LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga. -- In a historic first for the conference, the Executive Committee will be comprised entirely of female leadership in 2022-23 as L. Song Richardson of Colorado College takes over as chair of the SCAC Presidents Council and will serve along with Vanessa B. Beasley of Trinity (past-chair) and Laura Skandera Trombley of Southwestern (future chair). Lesley Irvine of Colorado College will chair the SCAC Athletic Directors Council in 2022-23.

Richardson will serve as chair for the 2022-23 academic year, taking over from the recently retired Danny Anderson of Trinity, who served as chair of the group in 2020-21 and 2021-22. Trombley is scheduled to take over as Presidents Council chair in 2023-24. 

L. Song Richardson is an award-winning educator, legal scholar, and lawyer who is recognized for her transformational leadership in higher education. She became Colorado College’s 14th president in July 2021. She earned her A.B. from Harvard College and her J.D. from Yale Law School.

Before coming to CC, President Richardson was the dean and chancellor’s professor of law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. At the time of her appointment there, she was the only woman of color to lead a top-30 law school, and under her leadership, the school became the first law school less than 10 years old to be ranked #21 by U.S. News and World Report. While she was dean, the school received accolades for its commitment to students, its faculty scholarship, the diversity of its student body, and its leadership in addressing the societal implications of artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. Under her leadership, UCI Law quadrupled the number of endowed student scholarships; launched a CEO Fellowship program; created a partnership with the UN’s AI for Good Conference; launched new revenue generating educational programs; established a satellite program on the East Coast; and enrolled one of the most diverse student bodies in the top 30 law schools.

President Richardson sits on the board of Lord Abbett and is a member of the Advisory Committee of the Law School Admission Council’s Legal Education Program. She is a member of the Colorado Forum, a group of business and civic leaders committed to Colorado’s future; the Council of Korean Americans; and the American Law Institute.

She is frequently invited to speak on the challenges facing higher education. Her awards and recognitions include the Association of American Law Schools’ Derrick Bell Award, which recognizes a faculty member’s extraordinary contributions to legal education through mentoring, teaching, and scholarship, and the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association’s Trailblazer Award. In recognition of her accomplishments, the Thurgood Marshall Bar Association created the L. Song Richardson Legacy Award to honor individuals whose contributions make a lasting impact on the legal profession.

President Richardson’s interdisciplinary research uses lessons from cognitive and social psychology to study decision-making, and judgment. Her scholarship has been published by law journals at Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, Cornell, Duke, and Northwestern, among others.

President Richardson also is a classically trained pianist who performed twice with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and won numerous major piano competitions, including the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Harvard/Radcliffe concerto competitions.

Laura Skandera Trombley, a gifted scholar, proven leader, and passionate advocate for liberal-arts education, took office as the 16th president of Southwestern University in July 2020. She is the first woman chosen to lead Texas’s first university.

Trombley is president emerita of Pitzer College and The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, as well as the former president of the University of Bridgeport. Trombley is also emerita chair of the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, appointed to the position by President Barack Obama in 2015. Previously, she served as vice president for academic affairs at Coe College, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Recognized by her peers as a champion of liberal-arts institutions, Trombley’s leadership has earned praise for her ability to raise sustainability awareness, establish best-in-class university operations, and drive exponential growth in fundraising. Under her leadership, both Pitzer College and University of Bridgeport experienced transformational change, realizing a dramatic improvement in the schools’ national rankings and fundraising capabilities.

Trombley is a preeminent Mark Twain scholar. Her most recent book is Mark Twain’s Other Woman (Knopf, 2011). Her first book, Mark Twain in the Company of Women (University of Pennsylvania Press), was published in 1994. In May 2018, The Huntington Library presented her with the Dixon Wecter Distinguished Professor of American Literature Award; in August 2017, the Mark Twain Circle of America awarded her the Louis J. Budd Award for excellence in scholarly achievement; and in July 2013, she was recognized as the inaugural Thomas Nast Gastprofessur by the University of Koblenz–Landau.

Trombley’s scholarly articles have appeared in the Paris Review,Los Angeles Times,The Huffington Post, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, among other publications. She has edited two other books as well: Critical Essays on Maxine Hong Kingston (G. K. Hall, 1998) and Epistemology: Turning Points in the History of Poetic Knowledge (coedited with Roland Hagenbuechle; Fredrich Pustat, 1986). She remains an active scholar, with her chapter, “Gender Issues,” appearing in the essay collection Mark Twain in Context (edited by John Bird; University of Cambridge, 2020). She has also been invited by sculptor Charles Ray to contribute an essay about Mark Twain in his catalog for two upcoming major solo exhibitions presented at the Centre Pompidou and at the Pinault Collection, housed in the Bourse de Commerce, both in Paris.

Trombley has redefined the role of women in academic leadership. In addition to breaking boundaries as Southwestern University’s first female president, Trombley was the first woman to hold the title of vice president of academic affairs and dean of the faculty at Coe College and was the first woman president of the Huntington Library. Over the years, Trombley has also written extensively about the underrepresentation of women and people of color in academia, including in a piece published in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2015. While president of Pitzer College, she created a special assistant to the president position to encourage women and people of color to consider administration as a career pathway. She is a public intellectual whose work in the humanities and higher education has sparked lively debates in the academic and nonprofit communities.

