Grinnell College announced today its board of trustees has named Anne Harris as the college’s 14th president. Harris, who joined Grinnell College last year as vice president for academic affairs and dean of the college, has been the acting president since July 1 and will assume office immediately. 

Harris, Grinnell’s second female president, spent nearly 20 years at DePauw University in Indiana as a faculty member and eventually vice president for academic affairs before coming to Grinnell in 2019. The private liberal arts college in Grinnell enrolls about 1,700 students from around the world. 

Her unanimous appointment by the board of trustees follows the successful tenure of Raynard Kington, who led the college for a decade before becoming head of school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., earlier this summer. 

“Anne Harris is a scholar, a teacher, a leader and a builder — without question, she is precisely the right president for Grinnell College at this time in our history,” said David Maxwell, chair of the Grinnell College board of trustees. “She is consistently guided by Grinnell’s institutional values of excellence, diversity and social responsibility, dealing gracefully and decisively with hard issues as the college navigates the challenges before it, and recognizes Grinnell as a place where we can experience and investigate, where we can deliberate and discern, and where we can put our values, knowledge and commitment together for the greater good.”

As vice president for academic affairs, Harris worked in partnership with more than 200 faculty members to deliver on Grinnell’s academic mission, the college said in a press release. In this role, she led a number of initiatives tied to the excellence, health and well-being of the Grinnell community, including directing the academic response to the COVID-19 pandemic, supporting the development and implementation of a First Year Experience, chairing the search for a chief diversity officer, and overseeing the implementation of a $1 million Mellon Foundation Humanities in Action grant. 

Harris holds bachelor’s degrees in art history and classical languages from Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Ga., and master’s and doctoral degrees in art history from the University of Chicago. She is married to Michael Mackenzie and they are the parents of Oliver, Iris, and Marlo.

Her appointment comes after an extensive and rigorous national search that resulted in more than 30 multiround interviews of candidates from peer institutions, Grinnell officials said.