Courtney Corwin stands just 4-feet 11 1/4 inches tall without her heels, but she packs a big punch in more ways than one.
Not only is she a mover and shaker at Hendrix College in Conway — vice president of strategic initiatives and chief of staff — but her nickname was The Waco Kid at the boxing gym where she took lessons in Dallas. She originally tried boxing to lose weight; then she fell in love with the sport.
And no, she did not have to get on a ladder to box with her trainer, although she admitted that she had to “punch up,” and he had to “crouch down a little bit.”
“I’m much taller on the tennis courts,” she said, laughing.
Her athletic prowess aside, Corwin was so well thought of by Hendrix College President Bill Tsutsui when they worked together at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, one of her alma maters, that he asked her to come to Conway when he was hired.
“It was a package deal,” Corwin said, sitting on the sofa at her home in The Village at Hendrix.
Corwin, who grew up in Waco, Texas, was director of development for the Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences at SMU, and deans had come and gone, she said. Corwin said she knew the minute she saw Tsutsui that he was the right person for the job. She sat in on an interview with Tsutsui and gave her input, although she was not directly involved in his hiring.
“I knew he needed to be hired — I recognized that the minute I ever heard him speak. He has this quality about him — he takes charge of the situation in a nonthreatening way,” she said.
Tsutsui was hired, and she said she made it her mission to introduce him to people and help him succeed. She was at SMU almost eight years, four while he was there.
Tsutsui and his wife, Marjorie, made the decision in one day to take the job in Conway, and so did Corwin. Corwin said she’d never been to Hendrix or Arkansas when Tsutsui asked if she wanted to take a position at Hendrix.
“That’s how much I trusted Bill,” she said.
Tsutsui said that when he first met Corwin, she scared him.
“I was terrified of her for about a year,” he said. “She’s got very high standards; she’s very confident, which I love about her, and she really wants to get the job done. I was always afraid I was letting her down. It took a long while for me to realize, really, we were on the same page and working together, and that’s been a great relationship ever since.”
Corwin, the oldest of three siblings, said she never imagined herself leaving Dallas. Her father is a retired urologist, and her mother was a homemaker with a graduate degree in history who had worked in the editing and publishing industry in New York City. That’s come in handy now that Corwin’s father has self-published a historical-fiction book, a Nazi spy novel. Corwin has his book, The Volsung Project, by Robert F. Corwin, M.D., displayed in her home and whips out his business card — she’s marketing the book for him.
Corwin, who will turn 48 on Monday, said she didn’t know what she wanted to be when she grew up; she performed in youth theater and briefly thought she wanted to be an actress. After seeing plays in New York, she realized that was another level of talent.
“I always loved languages,” she said. So she took Latin and German in high school. “It was always a given I was going to graduate school.”
She majored in art history and German at SMU and studied German in graduate school at Indiana University in Bloomington, where she got a master’s degree in German literature and culture studies. Her thesis was on Wassily Kandinsky’s collection of woodcuts and poems that he produced.
“I really liked the art-history side; I like the more visual side of things,” Corwin said, so she decided to get a master’s degree in art history from SMU. Her first job was in 1993 as a secretary at an art gallery in Dallas — not glamorous for an educated woman working on her second master’s degree — but the owners also wanted her to sell art while they traveled. “They went to Paris, and a client came in, a decorator, and she bought a whole bunch of art,” Corwin said. “I loved it there. That was the foundation for everything I do, even now.”
Corwin worked there for 18 months before leaving to finish her thesis. After earning her second master’s degree in 1995, she opened Corwin Fine Arts from her apartment while she looked for a full-time job. Corwin had clients for whom she would find art, and she curated an art show for the ArtCentre of Plano in Texas — a big event to pull off.
Corwin said she would hold art shows in her home for artists who made ceramics and jewelry, painters and sometimes photographers. Her mother would cater the shows. Corwin’s goal was to make enough money to hold another show.
“I just liked people to get something they enjoyed,” she said.
She worked in fundraising for two private schools in Dallas — one a K-12 school, the other pre-K through the eighth grade — before her job at SMU and meeting Tsutsui.
“It’s a great partnership,” she said. “He has a great vision, and I like executing his vision.”
Tsutsui said Corwin, “a bundle of energy,” is the type of person who wakes up in the middle of the night thinking about the detail that no one else has considered.
“It’s one of the great gifts of my life to be able to trust Courtney implicitly to be on top of things,” he said. “It was, ‘Courtney, do the inauguration, would you?’ She ran with it, and she owned it. She knows where to go out and get information so she doesn’t have to go out and reinvent the wheel. She was calling people all over the country, getting best practices and putting together a team to make it happen.”
Corwin said the college also started working on its Statement of Purpose last year, which will be presented to the board this fall, and she expects a capital campaign in the future.
One of the fun parts of her job is going with Tsutsui on his barbecue tour of every county in Arkansas. Tsutsui, who grew up primarily in Texas, is a barbecue fanatic. They’ve been on a tasting tour in about 13 counties thus far. “We’ll end with Faulkner County and make a big splash,” she said.
She moved to Conway just over a year ago, and she’s still learning about Arkansas.
Corwin, who is single, said she has felt lucky to get a lot in The Village at Hendrix, where she built a home and instantly made friends with her neighbors. She is proud of winning The Village’s Most Patriotic award with her Fourth of July decorations. “I’m very patriotic,” she said. Corwin said the decorating-contest judge said her Arkansas flag gave her the edge. I am very proud of my Arkansas flag that I have out there. In order not to hurt Texas’ feelings, I do get my Texas flag out there” for special occasions, she said.
“I’m really happy and so content, and I love my life here a lot,” she said. “I love Conway; it feels like home. Dallas is a big city, and it behaves like a big city. People are so nice here. When I went to get my driver’s license, somebody hugged me and said, ‘Welcome to Arkansas!’”
One of her goals is to explore the state more. Corwin said she has tennis elbow, but she’s slowly getting back on her game by working with Hendrix College tennis coach Harold Henderson. She’s also been to a local boxing gym a couple of times but doesn’t plan to get in the ring with anybody.
“She knows what she wants, but she never has to raise her voice or get pushy about it,” Tsutsui said.
But if push comes to shove, people shouldn’t mess with The Waco Kid.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-9708 or tkeith@arkansas
online.com.