Val Smith has served as the fifteenth president, and now the inaugural Roy J. and Linda G. Shanker Presidential Chair, of Swarthmore College since her inauguration in 2015. She came to Swarthmore from Princeton University, where she was dean of the college. She is a leading scholar of African American literature, the author of three books in the field, and an alumna of Bates College and the University of Virginia. Toward the end of 2024, President Smith’s contract was extended two years, through June 2027.
In recent years, Smith has presided over the college during challenges including the COVID-19 pandemic, a shifting political landscape posing new threats to higher education, and heightened activism and tensions on campus about violence in the Middle East. For the first time since 2016, she sat down for an in-depth Q&A with The Phoenix on Nov. 6 to discuss these topics and more. A transcript of the discussion, which began with a broad scope on her presidency before narrowing to specific developments and events, is below. It has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Daniel Perrin: Thank you very much for talking with me, President Smith. I’d like to start by reflecting on your time at Swarthmore. Separate from the language of strategic plans, fundraising, and communications, what do you identify as the philosophical through line of how you’ve approached your time as President?
Valerie Smith: Thank you. I would say that the philosophical through line essentially has been an approach that requires me to juggle the multifarious areas of emphasis that any college president deals with. For example, it is the responsibility of the president to articulate and advance the strategic vision and mission of the college. It’s also the responsibility of the president to oversee the operations of the college, to manage the senior staff, to be the key point person at moments of crisis, to also be on the ground engaging with and getting to know members of the campus community — faculty, students, staff — and to be the public face of the institution of the college for external constituencies, including alums, parents, and families. And then also to articulate the meaning and vision of the liberal arts, of the kind of education that we deliver, the value of a Swarthmore education to the broader public.
So I think, big picture, my philosophical approach has been primarily to figure out how to manage all of these different elements of a complex job during a time when the world of higher ed and the world that surrounds higher ed has been full of all sorts of unanticipated pressures on our sector and on our institution.
How I actually try to do the job perhaps comes down to trying to be as consultative as I can, because we’re dealing with so many complex issues, to understand what the priorities and concerns are of various members of our community, and to try to take into account these varying perspectives as I am considering what the path forward ought to be. But ultimately recognizing that, as president, the responsibility for key decisions rests with me.
DP: What’s one thing that you went into the presidency looking to accomplish that went the way you were hoping? And what’s one thing that has come up during your time here that you wish you’d planned for differently, and/or approached differently in retrospect?
VS: I came into the presidency with a long-standing commitment to issues of access and inclusivity to try to do my best to ensure that the college continued and expanded its efforts to recruit and retain students from a broad range of backgrounds and experiences and provided sufficient financial support so that students from all economic backgrounds would be able to survive in the community. I am pleased that we have been able to advance that commitment and to be able to meet student needs in ways that we were not already doing when I arrived. So that’s something that I had prioritized, and I’m glad that we’ve been able to advance it.
As for the other question, no one could have anticipated some of the crises we’ve had to deal with. The pandemic, of course, comes to mind immediately. I am grateful that we were able to get through that experience, for example, without having to lay off or furlough colleagues, and that we were able to support students in as many ways as we could anticipate and imagine. We had students who had to return home to environments where they didn’t have internet access or didn’t have appropriate technology. So the ways in which we were able to keep the community safe, to develop testing protocols and various ways of sanitizing environments and using plexiglass, I just felt like we did some really important, valuable, extraordinary work. The community as a whole came together. That was great.
But one thing that I wish we had understood, [that] none of us fully understood, were the unintended consequences of that experience. What it meant for members of the community, students, faculty, and staff alike, to undergo a period where there was so much isolation. We could never have anticipated the impact that that would have on the social fabric of the community, on the psychological health of individuals in the community. At some level, I wish I had anticipated that. On the other hand, I feel like I’ve got to give myself a little grace. But it has been challenging for individuals and for the community to move beyond that space and to figure out how to connect with and communicate with each other after an experience like that.
