George Washington University has named Ellen Granberg as its 19th president, the first woman to serve in that role, to oversee its roughly 26,000 students and $2.3 billion endowment.
Granberg, the current provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Rochester Institute of Technology, will start in her new role July 1 at the private university based in Foggy Bottom.
“There’s a phrase that I’ve already heard a lot of here: ‘Raise high,'” Granberg said during an on-campus event Wednesday afternoon announcing her upcoming presidency. “This is the ethos that I’m finding characterizes who we are and where we’re going, and I could not be more proud nor more grateful to be joining you on that path.”
Grace Speights, chair of the university’s board of trustees, introduced Granberg and her wife, Sonya Rankin, during the event. She described Granberg as an “innovative and dynamic higher education leader with a demonstrated record of supporting teaching and research excellence across all disciplines.”
GWU’s incoming president holds decades of higher education administration experience and is also a sociology scholar, specializing in mental health research. Prior to joining Rochester Institute of Technology in 2018, she spent 21 years climbing academic ranks at Clemson University to her final role as senior associate provost, according to her LinkedIn page. She also spent more than a decade in the private sector, working for Pacific Bell Telephone Co. in San Francisco. She earned her bachelor’s degree in history from the University of California, Davis, and her master’s degree and doctorate in sociology at Vanderbilt University.
Granberg will be coming to a larger institution financially as well. GWU’s budget for fiscal 2022, which ended last June 30, topped $1 billion, including more than $129 million for capital projects and the potential for a 2% operating margin. For that same fiscal year, RIT enrolled about 19,700 students in the fall of 2021 and reported $682.35 million in total revenue.
She will replace Mark Wrighton, who has led the university as interim president since January 2022, after the university’s previous president, Thomas LeBlanc, retired from his post five months earlier than planned. That followed months after a facultywide survey found 52% of faculty were not confident in LeBlanc’s leadership, citing such concerns as a lack of transparency and trust. In a statement at the time, LeBlanc said after the Covid-19 health crisis so thoroughly disrupted higher education, it was time to hand control over to a new leader.
Wrighton, former chancellor at Washington University in St. Louis, will see his 18-month term conclude at the end of June. “I vowed that this would be a time in the turning point of the progress of the university,” he said during Wednesday’s event, noting the university’s 200th anniversary in 2021. “I believe the new president will represent a significant contribution to accelerating the progress of the university.”
Led by its board of trustees, the university launched a nationwide presidential search in May, with a 17-member committee chaired by trustee Roslyn Brock and supported by Santa Barbara, California-based leadership search consultant Education Executives.
In its presidential profile that the university released in October, GWU described the ideal candidate as one who would develop an “aggressive strategy” to push the institution forward in national rankings for the U.S. News & World Report and the Association of American Universities, an elite group of 65 leading research universities, while acknowledging that this could take years to pull off. In last year’s U.S. News ranking of top colleges, GWU rose one spot to No. 62, trailing Georgetown University at No. 22 and University of Maryland at No. 55.
“GW’s next president will be expected to recruit and retain a world-class, diverse faculty to increase — quickly and significantly — the reputation, stature and rankings of all GW’s academic units in order to be competitive with comprehensive research universities ranked in the top 50 by U.S. News & World Report,” the presidential profile document reads. “This will be the first step toward GW’s ambitious goal to become the only AAU university in the nation’s capital.”
Granberg will lead the university through a slew of other changes and expansions as well, including its ever-shifting real estate portfolio, a new regional medical campus at Baltimore’s Sinai Hospital in partnership with its parent LifeBridge Health, and even the selection of a new mascot amid a campuswide reckoning about the racist histories of building names and other monikers.
While it sold its remaining stake in the George Washington University Hospital to its former owner partner, Universal Health Services Inc., university health and medical leaders are still working with the King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, company as the latter looks to stand up and operate a planned new $375 million hospital being built on the St. Elizabeths campus. The university’s School of Medicine and affiliated GW Medical Faculty Associates are still GWUH’s academic and clinical partners in Foggy Bottom.
George Washington University is the fifth-largest institution of higher learning in Greater Washington, and the largest in D.C., employing more than 11,500 faculty and staff members, according to the university and Washington Business Journal research. GWU also has a campus in D.C.’s Berkley neighborhood and a science and technology campus in Ashburn.
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