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Meet the Board of Governors
Gail Brekke

Always a Renaissance Woman,
A TV Reporter Evolves into an Executive
Able to Chart Her Own Course

Where many stumble through life, wandering accidentally into one path or another, successful individuals keep a trail map. Gail Brekke, a member of the University’s Board of Governors, has kept her trail map since she began her career as a TV reporter.

TV was exciting and immediate, but Brekke soon realized that if she wanted to move into the executive ranks, she would need more. More education, for one.

“It was the late ’70s, early ’80s,” Brekke says, “and there were not a lot of women in executive ranks anywhere. I looked at the radio and television industry and I saw that the people rising to the executive ranks were going through the field of marketing. They weren’t rising through on-air reporting.”

She returned to school to earn her master’s degree in marketing. Going back was a challenge and an education, not only in the method of marketing but also in the method of education itself.

“I think it’s important that students not be too narrow in how they pursue their degrees,” she says. “An engineering student should embrace the arts, a liberal arts student should embrace business, a business student should embrace a combination of technology and the arts. They need some exposure in those areas or they find themselves real babes in the woods in an incredibly competitive world. If we thought it was fierce back then, it’s exponentially fierce now.”

Certainly her new degree helped, but perhaps even more helpful was the guidance she met with once she stepped into the executive ranks.

“The fact that there were a couple of people who were also willing to mentor me was hugely important,” she says. “I would not have done that climb simply through education; I had people along the way willing to give me the guidance and support – either professionally or politically or both – that made the difference.”

Learning several languages and traversing the world over the course of her career, and more recently, with her husband, Jim Vlock, has further broadened her perspective. “Our goal is to see those places that are now on the main stage of the world,” she says, “to go to India and Vietnam, and to those places where their economies and their culture are changing the way the rest of us interact.”

Her affiliation with the University of New Haven began through a friend’s introduction. President Steven Kaplan reached out to Brekke soon after, inviting her to join the Board of Governors.

“One of the reasons I feel connected to the University of New Haven is that, historically and presently, it continues to be a fantastic place for students who still represent the first generations in their families to get a robust education and an undergraduate degree,” she says. “You can’t help but get excited at graduation to see all these family members who are the cheerleaders, and you just know there have been a lot of sacrifices made.”