After logging onto our Zoom call, incoming Smith President Sarah Willie-LeBreton introduced herself to me with a smile as “Sarah.” She verified the pronunciation of my name and inquired about my major and class year. When asked what she wanted the Smith community to know about her, Wille-LeBreton answered with two things:
She loves being a sociologist, and she loves Rooibos tea.
Wille-LeBreton is set to begin working as Smith’s next president on July 1 and be inaugurated in October. Her resume reads impressively: Wille-LeBreton has served as a professor, a department chair and is currently the provost and dean of faculty at Swarthmore College, a liberal arts college in a suburb of Philadelphia. She taught at Bard College and Colby College, other East Coast liberal art colleges. She has participated in two book projects and received a multitude of awards for her academic work.
But experience wasn’t the only reason Willie-LeBreton was selected. “The search committee was extraordinarily impressed by Sarah — because of her academic experience as well as her personal priorities,” said Susan Molineaux ’75, the chair of the search committee, in Smith’s press release of Willie-LeBreton’s appointment.
Willie-LeBreton said that such personal priorities include embarking on a “listening tour” during her first year as president. She plans to attend athletic games, department meetings, classes and house teas — where, yes, she hopes to drink Rooibos tea — but also plans to hear the voices and opinions of students, staff and faculty across campus.
She plans on devoting significant time to this project during her first year as president, and engagement is at the top of her list when she arrives on campus. Willie-LeBreton plans to block time out in her schedule for conversations with members of the community but also hopes that discussions will emerge spontaneously. This way, she said, “we can move Smith in a direction that feels good to everybody.”
Willie-LeBreton said that, in order to do this, she will work with her chief of staff and with her executive assistant to set aside time at least every week to meet with different people. “If you don’t set aside that time, then you can look up and three years later and say, ‘How come I’ve hardly met any students?’” She added that she does not want to enter the presidency of the college without knowing the community, and she believes these relationships will inform her agenda. “I am just completely devoted to getting to know people and offering the chance to get to know me,” she said.
She remarked that she is aware of problems that she may encounter during the tour and said that “there are and there are always smaller versions of the issues that are out in the larger world happening on campus.” She does not view college campuses as spaces that are exempt from real-world events, tragedies and discussions. “I think campus is another place where we let the real world in because we’re of the real world, and we bring our generosity, and we also bring our biases to campus with us, whether we’re faculty or students or staff.”
Willie-LeBreton thinks this to be true even in a learning environment like a liberal arts college, which she believes to be intrinsically special. She reflected on what she views to be important in a liberal arts education, highlighting the significance of relationships that students have with peers and mentors. “There’s something very special about the hope of spending your college time, four years, someplace where you expect to be transformed by it and to come out a different person, and where, as as a faculty member, you expect to participate in that transformation of students knowing that you too will be transformed,” she said.
Willie-LeBreton herself experienced the value of such interaction firsthand during her undergraduate career at Haverford College, where she was subject to a similar liberal arts environment. She said that “there’s something unusually vulnerable and life-expanding about residential education, where the conversations that begin in the classroom can continue into the dorm and over dinner.”
She said that she believes this idea extends to historically womens’ colleges such as Smith. She said, “HBCUs, tribal colleges, Hispanic-serving institutions and women’s colleges … are super important because they’re spaces in which anybody who is subdominant or minority is in the majority, or in a dominant position in terms of numbers,” she said.
During her undergraduate years, Willie-LeBreton spent a semester at Spelman College — a historically Black women’s liberal arts institution — in which this idea rang especially true for her. She said that attending Spelman was an incredibly valuable experience for her. “Coming back from Spelman I had a much deeper groundedness, I had a much deeper confidence. I was much more likely to use my voice in class, much more likely to raise my hand, much more likely to disagree even if it was politely, with professors or with upperclassmen,” she said.
Reflecting on the experience, she said that one of the reasons why she gained this sense of confidence was because Spelman is a historically Black women’s college. “I had, I think, a clearer sense that I deserved to be there [at Haverford] and that I had something to offer to the conversation. And I do think that was having spent a semester being just surrounded by other Black women, where I did not ever have a sense of racism or classism or sexism playing a role,” she said. “That space allowed me to transform developmentally in a way that I had not experienced before.”
However, when she returned to Haverford, not all of her peers agreed with her newfound perspectives. One of the college experiences that she remembers most clearly came after she returned. Willie-LeBreton was asked to give a sermon at her family’s Episcopal church in Cambridge, MA, that she published at Haverford later that year. She chose to speak about her experience at Spelman. Willie-LeBreton used a passage in her sermon that stated: “A bruised reed He will not break and a dimly burning wick He will not extinguish” (Isaiah 42:3). She used the passage to compare her experience at Spelman to her experience at Haverford.
“Spelman, compared to Haverford, was that bent reed and that flickering flame that had a lot less money and was less selective, but amazing things were happening there,” Willie-LeBreton said. She wanted to highlight that the community at Haverford that she had existed in throughout her years in college was doing a “disservice to themselves” by presuming that there was something innately superior about their elitism and selectivity, which she spoke about in the sermon.
After the sermon was published, it was met with displeasure by many of her friends at the time. “I don’t know if they didn’t understand what I was trying to say or they felt challenged by it,” she said. The interactions taught Willie-LeBreton that while we may assume that we share similar values and experiences with our peers, we in actuality may not. “I’m glad that I had come back from Spelman,” she said, “because I kind of had the personal Teflon and heart armor to withstand some good friends saying, ‘I think you’re absolutely wrong, Sarah.’ … I was like, ‘Okay, well, let’s keep talking.’”
While Willie-LeBreton is prepared to have difficult conversations when she arrives on campus, she is also looking forward to some of Smith’s more lighthearted traditions, especially Mountain Day and Julia Child Day. On Mountain Day, students can expect to see her dressed in plaid, picking apples alongside them. And on Julia Child Day, Willie-LeBreton says that while she is trying to go vegetarian, she will make an expectation for Julia.
“There’s nobody who can beat her recipe for beef bourguignon,” she said.