DP: You mentioned the social fabric of the community. How exactly do you see the lingering effects of COVID-19 and the isolation period in the social fabric of the college community?
VS: I think that that period perhaps exacerbated some issues that existed in the broader society and were manifest in our community as well, and that had to do with some difficulty, I think, that many of us have had in communicating with each other around difficult subjects. And the difficult subjects don’t need to exist at the level of [something like] international conflict. Some of this is actually individual, human-to-human differences. But, we seem to have, I would say, lost some of the skill at interacting with each other as humans. I think we’re slowly getting that back, but it has taken intentional effort.
More generally, I think we’re seeing this on our campus, this discomfort with staying in difficult conversations, and in being able to disagree with each other while retaining respect for each other’s common humanity. I think that the period of the pandemic has exacerbated those issues, but it’s not the cause of them. I think we saw seeds of that prior to the pandemic.
DP: I’m curious how your approach has evolved over your career, from your time as scholar of literature and Black studies in the classroom to your more recent years as an administrator.
VS: That’s a great question and something that I think about a lot myself. One of the things I’ll say is that before I became an administrator, I felt enormously fortunate to have had a career as a scholar, to be able to devote my life to the world of ideas, to immerse myself in literature, in narrative, in particular. As an English professor, I love narrative. I love thinking about the political and historical context within which literary and other kinds of cultural texts are produced. And I loved being in the classroom. I always felt that my seminars were communities that we were building intentionally together, and that my students and I would learn together and have moments of revelation together. I just found that such an extraordinary opportunity, an extraordinary gift. So, I think part of the connection between that phase of my life and my time as president is that I remain intellectually really curious. I am fascinated by the communities that are made possible when we stay in sustained conversation with each other. I learn from the people I work with, that I’m on committees with, and so on, so I remain intrigued by people’s stories. Their narratives may inform a lot of my decision-making, and they inform my understanding of what’s important about this work. I do think there’s a connection between the joy that I got from being an academic and the way I approach the work that I do as an administrator.
DP: Do you feel that you’ve had to make decisions as an administrator that would maybe have upset the version of you that was a teacher or a faculty member?
VS: Upset is an interesting word —
DP: Yes, or [decisions that maybe would have] been different from those you would have made as a teacher.
VS: I’ll say this: what I’ve come to appreciate is that life is a process of continuing revelation, and there are situations in which I have found myself that I could never have anticipated when I was an academic. I could never have imagined being confronted with certain choices. It’s possible I would have made those choices differently when I was an academic. But I also appreciate that there are things that I know now that I didn’t know then. So, [some decisions] might have surprised me, but I honestly do think each chapter of one’s life is full of little things that surprise one, catch one off guard. But I’m also intrigued to think about the continuities as well.
DP: You’re leading a very busy college community that is undeniably learning and working on exciting things every day. However, it seems at times that your leadership takes a more behind-the-scenes approach than some of your peers and predecessors, using email updates to communicate or working through other administrators more often. This might mean that the student body is less familiar with you, with your thought process, and how you approach your role. I’m curious what you’d say about this and what has guided you in your approach to leadership and visibility on campus.
VS: That’s a very interesting question. One thing I’ll say is that, even though people so often say that this generation of folks doesn’t read emails, that is not entirely the case with Swarthmore. I am genuinely surprised and often heartened by the fact that people clearly have read carefully what I have written and said, and they often have serious, thoughtful critiques. Sometimes they will agree with it, but they have thoughtfully engaged with it.
I’ve been president for almost eleven and a half years. There have been phases during my presidency where I did do more open conversations with students and other constituent groups about certain topics. Over time, I was not entirely convinced that those conversations were as effective as I would have hoped, because while I was able to communicate with the people who were in the room, other people were not aware of what I was saying. So, I think part of the reason that I have tried to communicate some of my most significant messages via email is to try to get to as broad a constituent base as possible, because one of the things that I appreciate about this community is its really heterogeneous. And there are people who simply would not be in a big setting because they find the energy problematic or they’d be concerned about hostility or that kind of thing. I think I found that written messages are a way for me to communicate with a broad, heterogeneous community.
