New Salem president starts July 1
(pictured above: Dr. Lorraine Sterritt speaks on the Salem campus last week.)
Dr. Lorraine Sterritt will begin her tenure as president of Salem Academy and College on July 1. She succeeds Susan E. Pauly, who is retiring after eight years as president.
Sterritt’s hiring was announced May 4 by Salem Board Chair Charles A. Blixt and Elizabeth Rader, a trustee and chair of the Presidential Search Committee. Sterritt,54, will be the third female president to lead Salem Academy and College, which was founded by the Moravian Church in 1772 and is the oldest continuously operating educational institution for women in the nation.
A native of Ireland, Sterritt has spent the last 30 years in education. It began at Chatham Hall, an all-girls college preparatory boarding school located in Chatham, Va., where she was director of the school and taught French and Latin. Most recently, she served as dean for Administration at Harvard College and a member of the Arts and Sciences faculty at Harvard University.
She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in French from The Queen’s University of Belfast. She continued her education at Princeton University, earning a second master’s degree and a doctor of philosophy degree in French. Sterritt will relocate from Belmont, Mass with her spouse, Norbert “Bert” Lain.
