Three Women Campus Leaders Announce Their Retirements

Kathleen McCartney, president of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, has announced that he will step done from her post in June 2023. Dr. McCartney became president of Smith on July 1, 2013. Earlier, she was dean of the Graduate School of Education and the Gerald S. Lesser Professor in Early Childhood Development at Harvard University.

Dr. McCartney is a graduate of Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. She earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. at Yale. She began her academic career as an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard. She then held a tenured faculty position at the University of New Hampshire, where she was also the director of the university’s child study and development center. She returned to Harvard in 2000 and was named dean of the Graduate School of Education in 2001.

Maryanne Stevens, president of the College of St. Mary in Omaha, Nebraska, will step down from her position in May 2023. She will have served as president of the college for more than a quarter-century. Before coming to the College of St. Mary, she was chair of the theology program at Creighton University in Omaha.

Dr. Stevens has a bachelor’s degree in math and sociology from Misericordia University in Dallas, Pennsylvania. She earned a master’s degree in theology from Saint Louis University and a Ph.D. in religion and education from Boston College.

Lori J. Bechtel-Wherry, chancellor and dean of the Altoona campus of Pennsylvania State University since 2005, recently announced her plans to retire at the end of the 2022 calendar year after more than 38 years of service to the university. Dr. Bechtel-Wheery is also a professor of biobehavioral health and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at the university.

Dr. Bechtel-Wherry earned a bachelor’s degree in health, physical education, recreation, and dance from Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania. She holds a master’s degree in health education from the University Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and a doctorate in health education from Pennsylvania State University.