THE LEADERSHIP CHALLENGES
Smith seeks a president who will articulate its vision and align the resources of the Smith community. The search committee believes that the next president will need to engage successfully with the following specific challenges:
Articulate the Smith Mission: Leadership of Women in the Most Challenging Work of the World
Smith graduates have emerged in leadership positions across the full landscape of possibility, in their families, their communities and their careers. Smith students aspire to full and demanding lives, and the world has opened up to them. The next president of Smith should carry a message of ambition, engagement and accomplishment that inspires the campus, the Smith community and the broader world.
The next president should hone the message, champion positions essential to women in the world and lead the Smith community as it evolves and coheres its program. Smith intends to be the finest place for an ambitious woman to learn the intellectual and personal skills she requires for an exceptional life. Smith is ready for a president who will understand its message and make the next decade its best ever.
Champion the Value of a Liberal Arts Education at Smith
In an era of rising costs, economic dislocation, and global competition, students and their parents reflexively question the value of a liberal arts education.
The president needs to champion the cause. The modern, networked, knowledge-based economy prizes technical, learned rigor; a critical, disciplined intelligence; fluid creativity and collaborative skill. It demands the ability the write vigorously and speak convincingly. Highly educated women excel in the contemporary world, but success requires the advantage of a superb education, which can be best acquired in a highly resourced liberal arts college.
Smith has an extraordinary case to make. The times favor women with an excellent education; Smith’s president will be its chief and most impressive advocate.
Make Smith the College of Choice for Talented, Diverse and Ambitious Women
Smith aspires to be the first-choice college for talented and ambitious young women around the world. The college wants to reach the right applicants, inspire its students, energize its faculty and evolve its program to meet the needs of the time.
Smith was founded to provide access for women to the same rigorous, high-quality education then available to men. It has always raised its students’ sights and can be justifiably proud of discovering talent in every corner of America, and across the entire range of race and class in many countries around the world.
As the value of a Smith education compounds in the rhythm of the global economy, Smith must find and convince the right women, worldwide to apply. Smith is an extraordinary platform with rare, almost irreplaceable resources. It should serve the women who can use it best.
Connect With and Inspire the Smith Alumnae
Smith alumnae have been impressively loyal. They comprise a crucial network for new alumnae. They volunteer willingly and have built the college through their generosity. In these demanding times, the cost of a classic, highly personal Smith education will continue to grow faster than the average family’s ability to pay. Financial aid, a strengthened endowment and capital for innovation are all critical to Smith’s future.
The next president will come on board shortly after the public launch of an impressive comprehensive campaign, the largest objective of which is financial aid, including aid for international students. The campaign has been well designed and executed, and the momentum it generates will provide a fine platform that will serve the college well and provide significant opportunity for a new president.
Smith alumnae have genuine capacity to support the college, considerably more than the alumnae of most peer liberal arts colleges. They have historically responded to Smith presidents, and a new president has the opportunity to inspire them again.
Lead the Faculty as It Renews Its Ranks and Builds a Strategic Academic Program
Like many American colleges and universities whose faculties expanded dramatically in the 1960s and early 1970s, Smith will see a steady stream of faculty retirements in the next decade. Thus, it will renew its faculty at a time when the college has made fundamental commitments to international programming, to a range of new and innovative programs and to STEM disciplines. Smith has made a strategic effort to draw together its resources for excellent new science facilities as well as new centers in environmental affairs, community service, work and life and global engagement that integrate across the campus. It has developed new and relevant special majors, concentrations and programs that are innovative, responsive to faculty and student interest, and valuable in terms of how they relate to the affairs of the world.
As Smith refines its message and recruits impressive faculty and students, it will need to take a careful look at its academic program, taking advantage of the opportunity to make strategic choices. The college has great resources in its faculty and in a variety of programs and endowments. During the next president’s tenure, the college will have a rare opportunity to hire and renew faculty and to secure its academic position.
