On Tuesday, Feb. 23, Swarthmore President Val Smith announced that her term would end on June 30, 2027, following the 2026-27 academic year. That date will also mark the conclusion of the two-year contract extension that she signed in October 2024, meaning that many on campus already expected the news to come soon, barring unexpected circumstances. When she leaves, she will conclude a twelve-year term as president, consisting of two five-year contracts begun in 2015 and 2020 and the two-year extension from 2025-2027.
In her email to the community, Smith reflected on her first visit to campus, writing, “I will never forget the moment I walked past the Rose Garden and saw Parrish Beach unfolding down both sides of Magill Walk.” She continued, “I had the unmistakable sensation that I had found my place, and that feeling has been reaffirmed again and again throughout my 11 years as part of this community.”
In email correspondence with The Phoenix, Vice President for Communications and Marketing Andy Hirsch wrote that Smith’s decision was not the result of any single development or pressure, and that she had been considering resigning since the 2024 contract extension. “Now in her 11th year, she has had a relatively long tenure for a college president, and this announcement reflects thoughtful planning rather than a reaction to circumstance,” he said, citing the American Council on Education’s finding that the average tenure (in 2023) of a school leader is around six years.
Before taking office as Swarthmore’s first Black president, Smith was dean of the college at Princeton University, where she was a longtime professor of African American literature. She is a leading scholar in the field and has written extensively in it, including three books. She is an alumna of Bates College and the University of Virginia. Since 2025, Smith has been the inaugural Roy J. and Linda G. Shanker Presidential Chair at Swarthmore.
Smith’s message did not specifically state that she planned to retire from academia, and Hirsch wrote that he couldn’t comment on her future plans. “I expect she will share more about what comes next as we get closer to June 2027. Until she concludes her time as president in June 2027, she remains fully engaged in and committed to the work of the College,” he mentioned. He clarified that the college does not expect to require an interim president.
Smith has presided over campus during a period of drastic change in the higher education landscape across the country and at Swarthmore in particular. Her time as president began just two years after the semester that former President Rebecca Chopp called “the Spring of Our Discontent” because of emerging tensions relating to the college’s handling of sexual assaults, ties to the fossil fuel industry, and selection of a controversial commencement speaker. Smith’s term as president has included periods of intense campus activism surrounding some of the same topics, in addition to the pro-Palestinian student movement that has grown more intense in recent semesters, but has also been shaped by the destabilizing forces of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Trump administration’s higher education policies.
While most of the faculty members The Phoenix contacted for comment declined to respond for the time being, Ben Berger, associate professor of political science and executive director of the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, wrote that he was saddened but not surprised by the news. Berger, who was taught English literature by Smith as an undergraduate at Princeton, wrote, “When I interact with her now, I don’t just see a college president but a scholar and teacher and mentor.”
Smith indicated that the remainder of her time as president would be devoted to implementing the Swarthmore Forward strategic plan. The plan, launched in Spring 2024, emphasizes a holistic approach to education and campus life, but has emerged amid a time when the college is also facing pressures from an antagonistic federal government and seems yet to be fully understood by the campus. In Fall 2025 Phoenix polling, faculty respondents expressed equal parts (22% each) approval, disapproval, and lack of knowledge about the strategic plan, with another 35% saying they were neutral. Student respondents were even more ambivalent, with 72% saying they either didn’t know or felt neutral about the plan.
“I’m announcing my decision now to ensure that there is time for a thoughtful, seamless transition,” Smith wrote in the email. Shortly after, current Chair of the Board of Managers Koof Kalkstein ’78 also wrote to the campus to offer more information about the presidential transition triggered by Smith’s news.
“This is a pivotal moment for the College and for higher education more broadly, and the Board recognizes how consequential this search will be in shaping Swarthmore’s future. We are committed to an inclusive and transparent process that welcomes input from across the community on the qualities and characteristics we should seek in Swarthmore’s 16th president,” he shared.
Kalkstein announced that the search committee would include students, faculty, staff, and managers, and would be chaired by incoming Board Chair Gustavo Schwed ’84 and Board Member Cindi Leive ’88. Schwed is a professor of management practice at New York University’s Stern School of Business, and Lieve is a journalist, senior fellow at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and former Editor-in-Chief of “Glamour” and “Self” magazines.
