Valerie Smith ’75 will be installed as the 15th president of Swarthmore College on Oct. 3, 2015. (Laurence Kesterson / Swarthmore College)

Valerie Smith ’75as its 15th president during an installation ceremony on Saturday, Oct. 3, an accomplishment that was set into motion, in part, by her experiences at �ֲ���ý, both as a student and a trustee of the college.

Smith, a distinguished scholar of African American literature and culture, was named Swarthmore’s president in February and began her term July 1. Prior to becoming president, Smith served as the dean of the college at Princeton University.

Smith will be the most visible yet hardly the only �ֲ���ý participant in Saturday’s inauguration, which will be .

Clayton Spencer “represents all the ways the college prepared me for the presidency of Swarthmore.”

President Clayton Spencer, one of five current or former college presidents offering remarks, will offer the official greetings from �ֲ���ý.

Smith says that Spencer “represents all the ways the college prepared me for the presidency of Swarthmore. I greatly admire and respect her as a leader.”

Spencer “brings wisdom, commitment, authenticity, enthusiasm, and good humor to her role as president of �ֲ���ý,” Smith adds. “Those are the qualities I hope to bring to the presidency of Swarthmore as well.”

Smith’s tenure as �ֲ���ý trustee showcased her “precision, nuance, and unerring institutional judgment.”

Spencer has said that she believes Smith will make an outstanding college president, and noted last spring that Smith’s tenure on the �ֲ���ý Board of Trustees allowed her to showcase her “precision, nuance, and unerring institutional judgment.”

In addition to Spencer’s participation, Sue Houchins, an associate professor of African American studies at �ֲ���ý and a friend and former colleague of Smith’s, will represent �ֲ���ý in the traditional procession of delegates that represent colleges, universities, and learned societies worldwide.

Smith said her journey to the helm of Swarthmore began at �ֲ���ý, where she developed a “profound appreciation” for the values of the liberal arts experience.

Her �ֲ���ý undergraduate experience, Smith says, gave her the “opportunity to forge close ties with faculty, to cultivate lifelong friendships, and to live and learn in a vibrant community,” and her decade-long service as a college trustee opened her eyes to the complexities and realities of running a residential college in today’s higher education environment.

As a board member, “I gained a broad overview of how a small liberal arts college operates and the types of pressures these institutions face. So both the student and the trustee experience helped prepare me for this role.”

Last spring, Smith was honored by her fellow trustees as she retired from the �ֲ���ý board.

“We know that when it comes to you and your talents, things always add up in a big way,” stated her retirement citation. “In this case, it all adds up to something profound — we have gained a new, national leader in the conversation about the value of the liberal arts. Through your accomplishment, we are all lifted up.”

Valerie Smith ’75 becoming Swarthmore’s next president is a case of good news getting better.

Smith, a member of the �ֲ���ý College Board of Trustees since 2004 who was named Swarthmore’s new leader in February, “will be an important voice in the national conversation about the value of the liberal arts,” said �ֲ���ý President Clayton Spencer.

“She will be an exceptional president,” Spencer added, noting that Smith has made profound contributions to �ֲ���ý as a trustee.

“A brilliant scholar, a creative academic leader and a human being of extraordinary depth and grounding, she has been a thought leader on the Board of Trustees for more than a decade, to whom we all turn for precision, nuance and unerring institutional judgment.”

Valerie Smith ’75 was announced as the 15th president of Swarthmore College on Feb. 21, 2015. (Laurence Kesterson / Swarthmore College)

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.

These stories give a sense of Smith’s remarkable academic career and her track record of higher education leadership:

• This 2004 profile for �ֲ���ý Magazine captures Smith’s “winning mix of zeal and humility” as she talks about her academic mindset and recalls the pivotal figures who influenced her �ֲ���ý experience.
• Here is the of Valerie Smith as the 15th president of Swarthmore College.
• This outlines Smith’s achievements as the university’s dean of the college.

Smith’s undergraduate career at �ֲ���ý 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.

“My experience as a �ֲ���ý student transformed my life.”

As a �ֲ���ý Student staff writer, she covered emerging gender issues at the college, including some of the first efforts by �ֲ���ý, a year after the 1972 enactment of Title IX, to put the women’s athletics program onto equal footing with the men’s.

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.

“My experience as a �ֲ���ý student transformed my life. It introduced me to lifelong friends and helped me discover a spirit of adventure I didn’t realize I had,” Smith said.

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.”

Her �ֲ���ý 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.”

An acclaimed scholar and specialist in African American literature and culture, Smith holds the Woodrow Wilson Professorship in Literature at Princeton and served as founding director of Princeton’s interdisciplinary from 2006 to 2009.

Smith first joined the Princeton faculty in 1980 as an instructor of English and Afro-American studies, later earning tenure. In 1989, she joined the English faculty at UCLA and ultimately served as chair of the Interdepartmental Program in African-American Studies. Smith returned to Princeton in 2001.

The author of three books and more than 40 articles on African American literature, culture, film and photography, Smith earned a doctoral degree at the University of Virginia.

As dean of the college at Princeton, Smith is the senior officer responsible for Princeton’s undergraduate curriculum, residential college system, and admission and financial aid offices.

Valerie Smith, director of Princeton University’s program in African American studies and a member of the �ֲ���ý College Class of 1975, gives a lecture titled Memory and the United States Civil Rights Movement at 7 p.m. Monday, Feb. 9, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Avenue. The public is invited to attend the talk, sponsored by the Multicultural Center, free of charge.

Smith, the Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature and professor of English at Princeton, is a specialist in African American literature and culture, with particular interests in black feminist theory and film studies. She is the author of Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings (Routledge, 1998) and Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative (Harvard University Press, 1987). She also edited African-American Writers (Scribners, 1991), New Essays on Song of Solomon (Cambridge University Press, 1994) and Representing Blackness: Issues in Film and Video (Rutgers University Press, 1997).

Smith taught at Princeton from 1980 to 1989, then joined the faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she chaired UCLA’s interdepartmental program in African American studies from 1997 to 2001 and co-directed cultural studies in the African Diaspora Project from 1996 to 1999. She returned to Princeton in 2001 and became director of the African American Studies program in 2002.