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The Entrance Interview: President Dudley on His Washington & Lee Presidency and His Plans for Claremont McKenna
President William C. Dudley is Claremont McKenna College’s sixth president, assuming the position after serving as president of Washington & Lee University for nearly a decade. He was preceded by Hiram Chodosh, who helmed Claremont McKenna for 13 years.
Dudley graduated from Williams College in 1989, returning as professor of philosophy in 1998. He served as Williams’ provost from 2011-2016, where he oversaw admissions, financial aid and other operations. In 2017, he left Williams to become Washington & Lee’s president.
The editors in chief of the Claremont Independent and The Forum conducted an exit interview with then-president Chodosh last spring, which you can read here. Today’s entrance interview—which discussed Dudley’s use of Washington & Lee’s institutional voice, artificial intelligence in classrooms, and Claremont McKenna’s tuition prices—was coordinated by The Forum and conducted by the 2026-27 editors in chief.
Kendall White (Claremont Independent): You began your academic career at Williams College as a student. What's a piece of advice that you’d give to someone who's beginning their liberal arts journey?
President Dudley: One piece of advice that I’ve given to first-years here, is to explore widely. I think one of the best things about a liberal arts education is discovering things you didn't know you were interested in. And it happened to me. I went to a public high school, had no familiarity with philosophy, stumbled into a philosophy class, got really interested, and now I'm a philosophy professor. So I encourage people to continue taking the things that you know that you love, but also explore. And great teachers can get you really excited about things that you don't know. That's one piece of advice.
If you want a bonus piece of advice: Don't spread yourself too thin. There's so much going on, and it's exciting. But it's really easy, if you're trying to do six different things, to not do any of them well, not sleep well, and not take care of yourself. So find one or two things you're really passionate about and do that.
Dhriti Jagadish (The Forum): How does your background as an academic, specifically as a philosophy professor, shape your approach to CMC's “learn-by-doing” approach, which we described in our interview with former President Chodosh as “pre-professionalism.”
President Dudley: One of the things that attracted me to CMC was its founding intellectual framework—the idea that a great liberal arts education is, in fact, terrific and really flexible professional preparation. It's not job training. We're not training you for a specific first job. If you look at alumni over decades, a liberal arts education will enable you to succeed in almost any professional arena. People who are liberally educated will feel called to put that potential to work and be more likely to succeed and lead. To me, those are almost like self-evident truths and it's a big part of what drew me here.
Kendall White: Let’s switch tracks to your time at Washington & Lee. During your tenure, you released statements on the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville; Executive Order 13679, commonly referred to as the Muslim Ban; thrice on the death of George Floyd; and the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions decision. Last year you declined to comment on Charlie Kirk's assassination, and you also didn't sign onto a letter condemning the Trump Administration's incursions into higher education—which was endorsed by every Claremont College president but Claremont McKenna’s. How did your approach to speaking with Washington & Lee's institutional voice change over time, and how will you use it here at CMC?
President Dudley: One of the really interesting and challenging parts of this job is that you are the living face and voice of a whole institution, right? And you have to be mindful of that every single day. Wherever I am, I am the president of Claremont McKenna College, and I'm representing it. And I don't have the luxury of speaking as Will Dudley, private citizen, because everything that comes out of my mouth is also coming out of the mouth of Claremont McKenna College. So it's a feature of the job, and it takes some getting used to.
And I will say, what I tried to do at Washington & Lee was even from the beginning to comment on issues that I thought were pretty tightly related to the mission of the College and its ability to fulfill its mission. For example, very early on with the ban on immigration from certain countries, well, that affected the ability of some of our students and our faculty to get to campus, or travel to and from campus, or go to study abroad programs. That went right to the heart of our ability to do our work. So that was kind of my guiding principle. Another example would be the Supreme Court decision on race and admissions, right? Obviously, goes directly to our ability to do our work, and over time, I tried to stick to that principle.
Even at the beginning, I probably didn't issue statements as frequently as some presidents do because I did have a principle guiding when I thought that was a good idea, and also because I think that statements—while I understand why people want them—often don't actually make a practical difference. I'm a fan of trying to intervene in ways that make a positive difference for the school. So over time, I probably got more selective about what I thought it made sense to issue a presidential proclamation on at Washington & Lee.
