Smith College announces Sarah Willie-LeBreton will become its next president.
Smith College announced today that its Board of Trustees has selected Sarah Willie-LeBreton to become the college’s 12th president. She will assume the Smith presidency on July 1, 2023. Willie-LeBreton is currently the provost and dean of the faculty at Swarthmore College, where she has taught since 1997.
She will succeed Kathleen McCartney, who was named president of Smith in 2013 and announced last spring that she would be concluding her term at the end of June, 2023.
Willie-LeBreton earned her bachelor’s degree in sociology from Haverford College and her master’s and doctoral degrees in sociology from Northwestern University. Prior to joining Swarthmore, where she chaired the Department of Sociology and Anthropology before becoming provost, she was a member of the faculty at both Colby College and Bard College.
Willie-LeBreton’s scholarly interests include higher education, social inequality, social theory, African-American culture, and work and occupations. In addition, as an applied sociologist, she has worked with a variety of groups on inclusivity and justice initiatives. She is the author of Acting Black: College, Identity and the Performance of Race (2003), a study of college-educated African Americans in the post-civil rights movement era, and editor of and contributor to Transforming the Academy: Faculty Perspectives on Diversity and Pedagogy (2016).
In a letter to the Smith community announcing the selection, Alison Overseth, chair of Smith’s board of trustees, commented, “In Sarah, we have found the extraordinary leader that the community intended as we began the search process. She has the vision, energy and strategic leadership experience necessary to move Smith toward our highest aspirations and goals for the future. Throughout the course of her career, she has demonstrated the courage to engage in challenging conversations and make difficult decisions while simultaneously exuding the joy, warmth, and curiosity that is required to lead an institution with empathy and integrity.”
For her part, Willie-LeBreton said she was “thrilled to be joining the Smith College community. The commitment of extraordinary educators on the faculty and staff, passionate and curious students, devoted alums and generous trustees and friends offer models of scholarship, engagement, leadership and philanthropy that inspire me. The promise of education is not just the creation of knowledge, but the model of how to share it for our mutual liberation and the collective good.”
Swarthmore President Valerie Smith said of Willie-LeBreton, “As Swarthmore’s provost and dean of the faculty, Sarah has led with a spirit of inclusivity and compassion, excellent judgment, a deep respect for shared governance, enthusiastic support for research and teaching, and good humor. She is certain to bring these qualities and more to her role as president of Smith College. Her colleagues and many friends at Swarthmore will miss Sarah, but we wish her all the best on her new adventure.”
Willie-LeBreton will assume the leadership of Smith, one of the nation’s leading liberal art colleges for women at a time when according to the college, “women’s education has become increasingly essential for solving the problems of tomorrow.” In October 2021, Smith announced that it was increasing educational access by eliminating loans from its financial aid packages, a policy that required the college to increase its annual investment in financial aid by about $7 million. Smith, located in Northampton, Massachusetts, has a current enrollment of about 2,100 undergraduates; according to the college, applications are at an all-time high, up 63% since 2014.
