Sweet Briar College has named Mary Pope Hutson as its new president. Hutson has been interim president since July, following the departure of Meredith Woo. A member of the class of 1983, Hutson is the College’s first alumna president. She was also involved in the Saving Sweet Briar group that held keep the school open when a previous board tried to close it.
After a new board took over in 2015, Hutson was hired as senior vice president for alumnae relations and development the following year. Under her leadership, Sweet Briar has raised more than $140 million since 2015.
“Persuading Mary Pope Hutson to join our administration was critical to our success in restoring Sweet Briar to fiscal strength,” said Phillip Stone, who served as Sweet Briar’s first president under the new board. “She understands every aspect of college administration and programming and is clearly ready to lead Sweet Briar to greatness.”
“The board has made a shrewd choice in selecting Mary Pope Hutson as President of Sweet Briar,” Woo said in a statement. “Mary Pope is one of the most brilliant individuals I have worked with. Creative and strategic, she is a preternatural problem-solver, gifted at finding elegant solutions to highly vexing challenges. Higher education faces so many problems that it did not know existed. I have no doubt that she will tackle them with a kind of tenacity and genius that has served Sweet Briar well since she returned to campus in 2016.”
Hutson has served Sweet Briar since her student days, when she was a student leader and a nationally ranked varsity tennis player. After graduation, she stayed involved through Friends of Athletics and was president and fund agent for her class. In 2012, she earned a spot in Sweet Briar’s Athletics Hall of Fame.
Prior to her position at Sweet Briar, Hutson served as the executive vice president of the Land Trust Alliance (2002-2015), a national conservation organization that works to save and strengthen land conservation across America. The Land Trust Alliance (LTA) represents more than 1,100-member land trusts, including 25 national conservation groups, and is supported by more than 5 million members nationwide.
Throughout her career, she has served in numerous volunteer leadership roles, including as the Chairwoman of the National Park Service System Advisory Board for the last four years, appointed by U.S. Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt. She also served four Secretaries of Interior on the North American Wetlands Council, was appointed by Governor David Beasley as the first woman to serve on the Board of Natural Resources in South Carolina, and most recently, was appointed by Governor Glenn Youngkin to the Commonwealth of Virginia’s Board of Historic Resources in July of this year. She also currently serves on the board of the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in Kenya.
Prior to her tenure at Land Trust Alliance, she was executive director of the Lowcountry Open Land Trust in South Carolina (1998-2002). She also served as the director of educational programs for the Historic Charleston Foundation, managing the oldest heritage tourism program in the United States (1993-1998).
Hutson also has a background in public service and policymaking, having worked in the office of a U.S. Senator, and for the Department of the Interior as a liaison for the Office of Territorial and International Affairs to St. Thomas, as Guam Desk Officer, and in the Office of the Assistant Secretary (1985-1989). In 1990, Hutson was appointed by the White House as special assistant to the Ambassador of Kenya.
Sweet Briar’s current enrollment is 465.