![\"Valerie](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2015\/03\/Valerie-Smith-75-Swarthmore-portrait.jpg\")
<\/a>Valerie Smith ’75 was announced as the 15th president of Swarthmore College on Feb. 21, 2015. (Laurence Kesterson \/ Swarthmore College)<\/p><\/div>\n
A member of the Princeton University faculty for 23 years, Smith has served as dean of the college since 2011. She will assume office at Swarthmore on July 1.<\/p>\n
These stories give a sense of Smith\u2019s remarkable academic career and her track record of higher education leadership:<\/p>\n
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- This 2004 profile for <\/a>Bates Magazine<\/a><\/em> captures Smith’s “winning mix of zeal and humility” as she talks about her academic mindset and recalls the pivotal figures who influenced her Bates experience.<\/li>\n
- Here is the official announcement<\/a> of Valerie Smith as the 15th president of Swarthmore College.<\/li>\n
- This news story from Princeton University<\/a> outlines Smith’s achievements as the university’s dean of the college.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Smith\u2019s undergraduate career at Bates offers more than a hint of her intellectual ability and sense of institutional direction as she proved equally adept at academic writing and its cousin, newspaper reporting.<\/p>\n
“My experience as a Bates student transformed my life.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
As a Bates Student<\/em> staff writer, she covered emerging gender issues at the college, including some of the first efforts by Bates, a year after the 1972 enactment of Title IX, to put the women’s athletics program onto equal footing with the men’s.<\/p>\n
In Smith’s senior year, she completed an honors thesis in English: “A Progress Report: The Evolution of George Eliot’s Techniques of Characterization.” She was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated cum laude<\/em>.<\/p>\n
“My experience as a Bates student transformed my life. It introduced me to lifelong friends and helped me discover a spirit of adventure I didn\u2019t realize I had,” Smith said.<\/p>\n
She said that professors such as Dick Wagner and the late Werner Deiman “embodied the spirit of the liberal arts; they were committed to nurturing their students’ intellectual and ethical development.”<\/p>\n
Her Bates memories include “attending Quaker meeting at the home of Dick and Lois Wagner. There I learned the value of contemplation and cultivating one’s inner life. How remarkable it is that all these years later I would be selected to lead a college founded by Quakers.”<\/p>\n
- Here is the official announcement<\/a> of Valerie Smith as the 15th president of Swarthmore College.<\/li>\n