Institute for Women’s Leadership Excellence Award

Claire L. Rolfs, Arts ’73 u 
West Bend, Wis.

Claire Rolfs didn’t initially plan to attend Marquette. “I was escaping a women’s college in New York and had no other plans, other than to not go back,” she explains. “I applied to other schools that summer and no one had a dorm room for me. At the last minute, Marquette took me in, and it was instantaneous love.”

On campus, she discovered the Marquette mission and “the idea of being of service,” she says. Today, Claire is president of the Thomas J. Rolfs Foundation, named for her late father. “I have the best job in the world,” she acknowledges, a position that allows her to support causes she values.

For example, Claire has ensured that Marquette supports the role of women in leadership. When the university launched the Explorer Challenge, an annual competition that provides seed funding for projects pitched by faculty, staff, or students, Claire noticed that women were proportionally underrepresented among the proposals.

This led the Rolfs family to make a $5 million endowment commitment to Marquette to establish the Institute of Women’s Leadership (IWL) in 2019. Designed to advance women’s leadership locally and globally, the IWL has already hosted a speaker series about pay equity, a virtual conference about women’s suffrage, and a summer research program that has supported more than 18 projects so far.

Claire is honored to receive the IWL Excellence Award. “Years ago, when enjoying 10-cent beer at the Avalanche,” she says, “I could not have imagined any of this.”

Fun Fact:

Name someone (past or present) with whom you’d like to have dinner.
I couldn’t possibly narrow down the list of people to have dinner with. The list is endless!

Leave a congratulatory message for Claire!

u Celebrating a Marquette Reunion