I actually have found also that being present with smaller groups of students, faculty, and staff has been a way for me to get to know them more effectively, and for them to get to know me. I have, in one chapter, tried the bigger events, bigger conversations. I’m not sure how effectively I thought those worked. And so I’ve been experimenting with other ways of communicating. I do think that communicating in smaller groups and messages seems to work.
DP: Would you be concerned about the potential that this more behind-the-scenes approach to communication and leadership results in members of the community not necessarily knowing exactly where you would stand on an issue?
VS: I do try to be as clear as I can be in my written messages about where I’m standing on something. If I’m concerned about that, I think it’s an opportunity for me to communicate more, but not necessarily to change the medium.
DP: I want to talk about the current state of higher education and the threats against it from the Trump administration. In a lot of ways, it seems that Swarthmore is better protected than the much larger research universities that rely on federal funding and find themselves at the center of much higher-profile culture wars about higher education. However, Swarthmore could still absolutely be vulnerable in other ways. What do you see as your role in protecting the college and its community members from ongoing threats, while also ensuring that the life of the college continues without preemptive and intrusive protective measures?
VS: Well, I think your question actually defines what I believe that role is. I think my role is to be as well-informed as I can be on both the threats that we’re aware of and the threats that we suspect might be coming. It is critically important, perhaps now more than ever, although it was important before, to communicate to external constituencies what the role of higher education actually is, what is a Swarthmore education, a liberal arts education, how we use our resources here, what we prioritize and value. It’s critically important to communicate that as a bulwark against some of the accusations that are being made against higher education, because people believe these myths without truly understanding [them].
I think part of the way that my colleagues and I protect the college against these assaults is by being proactive and telling our story. That’s sort of the macro approach. But we also have a responsibility internally to all of our constituent members, to be aware of the perceived and real threats and the ways in which they might affect members of this community, both materially and personally or emotionally. For example, when federal grants were being cut, it was crucial that the college understand how many grants were being affected, and to figure out how we could use our resources to be able to support faculty research and faculty-student research.
We continue to be concerned about the vulnerability of international students. We have added additional resources to the office that supports international students, both to make sure that the incoming students who might need visas were fully aware of what would be required of them and what the timeline would be and so on, but also to be hands on and connected to students who are already here who are worried about whether they would be deported, or whether they’d ever be able to home, or whether they could stay here. So I think we have macro as well as more personal approaches to this.
There’s also the question of academic freedom. We need to be explicit and clear about our ability to protect the rights of our faculty and students to be able to study, and in the case of faculty, to teach according to their own priorities and commitments without fear of intrusion or retribution at a national level. The goal is to be both proactive and also to attend to the needs of people on the ground here.
DP: You mentioned the need to tell higher education’s story to counter some of these false narratives that people at the federal level are telling, and that makes sense. But I’m also wondering whether you’ve found that there are real, fundamental problems with the conventional practices and dynamics within the sector that need to be addressed. If so, what are they?
VS: There are elements of how we do our work that we could certainly improve. That’s how our strengths always evolve. We’re never going to be as strong as we want to be if we become complacent. So I definitely think that we always ought to be scrutinizing how we do our work in order to achieve the excellence to which we aspire. But I think that higher ed and our institutions have the capacity and the experience to be able to be self-critical and to make the adjustments that are necessary. I absolutely do not think that we require a sledgehammer approach from the federal government that seems to want to break our institutions to get us to improve how we do our work.
