Two African American Women Appointed to Provost Positions at Pennsylvania Colleges

Monica Parrish Trent has been selected to be the next provost at Delaware County Community College in Media, Pennsylvania. She will take office on June 18.

Delaware County Community College, located in a suburb west of Philadelphia, enrolls nearly 11,500 students, according to the latest data from the U.S. Department of Education. Women make up 58 percent of the student body.

Dr. Trent currently serves as instructional dean of the English Language for Academic Purposes, Linguistics, and Communications at Montgomery College in Maryland. She has been on the faculty at Montgomery College since 2000. Earlier, she was a tenured professor at Brookdale Community College in Lincroft, New Jersey, and has held faculty positions at the University of Maryland, College Park and Northern Virginia Community College.

Dr. Trent holds a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in English from George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. She earned a Ph.D. in community college leadership from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.

Sarah Willie-LeBreton, a professor of sociology at Swarthmore College in suburban Philadelphia, was named provost of the highly rated liberal arts institution, effective July 1.

Swarthmore College enrolls more than 1,500 undergraduate students. Women make up 50 percent of the student body.

Dr. Willie-LeBreton joined the faculty at the college in 1997 and since 2013 has chaired the department of sociology and anthropology. She is the author of Acting Black: College, Identity and the Performance of Race (Routledge, 2003). She is the editor of Transforming the Academy: Faculty Perspectives on Diversity and Pedagogy (Rutgers University Press, 2016).

Professor Willie-LeBreton is a 1986 graduate of Haverford College in Pennsylvania. She earned a Ph.D. at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.