Nancy Cunniff is adamant she is not an academic — rather, her background is in sales. But since she joined One Book One Northwestern in 2010, her efforts have broadened the program’s outreach and formed countless partnerships between One Book and the NU and Chicago communities.
Cunniff was originally hired to assist One Book’s faculty chair, a rotating position leading the program. In 2010, this was SESP Prof. Dan Lewis.
Eugene Lowe Jr., who was assistant to the president at the time and oversaw the One Book program, asked Cunniff to stay on thanks to her knowledge and experience with the program. Cunniff became the director of One Book in 2016 and over the past 15 years has expanded the program — originally for Weinberg freshmen — across all undergraduate and graduate schools.
The Daily sat down with Cunniff to learn more about her time as One Book director following the May announcement of her upcoming retirement in August.
This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
The Daily: When did you realize you had a passion for books, and where did it come from?
Nancy Cunniff: I loved reading books as a young person. Then, through college, I don’t think I read a ton of books for pleasure, unless it was over the summer. And then working and then raising my kids, was a bit of a trick to get books in, but I’ve been in a book group for over 30 years, and I was one of the core members that has still stayed throughout the rotation.
The Daily: What have you learned over your 15 years in this role?
Cunniff: There are elements of a book that address certain things that you might be interested in, and you can have fun and learn at the same time. So I love interactive events, if we can make that happen. I love getting the students off of campus. I love seeing them connect with the community in some way.
I realized it’s really great to leverage stuff that’s already happening, just to see if students can connect it to the book. I’m not actually creating an additional program, I’m just influencing in some way connections to the book. And that’s how you make all sorts of partners.
When we did “Hidden Figures,” we had this amazing planetarium. So it’s like, ‘Wow, we have this amazing planetarium. I wonder if they would do a special tour for us.’ … And they were like ‘We’re on it.’ So they designated a day each quarter that would be a One Book day, and then we’d advertise it, and it would fill up and and then that made the people that are on our listserv who maybe never knew that existed be like, ‘Oh, this is so cool.’
Every year, people have connections that you would not expect, and so they leverage all of that networking that I would never know those people and just the random stuff that comes up.
I’m not a content expert, but I go to everything, so I just learned a ton from doing this stuff, and it really kind of changes how you think about things.
The Daily: What part of the job has been the most rewarding for you?
Cunniff: It’s fun to be around young people. I mean, young people, they have ideas. They have energy. I use them all the time to think about problem solving. … It’s fun to do that, and it’s fun to have them all meet each other.
And I’ll miss working with these brilliant faculty members. I mean, they’re hard pressed to go to a bad One Book program just because the level of what people know here is amazing, and they do a really good job. The people they bring to campus — I might not have ever heard of them, because their specialty is a field that I don’t know anything about — but I’ll sit there and it’s really interesting to hear about what they do.
The Daily: What legacy do you hope to leave at Northwestern as you retire?
Cunniff: I hope that people continue to find a way to work together in different disciplines and do kind of work as a community. … I just love all the relationships that have taken place.
And also looking at ideas from a different perspective. My mind has been changed and altered all the time because I thought I knew something about something I realized I didn’t really know. The more I delved into it, I realized how much I didn’t know and I think a lot of other people do that too — if they take the time.
The Daily: This upcoming year, One Book is on a hiatus. But assuming it does continue after that hiatus, what are your future hopes for the program?
Cunniff: I hope that they’ll kind of look at what we did, but I think everybody should have an opportunity to reinvent something.
I hope that they find a way to make the connections that we did. How they do that is probably not going to be the same way that I operated, because I operate in a very unusual way. I hope that they think about community connections, because I think that’s really important. I can’t stress that enough. Online is fine, and it’s great for some things, but really the difference in just being a community is major.
Email: [email protected]
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