Smith Faculty introduced immediately that its Board of Trustees has chosen Sarah Willie-LeBreton to develop into the school’s twelfth president. She’s going to assume the Smith presidency on July 1, 2023. Willie-LeBreton is at the moment the provost and dean of the college at Swarthmore Faculty, the place she has taught since 1997.
She’s going to succeed Kathleen McCartney, who was named president of Smith in 2013 and introduced final spring that she could be concluding her time period on the finish of June, 2023.
Willie-LeBreton earned her bachelor’s diploma in sociology from Haverford Faculty and her grasp’s and doctoral levels in sociology from Northwestern College. Previous to becoming a member of Swarthmore, the place she chaired the Division of Sociology and Anthropology earlier than changing into provost, she was a member of the college at each Colby Faculty and Bard Faculty.
Willie-LeBreton’s scholarly pursuits embody greater training, social inequality, social concept, African-American tradition, and work and occupations. As well as, as an utilized sociologist, she has labored with quite a lot of teams on inclusivity and justice initiatives. She is the writer of Appearing Black: Faculty, Id and the Efficiency of Race (2003), a examine of college-educated African Individuals within the post-civil rights motion period, and editor of and contributor to Remodeling the Academy: School Views on Variety and Pedagogy (2016).
In a letter to the Smith neighborhood saying the choice, Alison Overseth, chair of Smith’s board of trustees, commented, “In Sarah, we’ve got discovered the extraordinary chief that the neighborhood supposed as we started the search course of. She has the imaginative and prescient, vitality and strategic management expertise obligatory to maneuver Smith towards our highest aspirations and targets for the long run. All through the course of her profession, she has demonstrated the braveness to interact in difficult conversations and make troublesome selections whereas concurrently exuding the enjoyment, heat, and curiosity that’s required to steer an establishment with empathy and integrity.”
For her half, Willie-LeBreton mentioned she was “thrilled to be becoming a member of the Smith Faculty neighborhood. The dedication of extraordinary educators on the college and workers, passionate and curious college students, devoted alums and beneficiant trustees and pals supply fashions of scholarship, engagement, management and philanthropy that encourage me. The promise of training is not only the creation of data, however the mannequin of easy methods to share it for our mutual liberation and the collective good.”
Swarthmore President Valerie Smith mentioned of Willie-LeBreton, “As Swarthmore’s provost and dean of the college, Sarah has led with a spirit of inclusivity and compassion, glorious judgment, a deep respect for shared governance, enthusiastic assist for analysis and instructing, and good humor. She is definite to convey these qualities and extra to her function as president of Smith Faculty. Her colleagues and lots of pals at Swarthmore will miss Sarah, however we want her all one of the best on her new journey.”
Willie-LeBreton will assume the management of Smith, one of many nation’s main liberal artwork faculties for girls at a time when in keeping with the school, “ladies’s training has develop into more and more important for fixing the issues of tomorrow.” In October 2021, Smith introduced that it was growing instructional entry by eliminating loans from its monetary help packages, a coverage that required the school to extend its annual funding in monetary help by about $7 million. Smith, situated in Northampton, Massachusetts, has a present enrollment of about 2,100 undergraduates; in keeping with the school, functions are at an all-time excessive, up 63% since 2014.