Unlike Claremont McKenna, Washington & Lee doesn't have a formal endorsement of institutional neutrality, but the college and its board kind of operate that way even though they haven't formally endorsed it. I think that helps explain our reluctance to sign on to the statement that you mentioned. One of the things I talked about at the time was that the biggest threat to our mission right then was the threat in the congressional budget bill to tax our endowments at an even higher rate than they were already taxing them. Claremont McKenna, Pomona, Washington & Lee—all of these schools rely heavily on their endowments to run the place and provide an education, and so that really mattered. What I needed to do was whatever would reduce the likelihood of that coming about. So rather than issue a statement, what I did was go up to Washington, D.C. and go to every Republican senator's office that would let me in the door to talk to them about what a bad idea that was. And we came out actually much better off on the endowment tax. I'm not taking personal credit for that by any means, but that was my approach.
Kendall White: Washington & Lee has a controversial history and namesake, which was drawn into the spotlight during the racial and social unrest that happened around 2020. The College made some concessions in 2021, changing the name of Lee Chapel and discontinuing the celebratory “Founders Day” on Robert E. Lee's birthday. How did you weigh student and alumni protest against the history and traditions of the college, and how do you plan to keep or adapt those lessons for CMC?
President Dudley: Another feature of the job is that you have numerous constituencies—students, faculty, staff, alumni, parents, trustees, and to some extent, the wider public—all of whom care about the college, all of whom have overlapping but not identical perspectives on what they want the college to be and how they want it to be run. That was quite a moment, and it was also during the COVID year, so we’d sent everybody home in March of 2020. George Floyd was murdered a few months later, and shortly after that, the board and I received a petition signed by quite a lot of faculty and students requesting that Robert E. Lee's name be taken off of the school.
One thing that’s important to know is the historical context of why those names are on the school. George Washington gave a significant personal gift to what was then Liberty Hall Academy, when he was still president of the United States, to help it get off the ground and become the institution that it did. So his name has been on the University since around 1800 in recognition of his personal donation to it, and then Lee served as its president right after the Civil War.
Before the Civil War, Lee had been the president—which they called the “superintendent”—of West Point, so he'd already run a higher education institution. After the war, the trustees of what was then Washington College recruited him to come run the school. At the end of the Civil War, it was nominally open, but it had very few students, very few faculty, very little money. It could have easily gone out of business, and he actually did a really good job of attracting students and faculty and funding. Now it is a great national liberal arts institution, and obviously a lot of people have made it that, but those two individuals contributed a lot. So that's why their names are on there. And Lee's name went on in 1870, it didn't go on in the Jim Crow era.
So the trustees and I had to ask ourselves a question: Should we change the name of the school or not? And I think again, similar to the way I think about statements, we came back to the mission. Our responsibility was to make sure that the school was as successful as it could be on behalf of its students, now and for hopefully another 100 or 200 years. And was that more likely if we changed the name or kept it? That's honestly how we had to think about it, as opposed to it being a popularity contest, like you know, how many people were sending us letters, pro or con.It was a binary decision: You either keep the name or you don't. There were a lot of people on both sides of that issue.
But we weren't tallying up the mail. We were trying to ask that mission-driven question, and we didn't have evidence that the name was hurting the school in terms of applications, or ability to raise money, or ability to recruit good faculty, or ability to recruit an increasingly diverse student body. Actually, the reputation of the school was quite strong and seemed to be getting stronger. We concluded that it was really important to make sure that our increasingly diverse community felt really well supported and included, and like they belonged and it was their school. And so we did the things that you mentioned. We changed the name of the chapel, which Lee had actually built when he was the president, but he didn't name it for himself and he didn't ask to be buried there. And he would have hated the fact that people put up a sculpture of him in there. He was quite clear about not wanting that kind of thing. A lot of people after his death sort of used him in a way that I think he personally would have really resented.
Anyway, that chapel had taken on a kind of symbolic significance and association with the Confederacy that we wanted to make sure the school didn't have, and so we changed the name of that chapel and did some other things, but we made what we thought was a principled decision on the name of the school. There's lots that people can and do disagree with about the package of decisions that we made. But I think we did the best we could in a really tough situation, and I think it's turned out pretty well.
Dhriti Jagadish: How do you plan to bring that ethos over to CMC, particularly when there are lots of non-CMC students that you don't have direct oversight over, right? Those students might disapprove of CMC's actions, or perhaps there may be a group of CMC students that go over and protest at a different Claremont College. So how will you transition to being a consortium leader?
