Joanne V. Creighton, Ph.D.

Past President, Mt. Holyoke College

Known as a strategic planner, consensus-builder, and champion of the liberal arts and of women’s education, Joanne V. Creighton has played leadership roles at large public universities and at private liberal arts colleges.  President Emeritus and Professor of English at Mount Holyoke, she is currently serving a three-year term as a Five Colleges Fortieth Anniversary Professor teaching first at the University of Massachusetts, then Amherst College, and, in the fall of 2015, Hampshire College.

She served as Interim President of Haverford College for two years (2011-13).  She is widely credited with stabilizing and re-centering the College during a turbulent transition and initiating a strategic planning process, centered on vitalizing the liberal arts curriculum and linking academic, facilities, financial, and campaign planning.

From January 1996 to July 2010, Joanne Creighton served as President of Mount Holyoke where she led two comprehensive and highly consultative planning processes that culminated in unanimous faculty and Board of Trustees endorsements. Those plans were extraordinarily successful in engendering the renewed strength, vitality, and confidence of the College. Through fiscal discipline budgets were balanced and over $450 million raised through two comprehensive campaigns resulting in the dramatic growth of the endowment.  Applications for admissions to the College broke new records; over ninety new faculty were hired; three new centers were established; major building and renovation on campus — including a new state-of-the-art science complex and a new residence hall — were completed. Under Creighton’s leadership, Mount Holyoke College also had unprecedented success in attracting a global student body, with 20 percent of the student body from outside the United States. At the same time, the College retained its leadership in enrolling significant numbers of first generation students from low-income backgrounds.

In May 2010 President Creighton was awarded an honorary doctorate of human letters from Mount Holyoke College and its Board of Trustees named the new residence hall in her honor.

Joanne Creighton came to Mount Holyoke from Wesleyan University in Connecticut where she was Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost (1990-94) and Interim President from 1994-95.  While at Wesleyan University, she led the faculty in developing a five-year academic plan, the centerpiece of the University Plan.

So too did she work effectively with the faculty to develop an academic plan at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro as Dean of Arts and Sciences from 1980-85. A member of the faculty at Wayne State University in Detroit from 1968 to 1985, Ms. Creighton began her administrative career there as Associate Dean of Arts and Humanities in the early 1980s. She was the author and project director of a large NEH Challenge Grant designed to coordinate and strengthen the arts and humanities.

Ms. Creighton is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate in English of the University of Wisconsin at Madison and holds a masters from Harvard University and a doctoral degree from the University of Michigan.

The author of four books of literary criticism, Dr. Creighton has concentrated much of her scholarly work and teaching on the authors William Faulkner, Margaret Drabble, and Joyce Carol Oates.  She has also gained prominence as a vocal advocate for what she calls “the great unfinished agenda” – the education of girls and women worldwide – and for her public stances on educational policy issues, including liberal education, affirmative action, standardized testing, and college rankings.  Her writings have appeared in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, The Chicago Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Chronicle of Higher Education, USA Today, The Hartford Courant, among many other publications.