Kathleen M. Murray was selected to be the twenty-first president of Hamline University in St. Paul. Minnesota. Dr. Murray will assume her new role on January 1. She will be the third woman in a row to serve as president of Hamline University.
Hamline University enrolls just under 1,800 undergraduate students and nearly 900 graduate students, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Department of Education. Women make up 63 percent of the undergraduate student body.
Dr. Murray stated: “I am both honored and humbled by this appointment. I was deeply impressed by the passion for Hamline expressed by all of the students, faculty, staff, and alums I met during the search process, and I believe we can work together to build on the university’s very strong past to prepare it to thrive into the future.”
Dr. Murray brings 40 years of academic and higher education leadership experience to her role at Hamline — as the first woman president at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, provost and dean of the faculty at Macalester College in St. Paul, as provost at Birmingham-Southern College, and a professor of piano, dean of the conservatory, and dean of the faculty at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin.
Professor Murray is a summa cum laude graduate of Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington. She holds a master’s degree in music from Bowling Green State University in Ohio and a doctorate in piano performance and pedagogy from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.