Swarthmore College named Colgate University President Rebecca Chopp as its 14th president and first female to serve in the job, Bloomberg reported.
Chopp, 56, will replace Alfred Bloom on July 1, according to a statement on the Web site of the school in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, 11 miles from Philadelphia. Bloom is leaving at the end of June to be vice chancellor of New York University's Abu Dhabi campus.
Swarthmore's Board of Managers selected Chopp during a meeting yesterday.
"Her deep commitment to the liberal arts, along with her proven administrative talents, make her the ideal president to move the college forward," Board member Tom Spock, who served as chairman of a 12-member search committee, said in the statement.
Chopp has been president of Colgate in Hamilton, New York, since 2002 and previously was dean and Titus Street Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School, according to a biography on Swarthmore's Web site.
The Kansas native and scholar of religion and American culture has written or edited five books, including "The Power to Speak: Feminism, Language, God" and "The Praxis of Suffering: An Interpretation of Liberation and Political Theologies." Chopp spent 15 years at Emory University in Atlanta and served as the school's provost and executive vice president for academic affairs.
Swarthmore was founded 145 years ago by members of the Religious Society of Friends, known as the Quakers. The school has 1,490 undergraduates.
In December, the college said it lost almost 30 percent of its endowment's value in five months, forcing it to postpone construction and re-evaluate hiring. The fund fell to $980 million from $1.4 billion in June, Bloom said at the time.
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