Bryn Mawr College

Bryn Mawr Welcomes President-Elect
Jane Dammen McAuliffe

February 8, 2008

Dear members of the Bryn Mawr College community,

We are thrilled to announce that the Board of Trustees today appointed Jane Dammen McAuliffe as the President Elect of Bryn Mawr College. Dr. McAuliffe is Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Georgetown University and an internationally known scholar of Islamic studies. She will succeed President Nancy J. Vickers on July 1 as the College’s eighth president.

The Bryn Mawr community welcomed Dr. McAuliffe and her husband Dennis to the College at a special open house Friday afternoon in Thomas Great Hall. We assure you and others who could not attend that there will be other opportunities in the coming months to meet Dr. McAuliffe.

We can think of no one to whom we would rather entrust the bright future of Bryn Mawr College than Dr. McAuliffe. She is an exceptionally strong, accomplished, and visionary woman. During her tenure at Georgetown, she has been an outstanding leader, a creative and effective advocate for change, and an exemplar of distinguished scholarship.

As a graduate of a women’s college herself, Jane appreciates the transformative role that Bryn Mawr plays in both a student’s immediate learning and later life. As president, she will ensure that our students have the diverse, dynamic, and challenging undergraduate experience that will serve them well as members of an ever more connected global society.

Over the past year the search committee canvassed a diverse field of extraordinary candidates across all areas of professional accomplishment, both within and beyond the academy. Dr. McAuliffe rose to the top of that field because her vision, intellect, and commitment to women’s education are a perfect fit for our community. Frankly, it was amazing how she fulfilled our highest aspirations of who the next president of the College should be.

As a scholar, Dr. McAuliffe is an internationally respected specialist in Islamic studies whose expertise is in the Qur’an and its interpretations, early Islamic history, and the interrelationships between Islam and Christianity. In addition to publishing numerous books and journal articles, she recently completed the six-volume Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, the first reference work of its kind in a Western language.

While at Georgetown, Dr. McAuliffe enhanced faculty recruitment and diversity, developed initiatives to foster more effective teaching and student advising, and expanded the number of undergraduate majors and minors in contemporary fields of inquiry. She has also built several graduate programs, including two new Ph.D. programs. She has successfully raised funds to build a performing arts center, to endow faculty positions, to create scholarships, and to launch a science center.

To learn more about Dr. McAuliffe’s professional and personal background, please see her profile, her curriculum vitae, and the College’s press release on her appointment.

Dr. McAuliffe will join this community at a moment of great institutional strength and forward momentum.  Bryn Mawr has just raised over $232 million in its most ambitious fundraising campaign. Applications and enrollment are at record highs. Our campus has a series of new buildings dedicated to student activities and extensively renovated facilities for teaching. The College has a robust framework for shared governance and a wholehearted commitment to its mission. We owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to President Nancy Vickers, whose remarkable leadership for these past 11 years has made these achievements possible.

We also want to acknowledge with the deepest thanks the extraordinarily thoughtful and dedicated work of the members of the Presidential Search Committee. It has been a privilege to work with every one of them.

Sincerely yours,

Sally Hoover Zeckhauser ’64, Chair
Bryn Mawr College Board of Trustees 

Arlene Joy Gibson ’65, Chair
Presidential Search Committee