Gretchen Schuette

Gretchen Susan Schuette (born 1946) is an American academic who is President Emeritus of Chemeketa Community College in the U.S. state of Oregon. She has served at multiple levels of leadership at Linn–Benton Community College and Mt. Hood Community College, and in other roles in higher education: as director, dean and president, as superintendent, as member of the Oregon State Board of Higher Education, and as Oregon's commissioner of community colleges. She has been described as "one of the most highly regarded educators and administrators in the West". was born in 1946. Her dissertation, Recent marine diatom taphocoenoses off Peru and off southwest Africa: reflection of coastal upwelling, was supervised by Hans Schrader.

Career Schuette has been a faculty member and administrator at Linn–Benton, Mt. Hood, and Chemeketa Community College, and served as Oregon's commissioner of community colleges. She held positions as dean of distance and continuing education, as well as director of Portland area programs for Oregon State University, and she was superintendent of the Gresham-Barlow School District.

Following her degree at Oregon State, Schuette worked at Oregon State University's School of Oceanography as a research assistant and associate. She was hired from 1981 to 1988 at Linn–Benton Community College as an instructor, then humanities department head, and later as director of several other college departments. Schuette was OSU’s first dean of distance and continuing education and director of Portland area programs.

She retired in 2007,

Philanthropy In 2008 Schuette made a US$50,000 donation to the Chemeketa Community Foundation to support the campus art gallery, "to do more exhibits that explore diversity and new viewpoints".

Schuette made the largest donation in the history of the college in 2011, when she gave a charitable remainder unitrust that had been established in 2006 in the amount of US$287,000. The gift supplements a scholarship fund begun while she served as president of the college, "for people who have some aspect of their lives, whether ethnicity or not having a great income or special circumstances, that make it more of a challenge to perhaps even see themselves at Chemeketa".

Selected publications

Awards, honors

2002 Tenison Haley Outstanding Individual Contribution Award of the Oregon Diversity Institute Conference 2011 Gretchen Schuette Art Gallery at Chemeketa Community College, "which faculty and the Chemeketa Community College Foundation asked be named for the former president".