Tori Haring-Smith

Tori Haring-Smith is an American academic and the former president of Washington & Jefferson College.

Education Haring-Smith received a bachelor's degree from Swarthmore College and doctoral and master's degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As an undergraduate, she received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to study abroad. She visited ten of the smallest countries in the world, inspired by John Sack's' Report from Practically Nowhere (1959).

Academic career Haring-Smith was a professor of theatre and writing at Brown University for 16 years. During her time at Brown, she funded, established, and administered the Rose Writing Fellows Program, a cross-curricular writing and speaking initiative. She later served as chair of the Department of Performing and Visual Arts at the American University in Cairo.

She returned to the United States to serve as Executive Director of the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, and then served as Vice-President for Educational Affairs and Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon.

Presidency of Washington and Jefferson College Haring-Smith was named as the 12th president of Washington & Jefferson College on October 17, 2005. She is also the first woman to serve as president of the college. During her tenure at Washington & Jefferson College, Haring-Smith began a policy of offering "Good Neighbor" scholarships to eligible students from the seven southwestern Pennsylvania counties closest to the college and twice visited the White House to discuss college affordability issues. She also launched Washington & Jefferson's Magellan Project, which provides scholarships for students to pursue independent projects abroad during the summer. When Haring-Smith retired, the Magellan Project had spent $1 million to fund 500 student trips.

Haring-Smith led a capital campaign that raised more than $100 million for Washington & Jefferson College to support students, faculty and update campus facilities. She also questioned the "peer assessment" portion of the rankings and suggested that college presidents are rarely aware of educational improvements in their peer institutions; she noted that Washington & Jefferson College's ranking has remained the same for a number of years, even while the college made significant improvements in acceptance rates and overall selectivity, added academic programs, and constructed additional buildings. She signed the "Presidents Letter", a nationwide movement asking fellow college presidents to decline participation in the U.S. News & World Report reputation survey, a subjective evaluation where college administrators score their competition.

She retired from Washington & Jefferson College on June 30, 2017. Whitney and his wife, Abigail Seldin, cited Tori Haring-Smith as their inspiration for starting College Abacus, a company that provided financial aid estimates for prospective college students.