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Joanne V. Creighton is an outspoken champion of the American liberal arts tradition who believes that such an education is “at its best, revolutionary. It transforms students; it awakens them to a fuller life of the mind.” This core belief has been formed over a lifetime of scholarship and teaching. Together with her considerable skill as a strategist and leader, this belief has shaped the initiatives in the plans for 2003 and 2010 that have strengthened the academic resources of the College. Most importantly, her belief in the transformational power of the liberal arts has influenced the lives of the thousands of women who have passed through the Mount Holyoke gates since her arrival in 1996. A teacher, literary scholar, and experienced academic administrator known for her expertise in strategic planning and implementation, Joanne V. Creighton assumed the presidency of Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts on January 1, 1996. During her first eighteen months as president, Ms. Creighton led a comprehensive and highly consultative planning process that culminated in unanimous faculty and Board of Trustees endorsements of The Plan for Mount Holyoke 2003. That Plan was extraordinarily successful in engendering the renewed strength and vitality of the College. All of the major benchmarks and goals of the Plan were met or exceeded: applications for admissions to the College broke records for four consecutive years; fund-raising exceeded the campaign’s 200-million-dollar goal, and major building and renovation on campus—including a state-of-the-art new science complex—is near completion. Following the success of The Plan for Mount Holyoke 2003, the College completed a second round of strategic planning under Ms. Creighton’s leadership in 2003, culminating in The Plan for Mount Holyoke 2010. The new Plan reaffirms Mount Holyoke’s mission: educating a diverse, residential community of women at the highest level of academic excellence and fostering the alliance of liberal arts education with purposeful engagement in the world. In service of that mission, the Plan commissions further enterprises, including the creation of an office of Global Initiatives, that will build on the excellence that has earned Mount Holyoke its long-standing reputation as one of the finest liberal arts colleges in the nation. Prior to coming to Mount Holyoke, Ms. Creighton served at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut as vice president for academic affairs and provost and professor of English from 1990-1994, and as Wesleyan’s interim president from 1994 to 1995. Ms. Creighton is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Wisconsin at Madison and holds a master of arts in teaching from Harvard University and a doctoral degree in English Literature from the University of Michigan. A member of the faculty at Wayne State University from 1968 to 1985, Ms. Creighton began her administrative career there in the early 1980s, leaving in 1985 to become dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. The author of four books, Ms. Creighton has concentrated much of her scholarly work and teaching on the authors William Faulkner, Margaret Drabble, and Joyce Carol Oates. Her books are William Faulkner’s Craft of Revision (1977), Joyce Carol Oates (1979), Margaret Drabble (1985), and Joyce Carol Oates: Novels of the Middle Years (1992). The author of numerous scholarly articles and reviews, she is a frequent commentator on contemporary literature and issues affecting higher education. Additional Web Link: |
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WOMENSPHERE | Rockefeller Center | |
