Everyone likes a comeback story, and Sweet Briar College’s is particularly heartwarming. Yet the story is not over, even as the college prepares to begin a new chapter in its 116-year history with the arrival of its 12th president, Dr. Meredith Woo.
Woo comes to Sweet Briar by way of London, where she was the director of the International Higher Education Support Program at the Open Society Foundation from 2015 to 2017. Prior to that, she was the dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia (UVA) from 2008 to 2014.
Given her relative proximity to Sweet Briar during her years at UVA — the two schools are located about an hour apart in the hills of rural Virginia — Woo knew of the institution and was surprised when news broke that the school might close.
“I was thunderstruck when there was the near-closure experience,” Woo says. I very deeply admired the way that the alumnae and other stakeholders in the college conducted themselves to save the college.”
Woo grew up in Seoul, South Korea, and moved to Japan when she was 14. She came to the United States to attend Bowdoin College and earned a master’s in international a airs affairs and a doctorate in political science from Columbia University.
Woo notes that, although South Korea’s economy today is one of the most competitive in the world, it was not so at the close of the Korean War. After the conflict ended, South Korea transformed from a developing nation to a developed one within a generation — a metamorphosis brought about in part by widespread enrollment in higher education. The end result of that investment in education was that the country “compacted into 50 years something like four centuries of economic advancement in the West,” Woo says.
As Woo was growing up, her parents hosted relatives who came to the capital from the provinces to pursue postsecondary degrees. One aunt studied music education; an uncle studied engineering; and another uncle had found his calling in Germanic literature.
