President Will Dudley announced in an email Thursday that he will be leaving the university at the end of the academic year and moving to California to serve as the president of Claremont McKenna College.
Dudley took over as president in January 2017. He will have served as president for nine and a half years this spring. He said it was fully his decision to leave the university, and he could’ve stayed if he wanted to.
“You don’t want to stay in anything too long,” he said in an interview with the Ring-tum Phi. “It’s good to go out on top.”
He said the president position at Claremont McKenna is the only position he considered. The college began its presidential search over the summer and later invited him to be a candidate, Dudley said.
Dudley said he loves small liberal arts institutions.
“I’ve basically spent my life at two schools so far, Williams College and then W&L, and there are just very few schools of that caliber in this country,” Dudley said.
Claremont McKenna is the seventh-best liberal arts school in the country, according to U.S. News and World Report. Washington and Lee is ranked 21st.
Earlier this year, the two schools landed on the same side of a national issue. Nearly 600 leaders of colleges and universities across the country signed an American Association of Colleges and Universities letter criticizing “undue government intrusion” in higher education.
Almost all of Washington and Lee’s 21 peer schools joined — but W&L did not. Claremont McKenna was the only other peer school that also didn’t sign, according to previous reporting from the Phi.
Dudley said he has never lived in California, but his wife has family members who live there.
“There’s some personal appeal there. Her parents are in southern California and her brother and sister,” Dudley said. “My family’s kind of on both coasts, so we can’t be near everybody.”
He said it was “more of a coincidence” that the invitation from Claremont McKenna coincided with almost 10 years at Washington and Lee.
“There’s no precise time,” he said. “You don’t go into it thinking like, ‘I’ll serve exactly eight years or 12 years or 10 years.’”
But 10 years is almost twice the average tenure of a college president today, Dudley said.
In 2022, the average college president had been in office for about six years, according to a survey from the American Council on Education.
“Roughly a decade was pretty healthy for an institution to get a fresh perspective and a fresh set of eyes, and so I think that’s always been in the back of my mind since I started,” Dudley said.
Dudley said he learned about the natural institutional cycle from a mentor, Morton Schapiro. Schapiro served as the president of Williams College for nine years before leaving to lead Northwestern University.
“It’s not that there’s not more to do, but I feel good about what we got done,” Dudley said. “You develop a plan and raise money and implement your good ideas, and we’ve done that.”
Dudley said his proudest accomplishment is the university’s transition to need-blind admissions. He set that as a goal in his inauguration address and said this accomplishment was the hardest to obtain.
In November 2024, the university announced it will no longer consider applicants’ financial need in the admissions process after an alumnus donated $132 million, according to previous reporting by the Ring-tum Phi. The donation was the largest in institutional history.
“It feels good to know that for many, many, many years to come, the best students will be able to come to W&L whether their family has a lot of money or not,” Dudley said. “That’s a wonderful thing for them, and it’s a great thing for the school because the school is better when the students are better.”
Washington and Lee’s presidential search
The university will hire a nationally recognized executive search firm in its search for the next university president, according to a campus-wide email from the Board of Trustees on Friday morning.
Rector Wali Bacdayan, ’92, said the board only found out about Dudley’s decision three hours before the rest of the university.
“I was not expecting this,” he said. “We’re in the middle of a capital campaign, and things are going fabulously well.”
Bacdayan wrote that selecting the university’s next president is one of the Board of Trustees’ most important responsibilities. Dudley agreed.
“Hopefully you don’t do it very often. If you do it very often, you haven’t done it right,” Dudley said. “Ideally, you know, what they’re trying to do is find the person they think is the best fit to lead this place for the next 10 years.”
Bacdayan said the board is still deciding on which search firm to use.
“With the board only being informed of this on Thursday, we are less than 48 hours into this,” Bacdayan said Saturday morning. “We’re moving quickly.”
He said the board will provide more details in the coming weeks, and the process will involve extensive input from community members.
“We’re going to seek input from all corners of our community,” he said. “Students, faculty, alumni, staff.”
He said Dudley has left large shoes to fill.
“His leadership will be missed,” Bacdayan said. “He’s been a great friend to many of us on the board.”
But he said in his email that he thinks the board will have a competitive pool of applicants to choose from.
“Washington and Lee is in a strong position to attract exceptional candidates for the presidency thanks to its talented students and faculty, devoted alumni and friends, and firm financial foundation,” Bacdayan wrote.
Dudley echoed that confidence.
“There’s no question that whoever they find will be excellent,” he said. “Whoever my successor is will be a really lucky person. I feel like I was super lucky to land here.”
Looking back on the decade of his leadership, Dudley said he feels ready to hand the role to someone new.
“I hope that I’ve left it at least as good as I found it,” he said.
Read the full interview with Dudley here.
Read Bacdayan’s email here and Dudley’s email here. Both emails were sent to the W&L community.