President Dudley: To be perfectly honest, I have a lot to learn about that, right? I mean, I've been here for just under three months, and the consortium is unique in higher education. It's kind of an amazing thing, really, that people dreamed this whole thing up and brought it into being. I think what you've heard me say a couple times about how I approached Washington & Lee, which will definitely inform how I approach CMC, is that at the end of the day, you come back to the mission and you have to ask, why are we here? Why is this institution here? You have to do your best to discern in any situation, especially difficult ones, what best serves the College’s mission, and that's what's hard. Sometimes that may not be the most popular thing, and of course, I don't have perfect insight into what the mission demands. But that's my north star: our institutional purpose and how we can best fulfill it.
The Consortium, as I said, is super interesting. I have just begun getting my toe in the water—there's a council of the presidents and we had an August retreat, which we do every year. So I spent a couple days in a room with the other presidents. Because I've been a president for the last 10 years, I was already personally acquainted with Gabi [Pomona] and Strom [Pitzer], but had not met Harriet [Harvey Mudd], Amy [Scripps] and the presidents of the graduate institutions in person until I got this job. As far as I can tell, it's a very collegial group.
You guys know better than I do, honestly, how the Consortium functions on the ground and how it works for students. And I've been hearing about it from CMC students. It seems like one of the first things they want to talk to me about is their preferred dining hall. I’ve only eaten at Collins and Daybreak, so I haven’t yet ventured off campus for food, and have a lot to learn.
I am not super well-versed in the details of flashpoints and challenging moments here, but I know something about them, and clearly we need to collaborate as well as we can. That's sometimes easier than other times, and collaboration is not only at the level of the presidents, but also includes the deans of students and the deans of faculty. There's a lot of layers to working together. On the whole, I hope it's the case that the administrative complexity of running a consortium is, in the end, worth it and makes all of these institutions better than they would be on their own. I mean, that's obviously the goal. So I hope that's the case. I will always try to make that the case.
Dhriti Jagadish: Pivoting to a more specific challenge in higher education: AI. The Artificial Intelligence Committee at CMC has been meeting for several months, and recently The Claremont Colleges Services has announced their “AI in Teaching & Learning” symposium, which features CMC voices. What are the factors and stakeholders CMC is considering when deciding on the appropriate use of AI, and when do you expect to see this policy rolled out?
President Dudley: I mean, to be honest, I don't know that a single and universal policy will be an outcome. I mean, it might be. I just honestly don't know. Let me say a few things. One is, I don't think anybody knows the answers to AI in higher education, so I'm not going to pretend that I do. It's clear that there's a lot to think through, and there are many dimensions to it.
There are academic implications for sure, right? And those range from how can we preserve academic integrity when AI is pervasive, to how we can help interested faculty learn how to use new AI tools and become even better teachers and scholars, to how can we help students? Hopefully, all of our students will be fluent enough in emerging AI tools that you all can go out and succeed in the world, no matter what it is that you want to do. Those are academic questions.
And then there's a bunch of technological questions about which tools are best suited for those purposes. How do we ensure that the tools that we make available protect people's privacy and data security? Of course there are financial implications of providing technologies as well, and administrative implications and questions about the parts of our work that we can do better with emerging tools. That's a whole lot to think through. A lot of those conversations are already happening. They're not waiting for me to say, “Okay, everybody start talking about this stuff.” People are already talking about AI, and they have been for a number of years now.
The faculty at CMC created an AI committee last year—the committee you're referring to—and that has gotten started this school year. I'm going to make sure that that committee and the dean of the faculty are talking to the technology security committee that we also have, and the head of IT. We'll also be asking DT [Dianna Graves] in her role as vice president of student affairs to be thinking about the implications of AI for student life and student experience, and making sure that all of those conversations are connected to each other, so that people are learning from each other. I honestly don't know where that will lead. I wouldn't assume that there will be a grand policy that gets rolled out.
As a teacher, I feel there are a lot of different ways to teach, and a lot of different fields in which people teach. I've done a fair amount of teaching as president, including last year. I teach very old school classes. We read hard books. We talk about them around a table, and then I ask students to write about them. I still think that's a really worthwhile endeavor. And I was clear on my syllabus: We're not using AI in any way in this class. And I think as long as every teacher is clear with his or her students about what the expectations are, that's the important thing. But I want our faculty to be experimenting as they see fit. We're not going to impose a single kind of policy on how people do or don't use AI, I don't think.
