The board of trustees of Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, has named Jennifer M. Collins as the 21st president of the college. She will take office on July 1.
Rhodes College enrolls 1,840 undergraduate students and 35 graduate students, according to the most recent data available from the U.S. Department of Education. Women make up 60 percent of the student body.
Collins has served since 2014 as the Judge James Noel Dean and professor of law at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. She was appointed to the law faculty at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 2003 and was named associate provost for academic and strategic initiatives in 2010 and vice provost in 2013. She was the first law professor to hold these roles.
Collins clerked for Dorothy W. Nelson on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She then worked in private practice in Washington, D.C., before joining the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel as an attorney-adviser in 1993. Collins then served as Assistant United States Attorney for the District of Columbia from 1994 to 2002. She returned to private practice in 2002 at Sidley Austin before moving to Wake Forest a year later. She is the co-author of Privilege or Punish? Criminal Justice and The Challenge of Family Ties (Oxford University Press 2009).
Professor Collins is a graduate of Yale University. She is a manga cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, where she also served as an editor for the Harvard Law Review.
Below is a video of Professor Collins discussing her career.