What do I have in mind? There are accusations that are made about higher ed that might happen in certain institutions and then get generalized across the sector. There are certainly questions that get raised about our openness to a broad range of intellectual perspectives, research, and so on. There are sort of legendary examples of institutions where speakers or certain kinds of viewpoints have been challenged or shut down. That does not mean that this is a problem that higher ed needs to be broken in order to fix. It also doesn’t mean that institutions like Swarthmore have not already begun to identify that as an issue. But that is, I think, an area where we have some room for growth.
This goes back to a point that I made earlier [on the effects of COVID-19]. What we have seen from time to time is an unwillingness on the part of certain members of our community to disagree with each other, a certain kind of fear of that. We have the tools and the capacity to be able to help students, faculty, staff to learn how to be able to disagree with each other without feeling that they’re going to be silenced if they say something that’s unpopular or that deviates from a sort of majority opinion. There’s work that we can do internally to fix that. If institutions like ours are criticized for not being open to those viewpoints, we need to first of all figure out how true this is, or is it simply a myth that circulates? And then, beyond that, what can we do to the extent that it is true? How can we make ourselves more open to disagreement? Because I do think at the end of the day that so many of the fundamental principles of a democratic society depend on folks being able to work together across different viewpoints. That’s one thing.
I think there’s a general sort of misunderstanding about how colleges that have a healthy endowment use their resources. There’s some sense that we are sort of hoarding money as a piggy bank, and there’s a failure to understand how much we depend upon our endowments for financial aid. That was one of the things we discovered: that many of the critics of higher ed didn’t understand the socioeconomic diversity of our student body and the ways in which we use our institutional resources to be able to support them and to create environments where those who live, learn, and work here can thrive.
DP: I did want to talk about the relationship schools like Swarthmore have with their endowment. Many leading thinkers, like political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg and higher education expert and Swarthmore alum Jennifer Washburn ’92, have pointed out that with the drastic growth in college endowments and schools’ reliance on their returns in recent years has been an increased focus on administrative efforts on managing the institution and protecting its funds and status, as opposed to administrative focus on ensuring academic quality and fulfilling the school’s social values. This might be called the corporatization or financialization of higher education. I’m curious what you think about this trade-off and whether or not you see these pressures playing out at Swarthmore.
VS: I’m not sure I believe that it’s an “either-or” situation. I don’t want to speak for other institutions, but I do believe that at an institution like Swarthmore, we are concerned about the careful stewardship of our institutional resources. But I think it’s clear that we prioritize financial aid well beyond scholarships, in terms of more general support for students. Our suite of benefits for people who work here is designed to ensure that they are working at an institution that cares about them and supports and contributes to their ability to support themselves and their families in meaningful ways.
So I don’t believe that careful stewardship of resources and living into the institutional values need to be at odds with each other; in fact, I believe that the careful stewardship of resources actually helps us live into those values.
DP: They don’t necessarily need to be at odds with each other, but there are some faculty and students here who would say that with the growth in the endowment during not just your time as president, but beyond, might have come the growth, both in numbers and in strength, of administrative positions and administrative decision-making. Examples like, in recent years, the stricter protest and student life regulations might not be things that counter a strong educational experience or financial aid, but that come with an increased focus on managing the institution. Do you feel that those are results of pressure to be more focused on the management of the institution?
VS: I appreciate the question. I guess I worry a little bit about that logic, because it does seem to paint institutional or structural change with a pretty broad brush, and I don’t think it takes into account many of the variables, and the ways that society has changed and pressures on the institutions have changed that might require more administrative oversight. Some of the growth in the administration, for example, is a response to changes in the regulatory environment that we’re in. 30, 40 years ago, there were offices we did not need to have because we were not in the same kind of regulatory environment we are now, so we need to respond to that. Students and employees come to Swarthmore with different sets of challenges, say, than they would have 30 years or so ago. For example, we would not have been as aware of accessibility needs of students, faculty, staff, and people who visit the campus as we are now. I think it’s good that this is part of the inclusivity of our environment, but it does mean that we have to have administrative structure to deal with that as well. That formulation suggests that there’s some administrative growth to focus on managing the institution and its resources, and I guess I think it’s more complex than that.