Dhriti Jagadish: Recently, a group of CMC seniors wrote an open letter to you expressing their desire for CMC to increase diversity, namely socioeconomic diversity. And President Chodosh, in his exit interview, also expressed interest in a “more sensible way of pricing education against the actual ability to pay.” How will CMC tackle rising costs as one of the country's most expensive institutions?
President Dudley: It's an issue really close to my heart, and one I've spent 20-something years working on. Actually, at the top of my list of things I managed to accomplish at Washington & Lee would be raising the most money in the school's history for financial aid, so that we became significantly more socioeconomically diverse and were able to support our student body much better than we were able to at the beginning of my time there.
I've met with some of the students who sent that letter, which was an excellent letter, by the way, and really well done. And basically, I agree with them. This place can and should have a more socioeconomically diverse student body than it has. The pricing of higher education is really hard. It's complicated, and therefore it's difficult to communicate in a way that your average non-specialist can get their head around because nothing else in the world is priced this way. We have a published tuition and room and board, but we also provide financial aid to families that can't afford to pay that, which of course is most families in the world. And we scale that need-based aid to what people can afford to contribute.
One way to simplify the goal for me would be first of all to recruit an increasingly socioeconomically diverse applicant pool to make sure that we are effectively reaching really talented young people from every background in this country, and to some extent around the world. And then it's going to be hard to get in here. This is a really competitive academic institution, but I want it to be the case that if you get in, you can truly afford to come here. The price should not be the barrier to you coming and taking advantage of the opportunities at CMC. And I want that to be true at the high end—if we're expecting your family to pay full sticker price, that even if that is somewhat of a stretch, it's not too much to ask of you. And I want that to be the case across the whole income spectrum.
So, what you need to do is make it an institutional priority, which it is of mine, and that's demonstrable over the last 20 years of work that I've done. And then you need to raise a lot of money to support it, and that's part of my job. You can't do that overnight, but it's at the top of my list. And then you need to have really smart tactics in admissions and figure out how we can identify, recruit, and yield amazing kids who are not currently looking at CMC as an option. That's the plan.
Kendall White: Looking ahead, President Chodosh had some plans that were greenlighted by the Board, namely the campus expansion. Do you plan to modify those plans in any way? And what do you hope to accomplish during your tenure here?
President Dudley: When you step into this job at any institution, there's already a lot in progress, right? So it's not like a startup, although this place is only 80 years old, which is kind of amazing because the other places I've been are like 270 years old. So actually, this attracted me to CMC too—its youthful energy and aspiration and forward-looking nature.
I was very clear with the board when I was a candidate for the job that I don't have a list of, you know, six hot priorities that I want them to immediately adopt, because I don't know the place well enough, right? And so my first order of business is to get to know the place and listen to people and figure out how I think it can be better. One way that I'm confident it can be better is by raising additional resources for financial aid. I don't have any doubt about that.
If you land at a school that's in a very strong position, which CMC is, there's nothing on fire. There's nothing fundamentally broken. There's not a crisis that I have to come in and solve, and so I have the luxury of some time to keep working on the things that are already in progress, like finishing the Sports Bowl, which a whole bunch of people worked really hard to get done by this fall. I visited in February right after I got announced, and at that point, the Science Center was open. Those two things are brand new, amazing additions to this campus. It's my job to maintain the momentum of the priorities that are already in place, and then work with the board and faculty and students to figure out what’s next.
I hope that however many years from now, when I'm done doing this, Claremont McKenna is a better version of itself than it is today. That's the basic goal, and there are a number of different dimensions to that. That could be having been successful in supporting a more socioeconomically diverse student body. It could be having enhanced the curriculum in ways that make sense for this place. It could be that we have created new and better dorm space or classroom space. Those are all possibilities.
But the whole point is to provide the best undergraduate education on the planet, and that requires having the best student body we can have, the best faculty that we can have, and providing the facilities for our students and our faculty to live and work and play. And so that's my job, and it's fun to figure out. It's exciting. One of the exciting parts of coming to a new place is the complexity of the puzzle and trying to learn it well enough that you can figure out the things that can make it even better.
Dhriti Jagadish: Thank you for sitting down with us.
This article was published in conjunction with The Forum.
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