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A sociologist who helps lead a technology-oriented institution in New York will become the next president of George Washington University and will be the first woman to hold that position.
GWU announced Wednesday that Ellen Granberg, provost of the Rochester Institute of Technology, will take office July 1 as the 19th president of the largest university in the nation’s capital. Granberg will arrive in the job with a major goal set by the governing board: Move GWU toward, and eventually into, the top ranks of the nation’s research universities.
Granberg will succeed Mark Wrighton, a veteran education leader who stepped into the presidency a year ago to steady the university after his predecessor’s abrupt departure.
Thomas LeBlanc’s four-year term as president was marked by controversies, including the bumpy rollout in 2019 of a plan to shrink undergraduate enrollment on GWU’s D.C. campuses by about 20 percent, with a larger focus on recruiting students interested in science, technology, engineering and math. LeBlanc also drew accusations of racism in 2020 after he made a remark to a student, captured on video, in which he posed a hypothetical situation of a majority of students agreeing to “shoot all the Black people here.” The remark came as LeBlanc was discussing the university’s stance on fossil fuel divestment. LeBlanc later apologized for the remark, but he lost the confidence of many of the faculty members.
The coronavirus pandemic led GWU to pause the enrollment-shrinking plan. Now, a new president will guide the shape of a private university that counted 25,939 students in the fall, including 2,941 freshmen. The head count of first-year students is the largest for the university, exceeding the previous record of 2,845 in 2018, according to federal data.
Granberg, 60, has been provost at RIT since 2018 and before that spent 17 years on the faculty and in leadership positions at Clemson University in South Carolina. As provost, she is the chief academic officer of a university with about 17,000 students, including 14,000 undergraduates. Her biography on the RIT website lists her “key initiatives,” including “increasing undergraduate student success, expanding doctoral education [and] improving facilities for instruction and research.”
She earned a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of California at Davis, and master’s and doctoral degrees in sociology from Vanderbilt University. Her scholarly expertise is in the sociology of self, identity and mental health.
“I’ve known about and admired GW for a long, long time,” Granberg said in a telephone interview. “It’s a storied university in a storied city.”
Grace E. Speights, chair of the university’s board of trustees, said Granberg will bring “energy and excitement” to the university as it seeks to become one of the nation’s preeminent research institutions. “We have set our goals high,” Speights said.
Built into the job description as GWU conducted the presidential search was a very specific goal: to raise the profile of the university enough that it would qualify to join the Association of American Universities. The AAU, an invitation-only group with a somewhat opaque membership-selection process, includes 63 universities in the United States and two in Canada. Its members include private institutions such as Johns Hopkins University and public flagships such as the University of Maryland and the University of Virginia.
None of its current members are based in the District of Columbia, although Catholic University was a founding member of the AAU in 1900. It left the association in 2002.
For GWU, known for strengths in fields including international affairs, political science and public health, the goal of joining the AAU helps to define its next steps in the near future. It wants to broaden its reach in science and engineering, an ambition that has been evident for more than a decade. And it wants to become more selective and prestigious.
Private urban universities, such as Boston University, Tulane University in New Orleans and New York University, all belong to the AAU. They also happen to be ranked higher than GWU on the U.S. News & World Report list of national universities. GWU is tied for 62nd on that list. The presidential job description highlights the U.S. News ranking as a metric to watch, even though the ranking’s methodology has long been a subject of intense debate within higher education.
“GW’s next president will be expected to recruit and retain a world-class, diverse faculty to increase— quickly and significantly—the reputation, stature and rankings of all GW’s academic units in order to be competitive with comprehensive research universities ranked in the top 50 by U.S. News & World Report,” the description said. “This will be the first step toward GW’s ambitious goal to become the only AAU university in the nation’s capital.”
GWU officials acknowledge that the pursuit of AAU membership will probably take years. Granberg said the key will be to show the university’s strengths in a comprehensive way and to redouble efforts to recruit top faculty and students. “It’s really about building deep centers of excellence, in more and more areas,” she said.
As for the size of the university, Speights said the record head count of freshmen is an anomaly that will not necessarily determine future enrollment targets. Granberg said that enrollment is “an extremely important part of any major planning exercise” and emphasized that it would be one of the first questions she would be reviewing. She said the “quality of the student experience” will be a top priority.
Faculty and student leaders issued statements praising the board’s choice.
James Tielsch, a professor of global health who was on the presidential search committee, said: “Her record of academic leadership at premier research institutions shows her priority of growing the impact of all disciplines, and she clearly communicated the importance of working together to advance GW.”
Christian Zidouemba, president of the student association, said: “I believe she will be a proponent of inclusion and someone who listens, meets students where they are and addresses issues that are important to us.”
