To: The Wellesley College Community
From: Andrew Shennan, Provost and Lia Gelin Poorvu ’56 Dean of the College
Re: Concluding my service as provost
Date: September 14, 2023
The academic year just beginning will be my 25th in the dean’s office and my 20th year as the College’s provost and chief academic officer. With the COVID emergency (mostly) behind us, and with an ambitious strategic plan in place and many of its initiatives launched and underway, I have decided that this is the right time to conclude my service as provost. President Johnson and I have agreed that I will end my term on June 30, 2024.
Over the past quarter century I have been fortunate and grateful to work with three of the most far-sighted and principled presidents one could ever hope to serve under. I have been equally fortunate and grateful to work alongside nine outstanding academic deans, all members of the Wellesley College faculty. And I have collaborated with a succession of wonderful administrative teams—inside the Office of the Provost, across the academic division, and around the Senior Leadership table. Anything I have accomplished and all the satisfaction of this work has come from partnership with these talented and dedicated colleagues—I should say friends as well as colleagues.
It has been the privilege of my office (to use a phrase that I love to say at commencement) to work with the entire Wellesley community—with faculty and staff, with generations of student leaders and of trustees, and with our incomparable alums—to sustain and strengthen this institution. For me, as I know for many of you, Wellesley has always been and remains the exemplar of what a liberal arts college can be: a place that elevates undergraduate teaching and mentorship to a fine art, realizes the powerful synergy between high-caliber scholarship and high-impact teaching, and is animated through and through by the determination to make this world a better and fairer place, for women and for everyone.
During the balance of my term I look forward to continuing our progress on some of the important initiatives we’ve begun. And then, after some sabbatical time, I look forward to rejoining the history department (if they’ll have me!) and returning to the Wellesley classroom.
In the coming weeks, President Johnson will share information on the internal search process to select candidates for Wellesley’s next provost from the ranks of our distinguished faculty. She hopes to conclude the process by the end of January, and I look forward to supporting, in every way possible, my successor’s transition to the role.