A California native and the daughter of two educators, Trombley enrolled at the age of 16 as a first-year student at Pepperdine University and subsequently earned her bachelor of arts in English/humanities. She remained at Pepperdine to complete a master of arts in English, graduating summa cum laude. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Southern California as a Virginia Barbara Middleton Scholar and a recipient of the Lester and Irene Finkelstein Fellowship for Outstanding Humanities Student. Her teaching career began at the University of Southern California when she was 22. She was granted early tenure by SUNY—The State University of New York and was named to her first presidency at age 40.

A keynote speaker, session chair, or participant in dozens of academic and professional gatherings, Trombley has been a speaker at TEDxFulbright twice and regularly shares her insights into higher education, leadership, and the humanities for a variety of organizations, including the Association of Governing Boards, the Association of American Colleges and Universities, and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.

From 2002 to 2015, Trombley led some of the most transformative programs ever undertaken at Pitzer College, resulting in a drastic upturn in selectivity and dramatically improving the school’s rankings in the U.S. News and World Report from 70th to 32nd—an accomplishment no other college has equaled. Trombley, who joined the Fulbright Senior Specialists roster in 2004, established Pitzer College as the national leader in Fulbright Fellowships per 1,000 students for 10 years. From 2010 to 2015, Pitzer College was also the top producer of Fulbright award recipients among all liberal-arts colleges in the U.S.

Another defining aspect of Trombley’s presidency at Pitzer was her dedication to sustainability and environmental studies. She directed the construction of eight LEED-certified, mixed-use residential buildings; now 48% of all Pitzer buildings are LEED certified.

Trombley is dedicated to increasing access for all students. Under her leadership, Pitzer was the first college or university in California to make the SAT optional, and she also set a new standard for representation, with Pitzer tenure-track female faculty more than 50% and faculty of color more than 30%. She founded three scholarships at Pitzer College: the John Skandera Memorial Scholarship, the Laura Skandera Trombley Endowed Scholarship, and the Laura Skandera Trombley Humanities and Arts Endowed Research and Internship Fund.

At The Huntington, Trombley ushered in a new era of transparency, accountability, and increased revenues. In her first year, she raised $39.4 million—a $10 million increase over the previous year—and achieved record earned revenue amounts for admissions, The Huntington Store, and dining. The institution’s combined earned revenue reached a total of $11.3 million, a $1.4 million increase over the previous year. She expanded open hours by 130%, creating greater access for Los Angeles families to come and visit, thereby establishing a new record for attendance at The Huntington, with 40,000 member families and 725,759 visitors.

After a year’s sabbatical spent consulting for two foundations, writing her sixth book, Riding with Mark Twain (in progress), and teaching at the University of Southern California, Trombley accepted the presidency of the University of Bridgeport, in Connecticut. She was hired to reverse three consecutive years of budget deficits and to lend her expertise to finding new solutions for underrepresented students and university governance and structure.

The University of Bridgeport benefited from Trombley’s ability to manage operational budgets, as well as her extensive experience in fundraising. Trombley identified savings of more than $10 million dollars from the operational budget; negotiated new contracts with all of the University’s major vendors, resulting in millions of additional savings; and entered into two memoranda of understanding for real-estate development projects that will feature housing and amenities such as a recreational facility, a market, a pharmacy, and food service, with new employment opportunities for students and area residents.

Trombley has been a member of numerous organizations that advocate for service, higher education, scholarship, gender equality, and improved female representation in business networks: Rotary International, the National Council for Research on Women, the Council of Presidents of the Association of Governing Boards, the Council on Foreign Relations Higher Education Working Group on Global Issues, the Young Presidents Organization, the Chief Executive Organization, The Zamarano Club, The Mark Twain Circle of America, and The Southern California Forum of The Trusteeship of the International Women’s Forum.

Trombley is the proud mother of a son, a recent college graduate.

Vanessa B. Beasley was selected as Trinity's 20th president, and first female president, in the school's 153-year history on May 31. Guided by the University’s student-centered mission and vision, Beasley stands ready to lead one of the nation’s top liberal arts universities.

Beasley comes to Trinity from Vanderbilt University, where she served as vice provost for academic affairs, dean of residential faculty, and an associate professor of communication studies. As vice provost and dean of residential faculty, she oversaw Vanderbilt’s growing Residential College System as well as the campus units that offer experiential learning inside and outside of the classroom.

Beasley’s areas of academic expertise include the rhetoric of American presidents, political rhetoric on immigration, and media and politics. She attended Vanderbilt as an undergraduate and earned a bachelor of arts in speech communication and theatre arts. She also holds a Ph.D. in speech communication from the University of Texas at Austin.

Following stints on the faculty of Texas A&M University, Southern Methodist University, and the University of Georgia, she returned to Vanderbilt in 2007 as a faculty member in the Department of Communication Studies. Active in the Vanderbilt community, she has served as chair of the Provost’s Task Force on Sexual Assault and director of the Program for Career Development for faculty in the College of Arts and Science. 

Beasley was preceded by Danny Anderson, Trinity’s 19th president, who is retiring after serving with distinction for seven years.