Fresh Start, Familiar Face

President Eric M. Turner leads Lasell University into a new era

Home / Alumni / Leaves Magazine: Fall 2023 / Features / Eric M. Turner: Lasell's 10th President

A New Era at Lasell University

By David Nathan
Photos by Todd Dionne

Eric Turner invites a colleague into the president’s office in Brennan Library with a wide smile and outstretched hand. He settles into his desk chair and glances toward his computer to check for messages.

Although a frequent visitor to the office through the years, he now sits behind the desk rather than in front of it. Five weeks after becoming Lasell’s 10th president on July 1, there are still boxes to unpack, pictures to hang, and mementos to arrange.

Turner seems eminently comfortable in his new office — as well he should. After more than three decades in a variety of senior roles at Lasell, he is uniquely qualified to lead the institution in its 172nd year of existence.

While proud to be the first Black president of Lasell, the 67-year-old Turner is somewhat unimpressed by the distinction. The Turner family is accustomed to firsts.

His father, Jesse Sr., longtime president of Tri-State Bank in Memphis, was the first Black certified public accountant in Tennessee and first Black chair of the Shelby County Board of Commissioners, the governing body of the state’s largest county. The World War II veteran also served as treasurer of the NAACP and president of the Memphis chapter. For his contributions to the Memphis community, a public park on the south side of the city was named in his honor.

His mother, Allegra, also achieved many firsts in her life. She taught junior high, high school, and college, and later served as a career counselor and administrator in the Memphis Public Schools. She completed enough postgraduate work for a doctorate, but never wrote a dissertation due to raising five children and being engaged in a host of civic efforts; she was active in the Civil Rights Movement and led efforts to desegregate Memphis State University. Turner’s brother, Jesse Jr., was the first Black student to attend a white high school in the Memphis area when he integrated Christian Brothers High School in 1963. He later was national treasurer of the NAACP.

President Eric M. Turner walking toward Brennan Library

While proud to be the first Black president of Lasell, the 67-year-old Turner is somewhat unimpressed by the distinction.

The Turner family is accustomed to firsts.

Turner is a lifelong learner, continually synthesizing lessons learned through his personal and professional experiences. Sports was a particularly good teacher for the former hurdler, middle-distance runner, and football player.

“Sports is about failing and learning from failure,” he explains.

On the track team at Christian Brothers High, he ran the hurdles and 400 meters and was a member of the mile relay team. He compensated for his lack of speed by being technically proficient. Through hard work and persistence, he mastered the intricacies of the hurdles — launching himself properly and taking the appropriate number of steps between hurdles.

“I could beat people who were faster than I was but who lacked the right technique,” he remembers.

Playing football — he was a lineman in high school and defensive back on the Harvard freshman team — taught Turner the value of teamwork and importance of self sacrifice for the collective good.

Through his high school coaches, he notes an early example of differentiated learning; they customized instruction to meet individual needs, a bedrock principle of education. If the coaches saw that a player did not understand a point they were trying to teach, he remembers how quickly they would pivot to a different teaching technique.

“They understood that you weren’t a bad athlete, but that they needed to teach it another way,” Turner says. “It taught me at a young age that the way I try to explain or teach something might not work for everyone and I need to try an alternative. That was most helpful to me.”

President Turner with a student at studio1851.

Before shifting to higher education, Turner worked in both the private and public sectors.

He graduated from Harvard with a bachelor's in economics and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

At each step along the way — marketing rep at IBM, vice president at Drexel Burnham Lambert, executive director of the Massachusetts State Lottery, senior vice president at State Street, and owner of Waban Consulting — he acquired people and relationship-building skills that served him well.

Through IBM’s rigorous sales training protocol, Turner learned how to pay closer attention to customers to better understand their needs. As he reviewed recorded mock sales calls with his manager, he discovered how much he had missed by not listening intently.

“Most people don’t listen. They are focused on the color of the wall or the sound they just heard,” Turner says. “At IBM I learned the importance of listening.”

As his career progressed, he merged those skills with a healthy respect for the value of hearing from people with a variety of backgrounds, experiences, and viewpoints.

President Eric M. Turner with a student in de Witt Hall.

"The more perpsectives you can bring to almost any situation, the better the outcome.

There is so much benefit as a leader to listening to what different people tell you. You have to recognize that differences in strata or position in an organization are just artificial and that everybody deserves to be heard.”

When then-Trustee Larry Finn invited Turner to lunch with Lasell President Thomas de Witt H’07 in 1991, he could not have imagined still being involved with the institution 32 years later.

“Within about five minutes after Tom started talking about Lasell, he had me hooked,” Turner remembers with a laugh. “It wasn’t just Tom’s passion and enthusiasm for Lasell, it was the culture of innovation that he had created.”

De Witt described a unique program in existence at the time that allowed single mothers to live on campus with their children while they pursued degrees. Another forward-thinking initiative had transformed one of Lasell’s Victorian houses into a bed-and-breakfast that hospitality students operated.

“This small institution trying these kinds of things was very attractive to me,” Turner says. “I wanted to be part of that.”

Since joining the Lasell Board of Overseers 32 years ago, Turner has held a number of leadership positions: chair of the Board of Trustees, Lasell Village trustee, vice president of graduate and professional studies, and, most recently, provost and chief academic officer.

Turner believes Lasell is well positioned to meet the challenges facing many small, tuition-dependent colleges and universities in New England: declining numbers of high school graduates, the escalating cost of higher education, and meeting the varied educational needs of adults in the workforce.

For inspiration, he looks to his innovative predecessors — de Witt and Michael B. Alexander — and the 172-year-old University’s remarkable ability to repeatedly adapt.

President Eric M. Turner walks around campus.

"We are here today because of the innovative decisions people made five, 10, and 25 years ago.

“We need to continue to offer programs to meet the needs and demands of students today and tomorrow.”

When he first joined Lasell in the late 1990s, the most popular academic program trained students to become physical therapy assistants. Today’s students are pursuing degrees in the health sciences, business, and fashion.

“We, as an institution, have to continue to evolve and grow,” he summarizes. “We must deliver the things that will bring us another 172 years into the future.”