She rowed the Atlantic and skied to the South Pole. What's next for Tori Murden McClure?

She'll sit with you.

The president of a Division III university, the first woman to row the Atlantic Ocean , the first American to ski to the geographic South Pole , the first woman to climb Lewis Nunatak, a snow-covered ridge of a mountain among an icefield in Antarctica.

Tori Murden McClure will stay and answer questions, giving you her complete attention, never once checking her watch. It doesn't matter if her title is the President of Spalding University. She respects others for their own challenges and difficulties. Plus, all those firsts aside, she is not untouchable. In fact, she has a crumb on her chin.

"For the record, I just took a giant bite of something spinach-y," she said from inside the presidential dining room at Splading University's dining hall.

She'd rather not be in the enclosed glass room, where she declared all the whereas and wherefores (awards) should not be hung on the walls, instead opting for photos of students and staff .

At times, a university presidency can feel like "a cage" — her words. She'd rather be eating lunch among Spalding students and staff. But she will sit, as long as you don't ask her why.

"One of my least favorite questions when I'm doing an expedition is, 'Why? Why are you doing this? Why!" McClure said.

She goes on to paraphrase a quote from physician and explorer Edward Adrian Wilson from an Arctic expedition with British explorer Robert Falcon Scott: "I do the things that God puts in front of me to do. It's clear, so I don't have any difficulty choosing."

So, if you want to know why, after 25 years at Spalding University, 14 as its president, the 61-year-old is retiring from this education expedition, you'll have to keep waiting for the answer.

"My path at Spalding isn’t an end," she said. "I'm going to do something else. I have no idea what yet, and I'm waiting for that to become clear."

After decades in the spotlight following her solo row across the ocean at age 36, McClure is about to go silent for a while.

Yes, she's seriously contemplating going completely off-grid, except for an Apple AirTag so her husband, Charles "Mac" McClure, can keep tabs on her. But before her last day as president, we asked her thoughts on a few topics:

On the importance of learning with your hands:

"There’s a sense of what’s proper in education and what’s not proper in education. Spalding would fall on what the elite would consider to be the shallow end of the higher education gene pool. But that’s where the rubber hits the road. That’s where students are making a difference

"I often say to students, 'We don’t turn away from people in pain because we don’t care. We turn away from people in pain because we don’t know what to do.' Education, particularly at a place like Spalding, is about teaching people what to do."

On never really getting an off day as president:

"It's gotten worse ... that sense of if I say something wrong, bad people could come to the campus, blow things up, burn things down, hurt students. If I make one misstep, bad things can happen to the people I care about. I went to Smith College and I lead a Catholic school. There are things I cannot argue for. There are things I cannot protest on behalf of that are things I would love to argue for and things I would love to protest on behalf of."

On how to be authentic in a world of artificial intelligence and social media:

"I don’t think I’m the right person to answer that question."

On why she feels that way:

"I did some wilderness EMT hours recently, and I wore a T-shirt that said Plato’s Cave Search & Rescue Team. There was a young EMT who had never read the parable of the cave: There was this person who was raised in a cave and watched the shadows on the wall and mistook that for reality.

"He escapes and goes out into the sunlight and sees this whole other world, and he’s like, 'Wow this is the real world.' He goes back into the cave and tries to convince the people in the cave, 'No, no. The real world is out there. Those are shadows on the wall.' And they kill him.

So, Plato's Cave Search & Rescue is this metaphor for, 'Let’s rescue these people from the cave.' ... This young person had never heard of Plato as anything but a software system, not a Greek philosopher. And the parable of the cave is something this person was never exposed to. That's not his fault, either.

"When I see young people raised on social media, so many of them are staring at the shadows on the wall, confusing it for reality. And they need to get out and walk the Grand Canyon. They need to go get dirty. They need to feel hurts that are real, and not hurts that are social, so I’m the wrong person to answer the question because I don’t live in the cave."

On the biggest challenge she faced at Spalding:

" We are an under-resourced institution. The money we have comes from our students, and I guard it like a dragon because it belongs to our students. We can’t waste it ever. "

On feminism:

"There have been moments in the presidency — the only moment where I was like 'I don’t know if I like this,' was a student said, 'I was told that I can’t ask you this question,' and I was like, 'What’s the question?' And the question was are you a feminist? And I was like, 'Why, yes I am.' That student was then told you can’t put that on social media because that will bring harm to the president. And that was five or six years ago, when feminism was really under siege.

"But I still find that troubling because, like, 'Bring it. Bring it.' I do believe women can do anything a man can do. That is my definition of feminism. Do your homework. Do the job."

On why she never took a pay raise after her first year as president:

"I don’t need any more money. ... Over the years, everyone has surpassed me. I’m OK with that. I don’t measure my success on money or things. That’s just not who I am. And in some ways that’s tarnished my relationship with the board of trustees because they were bothered by, 'Well, how are we going to control her if she doesn’t care about money?' (She shrugs.) Sorry."

On why the Harvard Divinity School's Peter J. Gomes Distinguished Alumni Honor means so much to her:

"I was that kid who would go to Divinity School at Harvard, work with homeless people in South Boston pulling people out of dumpsters. There was a terrible fight one afternoon. One unhoused person — we call them now, back in that day we called them homeless — stabbed another guy. He was bleeding really badly. I charged into the fray. The police would drive around in circles because they didn’t really want to get there, and it took for freakin' ever for EMS to come in because the police had to get there first to secure the scene.

"Then EMS finally came and took the case from me. As I left, I unconsciously threw this blood-soaked towel over my shoulder and got on the subway back to Harvard, The T.

I’m furious. Here are these people living a savage existence, surrounded by some of the greatest affluence on the planet. And I’m on the T, and I’m angry, and I recognize, 'Oh my goodness. I’m still carrying this bloody towel and no one would look at me. I’m invisible.' So, I became angry about being invisible.

"I get off the T at Harvard Square. I’m invisible. I cross Harvard Yard like a bowling ball, knocking people out of the way. I’m invisible. This sort of ball of fury is crossing by Memorial Church. Peter Gomes, who was the minister of Memorial Church, comes down the stairs, sees me, places himself in my path. Does one of these (she throws up both hands like stops signs) , like, OK, bull, and says — and this was not his language — he was very erudite. But he said, 'Tori, what’s up with the towel?' Like he did not speak in pedestrian tones, ever. He was speaking Tori.

"I sputtered this thing about one guy got stabbed and it was awful. At the crux of the story, I’m like, 'The towel makes me invisible.' Peter said, 'It is your anger that makes you invisible.'

"So many times I’ve been angry about an injustice or angry about some problem I couldn’t solve, and I remembered, your anger makes you invisible. People will not hear you if you are speaking in anger. They will turn you off. So, you have to translate, and you have to cool off."

S tephanie Kuzydym is an enterprise and investigative reporter. She can be reached at skuzydym@courier-journal.com . Follow her for updates at @stephkuzy .

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This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: She rowed the Atlantic and skied to the South Pole. What's next for Tori Murden McClure?