On September 21, 2023, President Danielle R. Holley will become the 20th president of Mount Holyoke College (MHC). She is the first permanent Black president of MHC and the fourth Black woman president at a Seven Sisters college. Holley will also be a professor of politics at the College.
Holley received her B.A. from Yale University in 1996 and her J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1999. She worked as a law clerk for Judge Carl E. Steward on the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and was the Academic Dean of Academic Affairs at the University of South Carolina’s School of Law prior to becoming Dean of the Howard University School of Law in 2014.
She is a noted legal scholar of education law and civil rights. Holley serves as co-chair of the Board of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, is a Liberty Fellow with Aspen Global Leadership Network, and a fellow with the American Council of Education. In addition, she is a member of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority, a historically Black sorority founded at Howard University in 1913.