OPINION: Haverford Without Its Steady Hands: What Comes After Wendy Raymond & John McKnight

Last week, the news landed in a way that felt both sudden and strangely inevitable, a shift everyone sensed on the horizon but did not think would break all at once. First, Vice President and Dean of the College John McKnight announced his move to Dartmouth, effective June 1, 2026. Forty-eight hours later, President Wendy Raymond announced she will retire after the 2026-2027 academic year. A long runway, yes, but a single message all the same: the two people who have steered Haverford through its most turbulent decade will not be here to finish the work they began. 

For students, even the ones who roll their eyes at every all-campus email, there is a low hum of destabilization. Not panic, something even softer. A shift in gravity. You do not have to love an administrator to feel their absence. You just get used to the rhythm: the way McKnight maintained a constant presence across campus events, the way Raymond carried the weight of congressional testimony, the way both became the institutional anchors in a place that runs on the fallacy that a campus built on student governance requires no administrators or mentorship.

Gen Z is a generation that does not trust hierarchy by default. It is more or less muscle memory rather than cynicism. But departures like this are still felt. You lose the familiar people to argue with, the familiar signatures on the policies, the familiar sense, however strained, of continuity.

And now we are here, wondering what comes next.

Haverford 2030 is sitting on the table like a blueprint whose architects just walked out the door. The plan is ambitious in a way small colleges rarely allow themselves to be: a gateway complex on the south side of campus, a four-year pathways program, a writing and interpretation hub, paid internships for every student, carbon neutrality by 2033, new housing, new data systems, new endowed chairs, and an Ethical Inquiry and Leadership Institute meant to shape what ethical leadership will look like for the next generation as Artificial Intelligence (AI) reshapes the social, financial, and economical landscape in America.

It is all in motion, conceptually speaking. However, implementation is another language. You need someone who can actually assemble the teams, raise the money, persuade skeptics, and keep the campus steady while the world outside throws its usual chaos at higher education.

Haverford is entering its administrative search at a strangely open moment in American academia—open not in the political sense, but in the literal hiring sense. Some of the most credentialed university leaders in the country have been abruptly unmoored from their old posts. Whatever the politics of their departures, their track records show they have the kind of experience that would serve a college like Haverford exceptionally well. A few of those leaders are precisely the kind of people Haverford should be looking at as real contenders for the presidency.

Former Penn president Liz Magill strengthened Penn’s interdisciplinary footprint and expanded civic engagement initiatives. Claudine Gay, Harvard’s first Black president, made her name as a political scientist studying representation, race, and democracy. As dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, she stabilized budgets, expanded the diversity of academic hires, and held together feuding faculty blocs. Martha Pollack, who stepped down from Cornell’s presidency, guided one of the largest universities in the country through major expansions in AI, engineering, and computing while keeping the humanities afloat. And Minouche Shafik, former President of Columbia, brings a global résumé that almost seems unreal for a small liberal-arts search: Director of the London School of Economics, Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, Senior World Bank official. 

Taken together, this may sound like a fantasy wishlist, but it is also a reminder that serious leaders with serious track records are out there and available. Claudine Gay would be my personal pick, but any one of them would bring a level of experience and vision that could carry the 2030 Plan from blueprint to reality. If we are honest about our ambitions, these are precisely the kinds of leaders a school like Haverford should be chasing: the kind whose presence would raise the bar on what this place believes itself to be capable of achieving. Haverford will never know unless it asks, and for once, it might actually be worth asking.

Whoever arrives will not be able to float above the student body, either. Not here, and especially not now. Gen Z is wired for critique; we have no patience for authority without accountability. But that does not mean we want a ghost at Founders Hall. We want reciprocity, someone willing to learn the culture rather than assume they own it. Someone who shows up to the difficult conversations and does not flinch. Someone who understands that Haverford’s sense of itself, the Quaker values, the student autonomy, and the ethical posture are something people believe in and question at the same time.

The next president and vice president will have to lead a campus that is still stitching up old wounds from 2020 and still figuring out how to engage in constructive dialogue after student protests relating to Gaza and October 7 deepened divides between students and administration. The next Dean of the College will inherit a Student Life Division reshaped under McKnight’s watch and a campus that expects visible stewardship. And they will both have to take on a Strategic Plan that spans housing, sustainability, curriculum, student experience, ethics, and professional development, and, most importantly, decide which parts warrant immediate support.

Haverford could choose someone new to the world of the presidency or someone who has already carried the weight of a giant institution. It could choose a familiar name or a rising one. But whoever steps into Founders next will not succeed alone. They will need a student body willing to meet them halfway. Critical, yes, but also curious enough to try.

Haverford 2030 gave us the architecture. The people who built the blueprint are stepping aside. The next few years will determine whether this campus becomes the version of itself it keeps describing or whether it waits for another era to sort itself out.