Presidential Initiatives

Bryn Mawr’s founding commitment to academic excellence is at the core of its identity. Bryn Mawr supports a faculty of scholar-teachers who bring contemporary research to the classroom, the power of liberal arts education as the best preparation for professional success and lifetime learning, and the value of a challenging and engaging undergraduate experience that prepares students for long-term success.  

President Cassidy is committed to recruiting and retaining a superb, diverse faculty whose research advances knowledge, informs dynamic teaching, and drives development of innovative programs with national and international reputations. Bryn Mawr is measured among the top liberal colleges for its support of research and faculty publication.

She advocates for the importance and expansion of undergraduate research, which students pursue during the academic year and in funded summer projects. The College has also expanded opportunities for students to achieve an advanced degree at the Bryn Mawr or with partner institutions. These and other high-impact educational practices contribute to Bryn Mawr being consistently rated among the top 10 liberal arts colleges in the U.S. in the percentage of students who pursue advanced degrees. 

Curricular innovation has been a hallmark of her work at Bryn Mawr as both provost and president. In collaboration with faculty colleagues, Cassidy led development of a rich array of educational programs that integrate rigorous coursework and complex problem-solving in settings in and beyond the classroom, including 360° multi-disciplinary course clusters, Praxis courses that combine classroom and fieldwork learning, and new majors and minors in fields ranging from Data Science to Neuroscience to Asian American Studies.

Over the past decade, President Cassidy has worked across the College to honor Bryn Mawr’s commitment to equity across all forms of diversity and to build inclusive institutional structures, culture, and values in which all students, faculty, and staff can thrive. This work has demanded addressing historical  practices of exclusion as well as confronting existing barriers to our aspirations to a community of belonging. The College’s ongoing efforts are articulated in its approach to advance diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism in all aspects of the institution. Cassidy has established the Campus Partnership for Equity and Anti-Racism (CPEAR) in Spring 2021 as a cross-constituency leadership group to support institutional problem-solving, communicate progress, and assess success.

Working with colleagues across campus, President Cassidy has supported intentional, interconnected programming that helps students build a holistic experience of well-being, growth, and preparation through their years at Bryn Mawr—and beyond. This work has included completion of a new Student Life and Wellness Building, which co-locates departments that support students in thinking holistically about their education, well-being, and personal and professional development, as well as creation of THRIVE, a required first-semester course for new students that promotes students transition to college and promotes student reflection, resilience, and resourcefulness.

During her tenure, the College has increased support for a wide variety of extra-curricular and co-curricular programs, including athletics and fitness, civic engagement, and staff and programming that supports student engagement and clubs.  

President Cassidy has also promoted opportunities for fun, connection, and celebration of both individual and collective accomplishments. From surprise “Pop Up” events, to community dinners with the President, to acknowledging student contributions in the annual Community Building Honor Roll, President Cassidy has acted on her aspiration to “inject creativity and joy into what we do, to counter the pressures of perfectionism, to help our students’ intellects and imaginations flourish, and to let excitement and discovery thrive . . . .”

President Cassidy seeks to make a Bryn Mawr education and all of the programs the College offers available to talented students of all economic backgrounds. During Defy Expectation, the College’s most recent fundraising campaign, which concluded in May 2021, donors contributed $60 million in new endowed scholarship support and established 100 new endowed scholarship funds.

These gifts and other funds have allowed Bryn Mawr to increase its investment in need-based financial aid over the past several years. In 2022 the College eliminated loans in financial aid packages for families with annual incomes of $60,000 or less and reduced loan expectations substantially for all other students receiving need-based aid to support middle income families. Bryn Mawr also reduced expectations for savings from summer jobs for all students receiving need-based aid and replaced these with additional scholarship aid.

Defy Expectation also raised funding for more than 1,000 summer internships; to support student travel costs for courses that engage in field work around the world; to develop new staffing and programming for first-generation students and those from families of limited income; and to create a Career and Civic Engagement Center to help students explore and succeed in their post-graduation professional pathways.

Looking forward, President Cassidy aspires to more than double the campaign’s scholarship fundraising success and to realize her aspiration to eliminate loans for all students. 

Under President Cassidy’ leadership and beginning during her tenure as provost, Bryn Mawr has pioneered use of blended learning in the teaching of the liberal arts. Bringing together 40+ partner institutions through programs funded by a series of grants from major national foundations, President Cassidy led an initiative to investigate how to best combine online and active in-class approaches to support student learning in STEM, humanities, social sciences, and interdisciplinary courses. The College hosts an annual Blended Learning Conference that brings together an international community of faculty, educational technologists, librarians, and academic administrators to learn from one another to foster improved learning and student success. Bryn Mawr faulty, students, and staff also participate actively in the Liberal Arts Collaborative for Digital Innovation.

More recently, President Cassidy spearheaded an initiative at Bryn Mawr to capitalize on the rich possibilities for studying Data Science in a liberal arts context. Taking advantage of the interdisciplinary nature of Data Science, which requires both subject expertise and computational skills and approaches, faculty have created a Data Science minor that is available to students in any major, along with a wide range of co-curricular activities to support development of technical skills and understanding of ethical and social issues that have come with the development and use of data in contemporary life.

Bryn Mawr’s signature Digital Competencies Program provides a map for students seeking curricular and co-curricular opportunities to gain experience with an array of digital tools and methodologies. The model is woven through course assignments, campus jobs, internships, and research projects, and supports students in reflecting on and presenting how these skills support their post-graduation career and graduate study pathways.

Digital scholarship at Bryn Mawr encompasses the use of a wide range of digital methods and tools, from GIS to data visualization to network analysis and more. The digital scholarship program serves as a hub for faculty, students, and staff within and across disciplines to learn, collaborate, and make informed choices about interacting, creating, and critiquing digital technologies.

Overview

Across the College, students, faculty, and staff are working to realize the vision expressed in Bryn Mawr's mission statement that "equity and inclusion serve as the engine for excellence and innovation." The energy, insight, and imagination of community members is evident in initiatives ranging from development of the "Power, Inequity, and Justice" curricular requirement to Who Built Bryn Mawr? research and exhibits, teach-ins, programming from the Impact Center, and so much more.

To deepen the work already happening on campus, the President's Office launched an initiative in spring 2023 to bring visiting experts, artists, and thinkers to the Bryn Mawr campus to share their work with us. These guests will help us amplify initiatives we have already launched, provide new perspectives and ideas, contribute expertise and emerging knowledge, and expand our networks to other organizations and individuals around the country working to advance inclusive excellence in higher education. 

Inaugural Event

For the inaugural Advancing Inclusive Excellence visitors series, Expanding Access, Opportunity, and Success in STEM, two national leaders in transforming STEM education and student success visited Bryn Mawr to talk about their personal journeys in STEM and their efforts to create structural change, and to engage in dialogue informed by questions from students. Learn more about these speakers in the event listing here.