DP: What would you say, then, to members of the faculty or of the student body who feel that more of the kind of decision-making abilities from the college have transitioned from being with the faculty towards the administration?
VS: This takes me back to something I said earlier. There are certainly faculty who believe that and who have expressed that viewpoint. There are others who do not believe that that’s the case, so I think to take that question seriously, we would need to agree on a baseline and then understand where we are relevant to that. I am aware that that viewpoint exists, but I am also aware of the fact that we have colleagues who don’t agree with that.
DP: In recent months, Swarthmore has seen the assumption that it is a protected community challenged in a multitude of ways. First, I want to ask about the protests during the spring that were on campus with the sit-in in Parrish Hall and then with the encampment. Can you say more about the nature of the FBI presence on campus during both of those events, their communication with the administration, and their urging of the college to end those protests during the spring?
VS: The FBI came to campus because of the cyber attack. I just want to be clear that the FBI did not come to campus because of the encampment. But the fact that both these things happened at the same time made people think either that the FBI was watching us or that we had actually called them onto campus. That is simply not true.
[Following the interview, VP for Communications and Marketing Andy Hirsch clarified and confirmed to The Phoenix that representatives from the FBI were never physically on campus and only communicated virtually.]
Let me talk about the encampment. There had been a revision to the Code of Conduct that specifically disallowed encampments. My feeling is, if we have a policy and we don’t uphold it, then it raises questions about why we have it at all. One thing that may not be as visible to everyone is the extent to which the encampment and the sort of persistence of the protests were making many members of our community feel unsafe and afraid. In terms of the concern about ICE agents coming to campus and so on, some of our most vulnerable community members were terrified about the fact that if this encampment was allowed to continue, it would attract the attention of ICE and other law enforcement to campus, which would make them vulnerable. They were really concerned about that and were very clear that the longer the encampment stayed up, the more afraid they felt.
We tried multiple ways to communicate with the folks in the encampment to get them to take it down. One of the things we became increasingly aware of was that a growing number of people in the encampment had no affiliation with college. We had people in the encampment on campus who had no affiliation. We didn’t know who they were. They were masked, which raised other issues around the safety and security of the community.
I’m sure you can appreciate that I did not want to call local law enforcement. We tried every which way to get our students or the individuals who put up the encampment to leave and take it down. At the end, every student except one left, and so only one of our students was actually arrested. When I realized that we had gotten to the place where we seriously needed to consider calling law enforcement to get the encampment taken down, I did call a meeting of a faculty committee, and then I called an emergency meeting of the entire faculty. I don’t know how many folks were there, but we pretty much filled Science Center 101. It was a conversation where I explained to them what the situation was. I took questions. I know that not everybody, certainly not everybody, agreed with the plan, but I wanted to be open with the faculty about what my thinking was and what the plan was, and figure out how they might be able to be helpful. It is not something I would have ever wanted to do, and it’s something I hope I never have to do again. But I had to weigh the safety and security of the larger community with allowing this to continue and not knowing who the people were who were in that tent. We had students who stayed in the encampment until probably ten minutes before. It was not my intention to try to get our students arrested, but it had to come down.
DP: You mentioned that concerns about ICE were at play, but I’m wondering if the presence of the FBI on campus — even if they were there for the cyber attack — intensified the concern about the Trump administration, and, by extension, ICE, or whether these were really two independent things.
VS: Look, knowing that they were there, I couldn’t ignore them. It’s not something you can unknow once you know they’re there. But I don’t really feel like that played a disproportionate role in my decision-making around this. We had been increasingly clear over the course of the year that we needed to make sure that folks understood the full range of latitude that they had for activism, but where there were lines that couldn’t be crossed. We were, I think, trying to be consistent in terms of how we upheld the policy. So I don’t believe the presence of the FBI accelerated my concern around this. If anything, it was really a concern that the longer this went on, the greater risk we were inviting to the most vulnerable members to our community.
