Sweet Briar College names new president

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Sweet Briar College

National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education

 

Thirteen years since last serving at a women’s college, Jo Ellen Johnson Parker is looking forward to rejoining that community once again as the new president of Sweet Briar College.

Sweet Briar’s board of directors announced Friday morning that Parker will become the college’s tenth president as of July 1.

She will succeed Elisabeth Showalter Muhlenfeld, who is retiring after 13 years at Sweet Briar.

“The idea of coming back and serving at a woman’s college is very attractive because I know how powerful the experience is,” said Parker, who is an alumna and former professor at the all-female Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania.

Parker and her husband, Richard G. Manasa, are spending the weekend at the college getting to know the campus and meeting with faculty, staff, students and members of the board of directors.

Since 2004, Parker has served as the executive director of the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education, based in Ann Arbor, Mich.

The non-profit, international organization serves nearly 150 liberal arts colleges in “advancing liberal education in the digital age,” according to its mission statement.

Prior to that, Parker served as president of the Great Lakes Colleges Association, where she led the creation of the Global Partners Project. The project engaged 42 liberal arts colleges in exploring new models for international education.

Parker also taught Victorian literature, women’s literature and composition at Bryn Mawr for 12 years, and served there as associate dean for special academic programs.

Drawing from her variety of experiences, Parker hopes to incorporate several ideas at Sweet Briar College in the coming years, she said Friday.

Partnerships with other colleges along with issues of diversity, global perspectives and technological innovations will become increasingly important at colleges in the next 10 to 15 years, she said.

Virginia Collier, chair of Sweet Briar’s board of directors said Parker’s experience “positions her uniquely to take the college to a point where it can be the leader in women’s education in the 21st century.”

“She has a vision for how the liberal arts can become even more relevant for the lives of women,” Collier said. “We really feel that she will build upon the considerable successes of President Muhlenfeld.”

On Muhlenfeld’s watch, the campus has grown both in size and in enrollment.

As chair of the Women’s College Coalition, Muhlenfeld has been at the national forefront of the fight for women’s education. Since 1996, the school has become one of only two women’s colleges in the country to offer engineering degrees and also has added programs in film studies, environmental science, archaeology and leadership.

Parker said that the women’s college experience can be “a very empowering thing.”

Before she takes the helm in July, she hopes to visit campus about once a month to and to ease the transition and get to know the college community.

College officials are planning a campus-wide reception for a subsequent visit and a formal inauguration ceremony during the 2009-10 academic year.

“It’s going to be wonderful to get to know the students,” Parker said, “and this is clearly a faculty that is just so dedicated to the students.”