ALISON R. BYERLY is the 17th president of Lafayette College.
Appointed Lafayette’s president in 2013, Byerly launched a 10-year strategic direction, Affordability and Distinction through Growth, in 2016 to increase the size of the student body by 16 percent while more than doubling the financial aid budget and adding 40 new faculty positions. The plan has made the College more accessible to students from a range of backgrounds while supporting an expansion of the curriculum in innovative and interdisciplinary areas. The incoming classes enrolled after the launch of the plan brought the highest SAT scores and greatest student diversity in Lafayette’s history.
Byerly led Lafayette through its Live Connected, Lead Change fundraising campaign, which raised $426 million, exceeding its $400 million goal. The campaign raised more than $85 million for financial aid, created 195 new endowed scholarships, endowed 17 faculty positions, and resulted in the Williams Arts Campus, Rockwell Integrated Sciences Center, Oechsle Center for Global Education, Bradbury Dyer III ’64 Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and Daniel and Heidi ’91 Hanson Center for Inclusive Stem Education. It also raised $31 million to support engineering and generated significant funds for athletics.
Byerly previously was provost and executive vice president at Middlebury College. During her tenure on Middlebury’s faculty, she served as a visiting scholar at MIT, Stanford, and Oxford. She is the author of two scholarly books—Are We There Yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism and Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature—and has written and spoken extensively on the role of technology in higher education.
Alison Byerly will become president of Carleton College on August 1.