Comings and Goings …
Mount Holyoke College President Sonya Stephens announced she will step down in August to become president of the American University of Paris. Stephens has worked at the South Hadley, Mass.-based Seven Sisters and Five Colleges institution since 2013 and became president in 2018, succeeding Lynn Pasquerella. Just a few days earlier, another Seven Sisters leader, Smith College President Kathleen McCartney announced that she will step down in 2023 after a decade in charge of the Northampton, Mass.-based college that she began leading in 2013, succeeding Carol Christ, who is now chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley.
F. Javier Cevallos
Departing Framingham State University President F. Javier Cevallos will become president-in-residence at the Harvard Graduate School of Education for the 2022-23 academic year. Cevallos, who began as Framingham State president in 2014, announced last spring that he’d step down by August 2022. He will be succeeded at Framingham by Nancy Niemi, the provost and vice president for academic affairs at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. Biddy Martin, who recently announced she is leaving the presidency of Amherst College (another Five Colleges institution) will also serve as a Harvard president-in-residence.
Raytheon executive Tim DelGiudice announced he is stepping down as chair of Rhode Island’s Council on Postsecondary Education on March 31 after two three-year terms on the panel.
Community foundation expert Deborah Ellwood was named the next president and CEO of the Maine Community Foundation (MCF), the state’s second largest foundation. Currently in charge of a national network of community foundations called CFLeads, Ellwood will succeed Steve Rowe at the Ellsworth-based MCF.
Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) named Paula Fitzpatrick, formerly dean of Assumption University’s D’Amour College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, as the first director of a new Center for Well-Being launched by WPI in the wake of seven recent student deaths, at least three by suicide.
Westfield State University appointed Michael Freeman, recently vice president of enrollment management and student affairs at Baltimore’s Coppin State University, to be the western Massachusetts university’s special assistant to the president on university strategies and chief of staff in the president’s office.
Massachusetts’s Department of Transitional Assistance Commissioner Amy Kershaw was named acting commissioner of the state’s Department of Early Education and Care, succeeding Samantha Aigner-Treworgy, who announced her resignation last month.
William D. Barker, the founding executive director of Wenham, Mass.-based Gordon College’s Global Honors Institute and executive director of its Center for Faith and Inquiry, was named the 19th president of South Carolina’s Southern Wesleyan University, effective July 25.
Passings …
New Hampshire state Rep. Robert D. “Renny” Cushing died at age 69 after a battle with prostate cancer. Cushing began his political work as a member of the Clamshell Alliance opposing the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant in the 1970s and became a crusader for many human rights causes over eight terms in the New Hampshire House.
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