DP: Building on these interactions with the world external to Swarthmore, many on campus, The Phoenix’s Editorial Board included, have been pushing for the college to be more imaginative in shaping its role as a civic and social justice-oriented institution in proximity to communities like Chester, PA, and Philadelphia that exemplify the growing economic and political instability that many people are facing. What do you think about the college’s role, not just as a school and therefore having curricular efforts relating to Chester and Philadelphia, but also as a very well-resourced and social justice-oriented institution nearby to these far less-resourced communities?
VS: I do believe, personally, and we, as an institution, take seriously our commitment and responsibility to partner with less-resourced communities around us. While we have a longstanding tradition of curricular interventions in one kind or another, I do believe that, during the time that I’ve been here, I’ve seen growing efforts to partner with and problem-solve with our neighbors in Chester and in Philadelphia, in areas such as educational inequity, environmental justice, things of that nature. So, I think we’ve seen growth in those areas. Which is not to say that there isn’t more that we can do. Generally, as opportunities for more productive, transformative partnerships arise, I think the college is open to exploring them to figure out how we can make a difference. I do think that we see ourselves as responsible neighbors in this community and are always open to ways we can help to bring about more significant change.
But more generally, I think our mission is always going to be to educate our students to contribute to the common good. It is increasingly obvious why we need to take that responsibility seriously.
DP: The college’s response to threats — such as the FBI’s presence on campus, the federal endowment tax, and the guidelines with regard to transgender athletes — could be seen as taking the rules of the system as they already are, and the tools that are already part of it, to protect the institution. These responses are instead of going out and testifying before Congress or arguing the issues in a more public way. Or, with the case of the transgender athletes, the college could reimagine whether or not Swarthmore should even be in the NCAA. How do you see your administration addressing these threats, and do you see anything specific as causing that defensiveness, or do you dispute this narrative?
VS: My response is that this is another example of that sort of “either-or” thinking. I don’t believe that the fact that we were able to protect the college from having to pay an exorbitant federal endowment tax foreclosed the opportunity for us to take another stance. We are in a completely chaotic environment right now. There are things we can do in the short run, and then we also have to be able to play the long game. It might have looked valiant to get up in front of Congress, but if we had had to pay a 7-21% endowment tax, it would have been catastrophic for our ability to educate students, to support students financially. We needed to protect the institution at that moment.
That doesn’t mean that there will not be other opportunities for us to stand up for higher ed more vociferously, to stand up for the liberal arts more vociferously. We are already involved in those kinds of activities as a sector of higher ed with our fellow institutions. I do have opportunities to speak in other venues, to talk about the importance of the mission that we are involved in. But we have to think about when we are playing a longer game and when we’re playing a shorter game, and how we respond in the moment. I don’t think that trying to protect the institution necessarily means that one is sacrificing the opportunity to speak out for more significant change.
DP: Will Swarthmore think about or plan ways to do that in the near future?
VS: Yes. Yes, and we already have. I’m thinking of the letter we just signed on to about [Trump’s] compact for higher education. That was an important example. I was one of a number of presidents who signed two documents: one of which rejected [Trump’s] compact, and the other of which articulated our own compact — what we as institutions were offering to the public. We are working on multiple fronts and that doesn’t mean that work is not happening.
DP: Is there anything else you’d like to share with the college community?
VS: The opportunity to be president of Swarthmore has been, notwithstanding all the challenges and crises that I’ve had to face, one of the great joys of my life, and has so far exceeded anything I could have anticipated. I really treasure the opportunities that I have to meet with students, to get to know them, to find out about their passions, whether they’re things that they’re delighted about or things they’re really concerned about. The students and alums, the staff who work here, our neighbors, they’re extraordinary. It’s really, truly, an extraordinary community. Much of the time, I pinch myself because I can’t believe how fortunate I am.
