Office of thePresident

An accomplished molecular biologist, award-winning teacher, and academic leader, Wendy Raymond has served as the 16th president of Haverford College since 2019.

Through the first four years of her presidency, Raymond has initiated a comprehensive reinvestment in Haverford's values-based, liberal arts core, enhancing student support, broadening and deepening commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and sustainability, and expanding opportunities for engagement with greater Philadelphia and the globe. This work began with full implementation of the Plan for Haverford 2020, including the additions of Lutnick Library and Jaharis Recital Hall. Following a multi-year, community-wide process that Raymond led, the College is now implementing Better Learning, Broader Impact – Haverford 2030, a strategic plan to position Haverford for its third century.

A national voice for DEI in academia, the sciences, and the liberal arts, Raymond led the development of Haverford’s first antiracism action plan in 2021 en route to creating the division of Institutional Diversity, Equity, and Access that same year. Reflecting the College’s longstanding commitment to enrolling and supporting a diverse student body, in 2022 Haverford became one of only eight national colleges and universities since 1988 selected to join the Consortium for Financing Higher Education (COFHE).

Prior to Haverford, Raymond served for six years as vice president for academic affairs and dean of faculty at Davidson College, where she oversaw a significant reinvestment in faculty positions, research support, and curricular development. She also served as Davidson’s chief diversity officer and chaired the Committee on Equal Opportunities in Science and Engineering, a Congressionally mandated advisory committee to the National Science Foundation.

Raymond began her teaching career at Williams College in 1994 as a molecular geneticist with an active research laboratory funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. She was program director of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s undergraduate science program at Williams and served as co-director of the Symposia on Diversity in the Sciences at Harvard University, the University of Washington, and the University of Louisiana at Monroe. Raymond earned the rank of full professor at Williams and went on to serve as the College’s first associate dean for institutional diversity.

Raymond is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Cornell University, where she experienced the transformative impacts of financial aid, an outstanding liberal arts education, incredible faculty, and lifelong friendships. She earned her Ph.D. at Harvard in biochemistry, and completed an American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellowship in genetics at the University of Washington. She is married to geologist (and Haverford alumnus) David Backus ’82; they have an adult daughter, Jennifer. Raymond hails from Mequon, Wisconsin, near Milwaukee.