because I knew my mentor, Dr. Moorhead, was right in the room with me, believing in me. That’s what I want to pass along to my students to inspire the confidence and leadership of the next generation.”

As Moorhead passes the mic once more to a new dean, she notes that she has always tried to effect cross-departmental change “in a way that had integrity, so that [programs and events] could evolve and serve the greater good over a long period of time — so that they were sustainable in their own right.

“It wasn’t ever really about me,” Moorhead adds. “It was more about creating the kind of environment in which those kinds of efforts can flourish.”