Biography
Ava Clayton Spencer | Winchester, Massachusetts
Clayton Spencer was elected by the Bates College Board of Trustees as the eighth president of Bates on Dec. 3, 2011, to begin work on July 1, 2012.
Clayton Spencer is vice president for policy at Harvard University, where she directs policy initiatives on behalf of the president, oversees the administration of the Office of the President and Provost, and works closely with the president, provost, and deans to achieve an integrated approach to an array of university priorities and goals.
Prior to her appointment as vice president in September 2005, she served Harvard presidents Neil L. Rudenstine and Lawrence H. Summers as associate vice president for higher education policy. From January through June 2001, she served concurrently as executive dean of the newly founded Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Spencer has also served as a lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, teaching a course on federal higher education policy.
She is former chief education counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources (1993–97), where she managed the committee’s education staff and directed the legislative process. She was responsible for staffing Senator Edward M. Kennedy in his capacity as chairman and then ranking member of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee, on higher education legislation and policy, including federal student aid, science and research policy, education budget and technology in education.
Earlier, she clerked for Judge Rya W. Zobel of the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts (1985–86), practiced law at the Boston firm of Ropes & Gray (1986–89), and then served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Boston (1989–93), prosecuting criminal cases. She earned a law degree from Yale in 1985. While at Yale Law School, Spencer was an editor of The Yale Law Journal, winner of the Moot Court competition and chair of the Public Interest Council.
She received a bachelor’s degree from Williams College, magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, with highest honors in history and German, then earned a B.A. in theology from Oxford in 1979 as recipient of the Carroll A. Wilson Fellowship awarded by Williams. She received a master of arts degree in the study of religion from Harvard in 1982.
Spencer has served as a trustee of Williams College since 2003, as a trustee of Phillips Exeter Academy from 1998 to 2008 and has lectured and written on higher education issues. In 1997, Williams College awarded Clayton a Bicentennial Medal for achievement in the field of education policy.