Vice President of Harvard Will Lead Bates College

Vice President of Harvard Will Lead Bates College

Clayton Spencer, the vice president for policy at Harvard University, has been named the eighth president of Bates College, a small liberal arts institution in Lewiston, Me., effective July 1.


Ms. Spencer has served at Harvard since 1997, under four presidents; before that she was chief education counsel in the United States Senate.

Born in North Carolina, Ms. Spencer graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts, where she serves as a trustee, and Yale Law School, where she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal, winner of the moot court competition and chairwoman of the Public Interest Council. She practiced law at Ropes & Gray in Boston, then served as an assistant United States attorney in Boston before going to work on Capitol Hill.

Ms. Spencer, 56, whose full name is Ava Clayton Spencer, is a second-generation college president. Her father, Samuel Reid Spencer Jr., a Harvard-educated historian, served as president of Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Va., from 1957 to 1968 and Davidson College in North Carolina from 1968 to 1983.

Ms. Spencer will succeed Nancy J. Cable, who has served Bates as interim president since July 1, when Elaine Hansen, the previous president, resigned to become the executive director of the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins University.