Bowdoin College will officially induct the first woman to lead the 229-year-old institution during an inauguration ceremony this weekend.
Safa Zaki earlier this year was named the college’s 16th president, succeeding Clayton Rose, who stepped down after eight years. She started work in July.
Safa Zaki. Courtesy of Bowdoin College
Zaki, 55, had been a psychology professor and the dean of faculty at Williams College in Massachusetts. She was born in Egypt and grew up in several countries, including Tanzania, Syria, Jordan and Trinidad and Tobago. She earned her undergraduate degree in psychology at American University in Cairo, and her academic research has focused on how people divide the world into categories.
“In Safa Zaki, Bowdoin has found a distinguished scholar and leader with a global perspective who believes deeply in the transformative power of a liberal arts education,” said Scott Perper, chairperson of the Bowdoin College board of trustees.
The inauguration ceremony is Saturday morning on the college’s main quad. There will be several events to mark the inauguration Thursday through Saturday, including a forum on artificial intelligence Friday and a flower planting Saturday.
In March, during her introduction as Bowdoin’s next president, Zaki told students and faculty about using diverse perspectives and disciplines to face global problems.
“I’m deeply committed to this model, especially in this moment with the challenges that face us today, with the racism and structural inequality, with climate change, with emerging technologies that will change how we interact with each other,” she said. “This is the time to lean in on the liberal arts because progress on these issues and many others isn’t going to come from a single discipline, but from the varied approaches reflected in our curriculum.”
Bertrand Garcia-Moreno, a trustee and co-chairperson of the presidential search committee, called Zaki a “citizen of the world” with a deep understanding of a liberal arts education.
Zaki traveled to the U.S. in 1990 to attend Arizona State University, where she earned her master’s degree and doctorate, both in psychology. She joined the faculty at Williams in 2002 as assistant professor of psychology. Her research “focuses on how people divide the world into categories, using computational approaches to model cognitive processes in order to enrich our understanding of the human mind,” according to her Bowdoin profile.
She has received funding from the National Institute of Mental Health and her research has been published in several psychology journals.
Zaki is married to Huff Templeton, a community organizer who in 2022 ran for state Senate in Massachusetts as a Democrat. They have two children, Adly and Sabrina, who recently graduated college.
Last month, Zaki advocated for the release of Bowdoin graduate Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter who has been detained in Russia for the last six months on spying charges that his employer and President Joe Biden have said are bogus.
About 1,900 students are currently enrolled at Bowdoin, which has a $2.4 billion endowment.
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