The email said that Schwed and Lieve would work with “administration and faculty” to identify the remaining members of the search committee. Hirsch told The Phoenix that faculty representatives will be selected from a slate of nominees put forward by the Committee on Faculty Procedures, and Vice President for Student Affairs Stephanie Ives sent an email to campus on Wednesday calling for nominations of students for the committee. Ives wrote that students nominated for this role should be those who “demonstrate a consistent ability to work collaboratively; are trusted by students, faculty, and staff as a whole; are highly engaged with the College; can maintain strict confidentiality to protect the integrity of the search and the privacy of candidates; [and] are available to participate in multiple meetings, including during the summer months.”
In response to an interview request from The Phoenix, Schwed wrote that he didn’t have much to add at this early stage. “For more than a decade, [Smith] has led with integrity, thoughtfulness, and kindness. All of us are grateful for the clarity and care she has brought to the role, and for the strong foundation she leaves for the future,” he said. Schwed added that the committee would be “eager” to engage with the college community in the months ahead and “committed to keeping the community informed along the way.”
Perhaps addressing concerns about a search chaired by members of the Board of Managers, who are not based on campus and have faced disapproval in recent semesters (-5% net approval among faculty, -38% among students in fall ‘25), Hirsch wrote, “To be clear, the Board is not conducting the search; rather, the committee will lead the process.”
Notably, the search will also be coordinated with executive search firm Isaacson, Miller, an external company well-known for its support in hiring processes, perhaps raising questions about the ability to align the search with the college’s internal values. Hirsch wrote that this involvement was a “standard practice,” and added that the firm’s staff has already begun interacting with the college.
Expanding on Kalkstein’s comment about “meaningful opportunities for community input” during the search, Hirsch said that the college plans to hold listening sessions for different sides of campus later this semester to help inform the candidate profile for which the committee searches.
Because the task of college and university presidents has become especially challenging in a period of “unusually intense social turmoil with a lot of mistrust of public and international institutions,” Berger said, “We’re going to need to find someone else [after Smith] who’s extremely capable, dedicated, energetic, thick-skinned, and confident about their moral commitments while retaining the humility that we all need to change our minds when information and contexts change.”
When asked whether the administration has an early picture of what kind of candidate would be ideal, Hirsch told The Phoenix it was too early to identify a set of criteria, “as much of that will emerge from the community input gathered during the next few months.” He did, however, mention integrity, intellectual curiosity, a deep respect for the liberal arts, and a demonstrated ability to lead a complex organization as values that “we could all agree are important for the next president.”
Schwed wrote, “Our goal is a thoughtful, inclusive process that results in a leader who understands this institution and is ready to guide it into its next chapter.”
In recent semesters, Smith has seen differing levels of approval between the student body and the faculty. Following the Spring ’25 semester, which ended with her decision to call local law enforcement to end a pro-Palestine encampment on campus, Smith sat at a -34% net approval rating among the student body. By the end of the Fall ’25 semester, that number had jumped eight percentage points. Last fall, in The Phoenix’s inaugural faculty poll, Smith enjoyed a much higher approval rating of +22%, during a time when many other school leaders are facing crises of confidence among their faculties.
“Colleges are institutions, and whoever leads them in troubled times tends to get tarred with that broader anti-institutional sentiment — even if their leaders might share many or most of the critics’ values and commitments,” Berger contextualized.
This past fall, Smith sat down with The Phoenix for her first interview with the paper in a decade. The interview unpacked many specific developments in her presidency, but also reflected on her time at the college overall. When asked to identify a philosophical through line of her presidency, she said that her approach has primarily been “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,” and emphasized her effort to be as consultative as possible before taking responsibility for key decisions.
Among the efforts of which she is most proud, she mentioned in the interview, was ensuring that Swarthmore continued and expanded its financial aid program to allow students from all backgrounds to attend the college. Conversely, she identified the COVID-19 pandemic as an especially difficult period of her leadership that, in retrospect, left lasting effects on the college’s social fabric.
Smith’s impending departure will also mark a period of transition for the Tri-College Consortium as a whole. Haverford College president Wendy Raymond announced in November that she, too, will be leaving her post in June of 2027. Therefore, Bryn Mawr College President Wendy Cadge (Swarthmore ’97) will be the senior president within the consortium of three liberal arts colleges in Philadelphia’s western suburbs, having only been in office since 2024.
“Thank you for the trust you have placed in me to serve as Swarthmore’s president. This community has shaped me in ways I could not have imagined when I first looked out over Parrish Beach nearly 12 years ago. I hope that, in turn, I have contributed to strengthening the College for the generations who will follow,” Smith concluded.
