Brenda Meadows Cooper ’65, ’73 MA, who led Alumni Affairs and the alumni association before her retirement three decades ago, died on December 1. From her time as a student at Woman’s College/UNCG Greensboro to her career in Alumni Affairs at UNCG, she embodied the ideals of the University and made an impact on thousands of students and alumni. Her late husband, Jim ’68, was a UNCG graduate, as well.
Her retirement from the University was the cover story for the Fall 1995 alumni magazine. “If Brenda Cooper is Gone, Will McIver Statue Be Next?” read the headline, suggesting just how important she was to the alumni community she served with such devotion.
As a freshman, she lived in Guilford Residence Hall. In a 1990 interview for the UNCG Centennial Oral History Project, she remembered that from strict rules about “lights out” to social life (including courting) in the residence hall parlors to competition between campus residence halls, life at Woman’s College was different than the student experience today. She also recalled the WC legacy of activism and many changes on campus as WC became the co-ed University of North Carolina at Greensboro in the mid-1960s.
In that 1995 “UNCG Alumni News” article at her retirement, she said, “As a student, alumna, and member of the Alumni Office staff, I have been involved with UNCG for nearly one-third of its first century.”
Her career in UNCG Alumni Affairs began when she was a student assistant in the Alumni Office. As she taught in Winston-Salem in the years after graduation, she stayed connected, serving on the Service Awards Committee and representing her class on the Alumni Board of Trustees. In 1968, she was hired as Assistant Director of Alumni Affairs by Barbara Parrish ’48. She became Executive Secretary of the Alumni Association and Director of Alumni Affairs, succeeding Parrish, in 1990.
At the time of her retirement in 1995, Cooper expressed gratitude. “Few people are blessed to find the perfect job and then to be able to work at it for more than a quarter of a century in an office as elegant as the Alumni House.”
What were her aspirations in retirement? At the time she said she wanted to “wear purple and pick more daisies.”
In a first-person piece, “My Last Letter from Home” – accompanied by the wonderful photograph, seen above, of her in the Alumni House – she wrote, “UNCG continues to be a very special place. Each of us tends to remember the University’s best times as those years when we were students. We sometimes ‘disremember’ that just as we have changed to adapt to our changing life styles and the demands of society, so the University must change to meet the needs of today’s students just as it met ours when we were on campus. The things that made the University so special to us remain – the excellence of the faculty and the devotion and support of alumni – these are our sources of stability and strength.”
As she told her fellow alumni in the final sentence, “Together we must remember that UNCG is our college home where we are needed and always welcome.”
A Celebration of Life will be held at a future date.
By Mercer Bufter ’11 MA and Mike Harris ’93 MA, UNCG Magazine (Note: Miriam C. Barkley ’74, ’77 MLS was magazine editor at the time of the 1995 retirement article.)
Photograph by Bob Cavin