NH: You began this role in July. Why were you originally interested in the position?

LM: At Lafayette, knowledge lives across spaces—across the liberal arts and engineering; across libraries, galleries, laboratories, and theaters; and across our communities in the Lehigh Valley and beyond.

NH: With your experience in strategic planning, what excites you about our future?

LM: I’ve spent time in Lafayette’s ecosystem, and so many things come to mind. The College, for example, is in the early stages of figuring out how AI pertains to scholarship across the disciplines, and how faculty and students can come together to ask questions about what these new technologies mean for us.

NH: Good leaders, like you, have an incredible ability to cast a vision.

LM: Looking ahead, programs will continue to change as they push the boundaries of their disciplines. We want to ensure that we are building a faculty that brings new ways of learning to us.

NH: You have a background as an English professor and read The Biography of a College by David B. Skillman. Understanding Lafayette’s history is going to help inform moving into our Bicentennial.

LM: Yes, and it’s about going from strength to strength. I’ve been especially obsessed with the chapter on Pardee Hall. Within 18 months of the 19th-century fire, we had fundraising, plans redrawn, and construction complete. The building was better than before—and under budget. Lafayette moved forward. So this moment of crisis became strength and brilliance.

NH: The power of ‘and’ includes being embedded in the campus and community. In what ways did you do that at Haverford College?

LM: As the founding director of Haverford’s Visual Culture Arts and Media, I helped create a space that brought together cross-disciplinary faculty and students inside an old campus gymnasium that we completely reconstituted. It became a place of theorizing, learning, and making—both for Haverford, and for artists in the Philadelphia area.

NH: In our roles, we get to see so much of the College. What’s it like being able to watch the incredible scholarship happening here?

LM: Being able to “watch scholarship” is truly amazing: seeing faculty and students create archives; read from their fiction and scholarly monographs; build bridges; study rocks from local formations; make podcasts and political shows—it’s a privilege and learning experience every day.

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Get to know Laura Mcgrane

McGrane served as the associate provost for strategic initiatives at Haverford College, outside Philadelphia. She was also a former chair, humanities center director, and longtime faculty member in Haverford’s English department.

Expertise

McGrane has 20-plus years of academic and administrative leadership experience.

Noteworthy

She was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, earning a BA in English and a master’s degree in comparative and international education there. Later, she received her Ph.D. from Stanford University.

For fun

A fan of music, especially indie and folk, she recently toured the Martin Guitar Museum in Nazareth, Pa.

Last word

“Lafayette students are doing things right from the beginning,” McGrane says, “and that’s because our faculty are there to imagine possibilities every step of the way.”