The below message was sent to the community on April 9, 2024.
I am delighted to announce that the Bryn Mawr Board of Trustees has voted unanimously to elect Wendy Cadge, the dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanistic Social Sciences at Brandeis University, as the 10th president of Bryn Mawr College. She will begin her term on July 1.
Dr. Cadge stood out in an expansive field of remarkably talented candidates. Her life and work beautifully align with Bryn Mawr’s mission and aspirations. She is a distinguished and innovative scholar, an accomplished academic administrator, an award-winning teacher, and an innately inclusive and feminist leader. She shares Bryn Mawr’s core belief in the transformative power of liberal arts education and in the academic richness and synergy of our rigorous undergraduate and graduate programs.
President-elect Cadge is widely published in her field of American contemporary religion and is regularly engaged in public discourse. Her work is also entrepreneurial, creative, and practical. In 2018, she founded the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab, which has become a national nexus for thought leadership, education, and support for chaplains and spiritual care providers. Her work has illuminated and created a new community for practitioners of a powerful source of support for human wellness and thriving.
As an administrator, Dr Cadge has consistently demonstrated her ability to develop unexpected solutions to complex issues, discover common ground, and often foster new partnerships in the process.
Our search committee conversations with Dr. Cadge convinced us she has the moral compass, clarity of thought, generosity, creativity, and energy to lead our Bryn Mawr community forward in rich and unique ways.
You can read more about President-Elect Cadge’s background online. You will likely notice that Dr. Cadge will be our second president with an undergraduate degree from Swarthmore College, so she is already connected to our Tri-Co community.
We are grateful to the entire Bryn Mawr community for your thoughtful participation in articulating the essential priorities of our presidential search. In concert with these widely shared aspirations, we searched for a new leader who embodies a passion for learning, intellectual curiosity, and delight in engaging deeply with our students, faculty, staff, and alumnae/i. We searched for a candidate whose moral compass clearly embraces Bryn Mawr’s mission of excellence and inclusion. And we looked for a candidate able to steward the College’s significant resources while also building and nurturing our community's vibrancy and inclusiveness. Courage to engage in challenging conversations and make difficult decisions were also high on our list. Wendy Cadge meets all of these aspirations.
We owe a particular debt of gratitude to the Presidential Search Committee members for their deep commitment to Bryn Mawr and their unstinting dedication of time and care to this essential work. We launched our rigorous national and international search in May 2023, attracting a rich field of candidates. Search Chair and trustee Amy Loftus ‘90 and Vice-Chair and trustee Cecilia Conrad ably led the 17-member search committee. Amy, Cecilia, and I were joined by faculty members Catherine Conybeare, Erica Graham, Jamie Taylor, and Jose Vergara; staff member David Consiglio; students Adalia Rodriguez ‘24 and Hilde Nelson (PhD candidate, History of Art); Trustees Charlie Bruce ’16, Gina Kim ’92, Barry Mills, Thabani Sinkula ’99, Lorelei Vargas ’94, and Nanar Yoseloff ’97; and Haverford College Board of Managers representative Amy T. Brooks H’92.
Finally, and foundational to the success of our search, Bryn Mawr is fortunate to have been incomparably led by Kim Cassidy for over a decade. We are grateful for all she has done to strengthen Bryn Mawr’s position as one of the leading liberal arts institutions in the United States. We are stronger on every front and can take particular pride in Bryn Mawr’s ever-growing ability to attract, admit, and support the most excellent students because of Kim’s steadfast commitment to building our resources for financial aid. Kim will conclude her presidency on June 30. We will celebrate her presidency later this spring and look forward to her return to the Psychology faculty after a well-deserved sabbatical.
We can be proud of our community’s commitment to the success of our Presidential Search. Thank you to all, and please join in welcoming Wendy Cadge to Bryn Mawr. We have found the right next President, and I am confident that, together with her, Bryn Mawr will reach new heights of excellence and success.
Sincerely,
Cynthia Archer ‘75
Chair, Board of Trustees