Victoria Bergen ’11 grew up in a white farmhouse surrounded by fields of corn and soybeans 10 miles from the tiny town of Sutton, Neb. Today, she works as the personal secretary for Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College.
In 2011, Bergen was a senior at Hillsdale when Diane Philipp, dean of women, encouraged her to take the position after graduating. The offer came as a bit of a shock.
“I was very flattered, but I didn’t really pay much heed to it,” Bergen said. “I never in a million years thought I’d be working for Dr. Arnn.”
She disregarded the offer for several months, thinking she was not “smart enough” to work for Arnn. She was also considering confectionary school in London or Paris. But encouragement from Professor of Law Robert Blackstock convinced her to send in her résumé, interview with Arnn, and accept the position. She was on the job by June.
Every day, she walks up the eight flights of stairs to the president’s office suite on the fourth floor of Moss Hall. She walks for two reasons: first, because it is good exercise; second, she says with a hint of a smile, “the elevator can be a little slow.”
Directly below two massive south-facing windows, she sits behind a dark hardwood desk that displays a candy bowl, a large eagle statue, and informational pamphlets. She can watch the snow fall in the winter, and, if she works late enough, catch most of the sunset.
Bergen often works that late, as she does everything from answering the phone to compiling his packed schedule to arranging for events at Broadlawn. Much of the time, she works with Arnn’s wife, Penny Arnn, to cater the meals through Saga, Inc.
But she doesn’t just work with food from a distance. Her love for the culinary arts carries over into the office, as she constantly brings homemade cake for birthdays or special occasions. She also boasts that she has “resurrected” the desktop candy bowl former secretary Pat Loper used to keep.
“I like to spoil the boys,” she said with a smile. “They tease me about trying to make them fat.”
Working for Arnn has been a challenge, and she has to be up for anything, but the farm life of her youth prepared her well. Her family’s farm near Sutton – population 1,500, and the biggest spot of civilization for a radius of about 50 miles – is now leased to other farmers, but her father worked the fields when she was a girl.
Bergen and her brother started a chicken business when she was in middle school, and ran the business for several years. They built pens that they could move around the yard, and would move the chickens from pen to pen “so they could have fresh grass.”
“Best chicken I ever had,” Bergen said. “They were delicious.”
Each summer, she and her brother would raise, butcher, package, and sell about 600 Cornish game hens, a breed a of chicken that starts life as a fluffy yellow chick but ends it fat and almost unable to walk. On butcher days, they would process about 70 birds.
“I’m glad I grew up on a farm. I think it taught me a lot about hard work,” she said, adding with a grin, “And I talk a lot about Nebraska football.”
If farm life taught Bergen about hard work, Hillsdale College ingrained it. She said one of the best things about working for Arnn is discovering his fierce dedication to the college’s mission statement and the students who attend.
Now that she arranges his schedule, she sees how often he travels across the country to give speeches and fundraise, and how much he accomplishes when he gets back to campus. He eats lunch with students, meets with donors, and hosts dinners at his home.
“The longer I’ve worked for the college,” she said, “the more I’ve come to respect Dr. Arnn and what he and Mrs. Arnn do for the college.”
She said she has also come to a new personal appreciation of the Hillsdale atmosphere. Friends who have graduated and moved on from Hillsdale tell her she is “so lucky” she is to still be at the college. They say that their fellow employees are different, often refusing to take responsibility for mistakes. A Hillsdale education, she said, changes you for the better.
“You understand the world so much better, you are able to discern things, you are able to reason things out,” she said. “Here at Hillsdale, we know what it is to work hard.”
