Reimagining Sweet Briar College

In this compelling reflection, Meredith Woo recounts her experience leading Sweet Briar College through one of the most dramatic institutional turnarounds in higher education. Facing financial insolvency, low enrollment, and deteriorating infrastructure, Woo outlines a three-part strategy that reimagined the liberal arts for 21st-century women, generated sustainable revenue, and realigned faculty and staff with institutional capacity. Her story illustrates the difficult realities of higher ed leadership — especially in small, resource-constrained environments — and the importance of transparency, board alignment, and strategic clarity. Beyond financial recovery, Woo emphasizes the cultural and civic responsibility of preserving the college’s architectural and historical legacy.

I think that in terms of academic leadership, there is nothing tougher than leadership in a struggling small liberal arts college. There's a novel titled 'No Country for Old Men', but it's no country for academic administrators. So, it was it was really tough. I joined a college that had declared bankruptcy, dispersed all the students, and I joined it about a year and a half after that decision. So we had less than 200 students and we had about 95 faculty members. However, and you know, when you don't have students but a huge payroll, you also have to do a lot of fundraising and try to get encouragement up of the donors that we can survive while this is going on. At the same time, we had to do reacreditation of the college and the upkeep in terms of the physical space was difficult because the college had been basically abandoned for over 20 years in terms of upkeep. So, it was kind of tough. But I think that what's really important in that kind of setting as a leader is to truly have the support of the board if it's a good board and it's a board that matters, and to have companions or supporters like that going forward so that you can have - you can make some tough decisions. Well, I don't know that I've always succeeded in rallying part of things because, you know, it's kind of hard to rally people when you sort of know that half of you [are] going to be gone within a year, right? I mean in terms of the faculty but uh I think that because the crisis was so severe and people knew the financial pressure, people knew the accreditation pressure, people knew the enrollment pressure that if you could explain and come clean and explain what the truth is, and you know people will at least have sympathy for what it is that you have to do. But I think it's also very important to have a really clear strategy for how you're going to pull the institution out of the drain that's in and how you're going to make it sustainable. So in my case, I don't know how it came about. Probably out of necessity. It wasn't that I actually thought this through, but it seemed kind of natural that we do. So was to think about this strategic plan in three steps, that was intuitively, that felt right. One is to come up with an ambition, something that has to do with an idea, something that makes us truly unique as a liberal arts institution. And then you want to show how you're going to generate revenue, and you're going to show how your budget is going to be sustainable going forward. So first, we announced the plan for a new kind of liberal arts education for women. And so if people thought that we were going to close the institution as we did two years ago prior to my joining it, if they thought that liberal arts was a wrong idea and women's education was an idea at the wrong time and being in rural Virginia was the wrong place, what we did was you had to take those three things that are fundamental and make them into the right idea at the right time, right place. And based on that requirement, we began designing a curriculum that turned the whole thing on a dime, into not antiquated ideas and places and notions, but into something truly interesting and exciting. And that led to creation of [the] jettisoning of the entire gen ed and [the] creation of [a] liberal arts curriculum centered on women leadership, that's unique for the 21st century, and get people really excited about it. And then after that we created a plan for generating revenue, and that was some detailed plan about how we play around with tuition. And then the third part, really was a tough part, was to align the number of students that number with the faculty size and with the staff size. And by making a fairly courageous decision on that realignment, people saw that our budget was sustainable and that we really meant business. And that was tough, but in the end it worked out. The Chronicle of Higher Education called us one of the most innovative liberal arts institutions in the country. The reason why I joined Sweet Brian in the first place was because it wasn't just a college that was struggling to make ends meet, but that it was a significant cultural institutions, [a] civic institution, and it meant something in the history of this country. So in some ways, my take on it was backward-looking, not forward-looking, even. And so I wanted to preserve that legacy because that campus happens to be on 3,000 acres of jaw-dropping, heartbreaking beauty of a land. And the whole campus was built by a great American architect by the name of Ralph Adams Cram. And so as you survey 28 historical register buildings that have become neglected but that are beautiful neo-Georgian buildings, you almost feel like it is your civic responsibility to do something about it. And so by the time I left, I'm proud to say the campus is gorgeous and the buildings have been refurbished, and the land, I think, is lovingly restored. We put a lot of - we revived the land, made them work. We put a lot of vineyards and created just beautiful spaces. And so in some ways, the restoration of [the] beauty of the land and restoration of the legacy is something that, looking back, I'm feeling pretty good that I did that.