A New VP for Alumni Relations
The first sentences of the LinkedIn profile of Cheryl Bascomb ’82 read: “Not your typical Mainer. Not your typical hockey player. Not your typical marketing leader.” That only skims the surface. Bascomb, who officially began her new role as Dartmouth’s vice president for alumni relations on June 1, is not your typical anything.
She left Bethesda, Maryland, for Hanover in 1978, six years after the College went coed. “It was an interesting time at Dartmouth,” says Bascomb, who majored in psychology, played rugby, captained the track and cross-country teams, and joined Kappa Kappa Gamma. “It was not intimidating to go to an environment that had been and remained largely male, because my parents had given me enough confidence that if someone was treating me differently, there would be hell to pay.”
That attitude came in handy. As an athlete, Bascomb realized female athletes had to take a circuitous route to drop off their practice clothes at Davis Varsity House for laundering—walking outside and around the gym to a side entrance, while male athletes used an indoor shortcut. “The football team had the run of Davis,” she says. “The men’s track team didn’t have to go around, but the women did, because the football team might be in their underwear.” She spoke up, and when nothing changed, she marched straight into that crowd of men to drop off her laundry. “It was my own little protest.”
Bascomb has worked in marketing for more than three decades, most recently as director of marketing and business development at BerryDunn, northern New England’s largest independent CPA and consulting firm. Previous gigs include marketing and leadership roles at Unum Life Insurance, Gofish.com, and L.L.Bean, where, in 1989, she made national headlines when she became the first African American to appear in the L.L.Bean catalog. “That was my 15 minutes of fame,” she says. (Employees served as models back then.)
Sarah Marble was fresh out of college when she met Bascomb in the marketing department at Unum. “She had so much energy and was so positive. She took a genuine interest in everybody— she left a mark,” says Marble, a lawyer at Mass Mutual, who says Bascomb was the reason she started running again. “She was so much faster, but if she had a great story at the bottom of the hill, we’d all kill ourselves to get to the top to hear it. We were j ust trying to keep up so we could hear that story. She made us better both professionally and on the track.”
Bascomb has held numerous volunteer positions at the College, including vice president of the Association of Alumni, president of the Dartmouth Club of Maine, and alumni admissions interviewer. Her husband, David Van Wie ’79, Th’84, writes his class newsletter. They’re also Dartmouth parents: Daughter Rosa graduated in 2012. “I saw through her eyes a different Dartmouth—a more contemporary, more diverse Dartmouth, a good place for gender balance,” says Bascomb. (Their son went to Amherst. “He’d had enough of Dartmouth,” she says.)
Thirty-four years after Bascomb followed her husband to Portland, Maine, for his career as an environmental scientist, he’s following her back to Hanover so she can lead Dartmouth’s alumni engagement around the world. “There is a very diverse alumni body, and we want to make sure we welcome everybody and meet their needs regardless of their culture, belief, or point of view, where they live, their age, or where they are in their lives,” she says.
In her new position, Bascomb will oversee a department of 39 people and coordinate more than 13,000 volunteers across the College’s clubs, classes, Alumni Council, and other groups. Bascomb declined to reveal the budget she’ll oversee.
Asked what she’s most proud of, Bascomb says her family—and herself. “I try to be fearless,” she says. “I took up ice hockey at 44. I live in Maine as a black woman, in an area that isn’t typically a large population of black people. I believe in taking on new things, taking risks, and trying to grow from those experiences.”
