The president of Lesley University is stepping down after seven years, leaving the role at the end of June as her contract term expires, according to a university email sent Wednesday. Upon Janet Steinmayer’s departure June 30, her work will be taken up on an interim basis by chief operating officer Joanne Kossuth, said Hal Belodoff, chair of the board of trustees.
“We are at a unique time in our university’s history. This requires that we plan carefully. When it is the right time to focus on a presidential search, the board looks forward to working with the community in that important effort,” Belodoff said. He thanked Steinmayer for “fundamental changes that we have made over the past few years [that] do not always come easily and some stirred controversy.”
Lesley, founded in 1909, has been cutting programs, laying off faculty and selling property to eliminate a deficit and find sustainability as the country faces a “demographic cliff” – a drop-off in available students – and faltering economy. Lesley’s 5-acre campus across three Cambridge neighborhoods swelled in 2018 with the purchase of former Episcopal Divinity School property near Harvard Square. In its February town-gown report to Cambridge’s Planning Board, the school said it had 41 buildings, down from 58 a decade earlier.
Steinmayer, overseeing the turbulence, has been controversial, receiving three votes of no confidence from faculty and seeing a series of student protests in 2023 as programs were cut under a “Better Lesley” plan.
Unionized core faculty at Lesley voted by “an overwhelming majority” in support of a strike on April 16, expressing frustration with a lack of progress after bargaining for a contract for nearly two years. Natalia Berthet García, communications director of the SEIU Local 509 labor chapter, said Thursday that her group was focused on negotiations and didn’t immediately have comment.
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