When Susan Resneck Pierce stepped down from the presidency in 2003, she and her husband moved to Florida to spend time with her daughter, son-in-law, and eventually two grandsons. To start off the 2026–27 academic year, former Arches editor Chuck Luce checked in with President Pierce to update the community on what her work and world has looked like since retirement.
In 2003, Susan Pierce stepped down from the Puget Sound presidency to care for her husband, Ken, who had had two strokes. “After Ken died [in 2006], I realized that I was happily seeing my daughter and the kids every day, and I was too young to stop working,” she says. “So I thought, I’ll stay in Boca and do a little consulting and a little writing.”
As president of SRP Consulting, she’s advised colleges and universities where she coaches presidents, advises boards, consults on shared governance and strategic planning, and conducts presidential reviews. She has also worked with hospitals, national foundations, a symphony orchestra, volunteered on several boards (co-founding the Festival of the Arts Boca, now in its 21st year), and written books (on the college presidency and on governance) and numerous articles, mainly for Inside Higher Ed. She recently facilitated board retreats in California, Texas, New York, and Arkansas. And she gave the plenary address last fall to 500 nursing-college deans.
“I have flunked retirement with a vengeance,” she says. “But my best days still are spent with my family. Until the boys graduated from high school a few years ago — they’re now 21 and 23 — I saw them every day. I was pretty much their chauffeur. I think I've seen every kid's movie ever made.”
Home for Pierce is a fifth-floor condo with enormous windows and a wrap-around balcony overlooking the Intracoastal Waterway. Her place is filled with art, including Chihuly glass. And books, of course. Books everywhere. On the coffee table: a family photo book of a trip to Italy and Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize-winning All the Light We Cannot See (Doerr’s late father-in-law was former trustee Hal Eastman ’60). In bookcases around the apartment are volumes on higher education and numerous works of fiction. She especially prizes a copy of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man inscribed for her by the author, whom she met twice while editing a book of essays on that novel. Pierce also now treats herself to mysteries and periodically re-reads books she loves. “There was a period when I re-read Anna Karenina every year.”
Pierce still keeps in regular touch with Puget Sound colleagues, trustees, and alumni from across the generations. “I loved being with our students, who were simply terrific,” she says. “The board was one of the best I have worked with. The faculty and the staff were unbelievable pleasures — we traded in good ideas.”
