Sherwin Lee Davidson

Sherwin was born in Urbana, Ohio, on October 10, 1945, the youngest of three children. Named after her great grandmother, Dorcas Sherwin, she grew up in West Liberty, Ohio, a small Mennonite farming community (population 1500) where her father, Earl, managed the grain elevator, and her mother, Francis, scheduled all the runs at a nearby paper company. As a teenager, Sherwin made pocket money testing harvest wheat at the elevator, babysitting, and mowing lawns.

Sherwin's older brother, Earl (Kayo), became a Presbyterian minister, and her older sister, Lynn, after moving to California and raising four children, became a public school teacher. By high school Sherwin had developed a love of singing, playing the piano, public speaking, and anything athletic. Her parents, neither of whom went past high school, made sure Sherwin went on to college, where she was active in her sorority and student government, participated in chorale and theater, and graduated Phi Kappa Phi in American Studies from Bowling Green University in 1966. By graduation, she had married her high school boyfriend, Arne Vanderberg, and then taught high school English for a year before the two joined the Peace Corps and served in Ghana, West Africa, from 1968 to 1970. After finishing their tour, the two stayed on to help train incoming volunteers and then traveled extensively in northern Africa and Europe in a little home-made camp-mobile before returning to the U.S.

Sherwin then went to Western Michigan State to complete a Master's degree in counseling, divorced, and went on to the University of Utah in Salt Lake City where she met and married Michael Toth, completed her Ph.D. in educational psychology, interned at the VA hospital, and became a licensed psychologist in 1978. In her dissertation she examined the therapeutic aspects of friendship between women, articulating a theme which has characterized her adult life. Shortly after graduating Sherwin became the Associate Dean of Continuing Education at the University of Utah where she also founded the Center for Adult Transitions and became president of the Utah Consortium for Women in Higher Education. All of these experiences were early instances of a lifelong commitment to understanding how experiences and opportunities may be very different for women than for men.

In 1979 Sherwin came to Portland State University as Dean of Extended Studies. She subsequently held a joint appointment as Dean and Vice Provost during which time she founded the Center for Academic Excellence. In 2002 she moved to the Department of Psychology as a full professor and subsequently became the first woman chair of the department, starting in 2007.

Sherwin has been a Rotarian since 1993 and has served as Chair of the Rotary Charitable Trust and as a director of the board, as well as assisting in founding the Portland Rotary Domestic Violence Committee. She was a member of the board of Oregon Public Broadcasting for ten years, serving as president from 2007 to 2009. She is one of the three founding members of the Walk of the Heroines.

Her current recreational enthusiasms are twofold: one is for cycling; she and her husband have taken over two dozen cycling trips, most of them self-guided, in the Pacific Northwest, Wales, England, France, and Italy. The other is for time on vacation property on an island in a lake in Montana which she loves to share with her husband, her dog, and her many friends. She continues her life-long commitment to exercise and a pro-active life-style.

Sherwin has a great gift for quiet, supportive, and effective leadership, amplified and honed by what she has learned from the various administrators, presidents, and CEOs, as well as the many faculty and staff she has worked with over the years -- especially in Rotary, in Portland State University, and in Oregon Public Broadcasting. She will also tell you she learned a tremendous amount from loving family members who she nursed through cancer to their deaths.

Her extended family, now consisting of in-laws, nieces and nephews with children of their own, the lovely emphasis on friends with whom she and her husband share much of their lives, and especially her two godchildren -- Sarah and Phillip -- now young adults, bring additional significant and much-cherished dimensions to Sherwin's life.

Sherwin's commitment to women's friendships is reflected twice in the Walk of the Heroines: one is in the tree sponsored by Sherwin's many women friends in her honor; the other is in the friendship tree sponsored by Sherwin and her husband.

Perhaps more than anything else, Sherwin's remarkable determination to bring the very best of herself to every situation, responsibility, and relationship -- to give purposefully, generously, intelligently, and lovingly wherever and with whoever she finds herself -- is the commitment that sets her apart, makes her a remarkable companion to so many and defines her as truly worthy of this tribute at the Walk of the Heroines.

Locate on Walk:

• Naming Wall (Right Wall), 1-15