Nestled in the front of Ewell Hall is a room lined with built-in bookshelves, a welcoming conference table, a warm fireplace and Virginia Woolf artwork. This is the office of the College of William and Mary dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. On April 19, Provost Peggy Agouris announced in an email that Suzanne Raitt was to fill the role of the permanent dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, effective April 25. This was a natural transition for Raitt, who has been in tune with the pulse of the faculty and students of the College while working as the acting dean in the Ewell office overlooking the heart of old campus since January.
Raitt started at the College in 2000, taking on many different leadership roles including vice dean for Arts, Humanities and Interdisciplinary Studies, chair of the English department, president of Faculty Assembly and faculty representative on the Board of Visitors. Raitt has been an advocate for the need of faculty members across her almost two and a half decades in the City of Williamsburg.
“I think we need to always be thinking about how to deliver the education that students want and deserve in the best possible way,” Raitt said. “One of the reasons I really love working at William and Mary is that our culture is a culture that takes teaching extremely seriously and puts it at the top of the list in terms of our priorities when we hire people, perhaps equal with research, but it’s a big priority. We look for people who have real skill, not just in the classroom, but in mentoring.”
Growing up in Oxford, England as the eldest daughter of four educators, Raitt had wanted to go into higher education from a young age.
“There was barely a person in my immediate family who was not an educator. I had four parents because I had two step-parents, and they were all academics of one kind or another at Oxford University,” Raitt said.
She noted that literary studies came naturally to her, helping narrow her educational path to focus on English. Raitt graduated from Jesus College at the University of Cambridge in 1983 with a bachelor’s degree in English. She then moved to the United States for the first time to receive her master’s degree in English from Yale University in 1985 before returning to Jesus College for her Ph.D. in English, awarded in May 1989.
“I think we need to always be thinking about how to deliver the education that students want and deserve in the best possible way,” Raitt said.
The English department has been Raitt’s home at the College since she arrived as a tenured professor in 2000. Raitt has studied leading literary women like Virginia Woolf and May Sinclair for her entire career and was the director of the Women’s Studies Program at the College from 2004 to 2008. Raitt wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on Virginia Woolf and Woolf’s lover Vita Sackville-West.
“The course I’ve taught most regularly recently is Lesbian Fictions,” Raitt said. “I teach that in preference to Virginia Woolf … not because Virginia Woolf isn’t popular but because there is such a demand on this campus for courses on LGBTQ topics and for safe spaces where people can explore those experiences.”
As dean of the faculty of Arts and Sciences, it is part of Raitt’s job to stay in tune with the demand for certain courses and sections. Along this vein, Raitt says it is her goal to hire more faculty and a more diverse faculty to meet these student demands, working with Arts and Sciences Assistant Dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Wanjirũ Mbure to do so. Raitt also said that the Dean’s Office will undertake a strategic visioning process for Arts and Sciences in the fall.
“I want the process to be faculty-led, but I’m assuming that one of the top priorities is going to be working on increasing the diversity of the faculty in every aspect,” Raitt said. “And we’re lucky that we have great partnership from the president’s office and the provost’s office and the chief diversity officer in achieving that goal.”
Throughout her time at the College, Raitt has shown a commitment to increasing diversity, equity and inclusion among faculty. In 2015, she worked with the chief diversity officer and provost of the College to give the first presentation on diversity at a meeting of the College’s board of visitors. Furthermore, as president of the Faculty Assembly, Raitt passed a resolution in 2013 that asked the state to provide benefits for same-sex partners of College employees while also reaching out to other universities across Virginia to do the same. Raitt also successfully campaigned to change the Faculty Assembly’s by-laws to allow for non-tenured faculty representation.
“To me, that conversation needs to be folded into a much broader conversation about the future of Arts and Sciences and revisioning it –– building the strategic plan such that we can showcase all of our units and not just a few of them and give all of our units the support they need and not just a few of them,” Raitt said.
In addition to increasing and diversifying Arts and Sciences faculty, Raitt’s goals as dean include making processes of registration and petitioning within the College more efficient. Furthermore, one of the dean’s most important initiatives currently revolves around restructuring Arts and Sciences to benefit student education and faculty research, particularly sparked by the conversation of a potential school for computing, data and applied science.
“To me, that conversation needs to be folded into a much broader conversation about the future of Arts and Sciences and revisioning it –– building the strategic plan such that we can showcase all of our units and not just a few of them and give all of our units the support they need and not just a few of them,” Raitt said.
Raitt proves just how passionate she is about supporting the faculty and students at the College with the sheer determination of her commute. For 19 years, Raitt has been commuting to the City weekly from her home in Washington, D.C. She has two kids, Ellen and Jonathan, with her husband Peter Lurie, who is the president and executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
Raitt emphasized just how integral students are in keeping the professors at the College returning to work each day. She shared a story about her fall 2019 senior seminar class on Virginia Woolf and how meaningful the students and classroom dynamic were to her as the professor. The students rotated who brought food to class each day, including one student who made a Crockpot beef stew inspired by a meal in Woolf’s novel “To the Lighthouse”. They shared drinks at Paul’s Deli after the course ended, kept in touch throughout the pandemic and went to Precarious Beer Project for a reunion in 2021.
“That was just something really outstanding about that group,” Raitt said. “It was the best teaching experience I had in terms of the joy that everybody brought to it.”
Raitt underscored how important student interactions are to the faculty at the College.
“Whenever you ask anybody, ‘Why do you stay at William and Mary?’ or even ‘Why did you come to William and Mary? They always say, ‘the students,’” Raitt said.