Lead an Exceptional Management Team at Smith and Inspire the College Staff
The college has had an excellent administration and a dedicated staff motivated by the college mission. The management have planned well, understood the core managerial challenges and made hard decisions in hard times. The cuts were essential for the college but difficult for the staff. As Smith turns to the future, the college will need to attend to frontline staff, greatly improve IT infrastructure and continue to renovate facilities. Smith has opportunities as part of the Five College Consortium, and will need funds for innovation and financial aid. A liberal arts college is inherently expensive and requires a strong administration to sustain it. Smith will expect its new president to retain, recruit and lead an exceptional managerial team that can inspire a talented and committed college staff.
Strengthen a Diverse Smith
Smith has been immeasurably strengthened by its impressive diversity. The range of student experience
introduces Smith students, faculty and staff to the full array of American and global culture,
enriching learning both in and outside of the classroom. Like its peers, Smith works hard to make
the college a welcoming place for all of its students and to make the experience inclusive. It
is committed to a campus climate that supports every student in the full pursuit of her education.
The task of the college, led by the president, is to use clashes of difference, when they occur,
to aid the work of learning. As it is in society at large, this is ongoing and evolving work; at
Smith, the work of learning and navigating difference will require continued presidential leadership.
Of equal importance is the work of adding diversity to the faculty and staff, which are noticeably
less diverse than the students they serve. Historically, Smith has had excellent leadership in
diversity; this must continue.
Cohere the Smith Community—Attend to Student Life
Smith has traditionally had a rich student life, systematically and regularly adding new opportunities for its students at each stage of its development. The college creates leadership opportunities on campus and off, nationally and internationally, encouraging student activism. The Campus Center is a hub of student life—and community life in general—and students initiate and run formal organizations such as student government as well as social, political and cultural groups.
The Smith community comes together for events throughout the year. From the first Rally Day in 1876, to Julia Child Day, Mountain Day, and the Sherrerd Teaching Prizes, begun in 2004, the college’s annual events honor students, faculty and alumnae for their accomplishments and give students an opportunity to learn and reflect. Otelia Cromwell Day, named for the first African-American to graduate from Smith College, in 1900, is an annual opportunity for communitywide reflection on issues of social justice and injustice.
In residential life, the house system has long been the envy of other colleges. The houses—small, intimate, social and enduring—create instant belonging.
In recent years, the college has focused on first-year student retention, raising the rate to 94 percent in 2010–11, with the six-year graduation rate slowly climbing in tandem.
Compared to its peers, Smith has done well in retention and graduation, but it has challenges, being that it is larger, more dispersed and significantly diverse. The quality of the Smith experience has always been a marker of success. That same imperative will remain in a next president’s tenure.
Refining the Smith Economic Model
A highly personal liberal arts education with consistent faculty attention, delivered by active scholars, is, of necessity, expensive. Tuition at Smith pays for roughly two-thirds of the cost.
In 2011, the board and the administration developed a Futures Initiative, an extension of Smith’s strategic planning efforts that explored the emerging challenges to itself and the higher education economic model. In general, the report points to a compelling set of economic challenges. The number of domestic American families who can afford to pay the full price of a premier liberal arts education has slowly declined as tuition has increased and average family income has flattened. That trend will endure and affects virtually all but the most heavily endowed institutions. American families who willingly pay the full price for an excellent education will be joined by a modest number of international families who can equally choose and afford a premier women’s college for their daughters. Nonetheless, the overall trend will stress all academic institutions with low faculty-student ratios.
On the cost side, Smith will need to steward its resources and increasingly explore the power of technology to improve the quality of education efficiently. On the revenue side, Smith has a highly varied menu of realistic possibilities that could use its resources to strengthen core values, add revenue, reduce average cost and increase net surplus.
Like its peers, Smith needs to adjust its economic model and use its entrepreneurial opportunities. It needs a president who can both direct and unleash its energies.
