Three Women Who Are Serving as University Presidents Have Announced They Will Retire in 2023

Pamela R. Fox, president of Mary Baldwin University in Staunton, Virginia, will retire on June 30, 2023. She is the ninth president of the educational institution. During her 20-year tenure, she provided over the transition to university status and to the transformation to a co-educational institution. Thirty new degree programs have been established since Dr. Fox became president in 2003.

Prior to her tenure at Mary Baldwin, Dr. Fox served as a professor of music, dean, and assistant vice president for strategic planning at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. She earned a Ph.D. in musicology from the College Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati.

Bonita Jacobs will retire from the presidency of the University of North Georgia in June 2023. Dr. Jacobs was appointed as the first woman president of the then North Georgia College & State University in July 2011. Earlier she was a professor of higher education counseling and executive director of the National Institute for the Study of Transfer Students at the University of North Texas in Denton. She is the former editor of The Journal of College Orientation and Transition.

Dr. Jacobs earned a bachelor’s degree in Spanish and history and a master’s degree in counseling at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas. She received a doctorate in educational administration from Texas A&M University.

Laura M. Casamento, president of Utica University in New York, will step down on July 31, 2023. Dr. Casamento became the ninth president and fourteenth chief executive officer of Utica University on August 1, 2016. She is the first woman to serve as president in the 75-year history of the university. Prior to joining Utica University in 2004 as vice president for institutional advancement and, later, executive vice president and chief advancement officer, she was president and chief operating officer of Herkimer County Trust, an independently owned, state-chartered bank located in central New York.

Dr. Casamento holds an MBA from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. She earned an educational doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania.