Smith College names Sarah Willie-LeBreton its new president
Jim Kinney | jkinney@repub.com Jim Kinney jkinney@repub.com
Willie-LeBreton will take office July 1, 2023.
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NORTHAMPTON — Sarah Willie-LeBreton will be 12th president of Smith College, the elite women’s college announced Thursday.

Willie-LeBreton is provost and dean of the faculty at Swarthmore College where she has taught since 1997. She will take office at Smith on July 1, 2023.

Smith College president Kathleen McCartney announced in February that she would retire and leave the job at the end of this current academic year.

Willie-LeBreton is a sociologist who studies social inequality and race and ethnicity.

“In Sarah, we have found the extraordinary leader that the community intended as we began the search process,” said Alison Overseth, chair of Smith’s board of trustees, said in a statement. “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.”

Willie-LeBreton said:

“I am 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. We tend to be more aware of injustice when it crashes in upon our lives, more aware of misogyny, racism and other forms of oppression when they circumscribe our possibilities, and more aware of the fragility of democracy when its admittedly young promise brought to us through the liberation struggles of its subdominant people is so clearly threatened. But so, too, are we more aware of knowledge when we participate in its co-creation, more appreciative of empathy when we receive it, more devoted to the liberal arts when we experience the power of mutually-informing disciplines.”

Smith enrolls more than 2,900 students from nearly every state and more than 75 countries.