Valerie Smith has always been something of an anomaly.
While her peers were beginning their sophomore year in high school, Smith was headed to Maine, where she would enroll as a student at Bates College at the young age of 15.
Her father, Dr. W. Reeves Smith, a retired biology professor at Long Island University, insisted that his daughter take a look at the small liberal arts college where Dr. Benjamin E. Mays—the prolific Black preacher and longtime president of Morehouse College—graduated from in 1920.
“Once I got there, something clicked and I just felt very comfortable,” says Smith, who served for 11 years on the college’s board of trustees. “I really believe in the small liberal arts college model.”
She could not have known that her career trajectory would follow that of her parents (her mother is a retired schoolteacher) nor did she fully conceptualize that she would be a college professor until the final years of her graduate studies.
“It wasn’t until I was writing my dissertation that I realized that I was following in my father’s footsteps,” says Smith. But teaching “was in my DNA, and I was just not aware of it.”
Her scholarly work and her advocacy for the liberal arts, coupled with experience overseeing undergraduate academic programs, quickly catapulted Smith to the top of a search committee list that ended with her being named the president of Swarthmore College, the small but competitive school that has approximately 1,500 students and is located about 11 miles outside Philadelphia.
