Biography

Mary B. Marcy is provost and vice president of Bard College at Simon's Rock.  As the chief executive officer of Simon’s Rock, Dr. Marcy has leadership responsibility for all aspects of the academic, student support, and financial management of the college as well as serving as a member on the Board of Overseers.  She is also a member of the executive management team at Bard College.  Dr. Marcy has had a distinguished career in administration as policy researcher and advisor to the President of Western Washington University, Director of Government Relations at Central Washington University, and as the first Dean of University Relations and Planning at Antioch University/Seattle campus.

Prior to her appointment to Simon’s Rock in 2004, Dr. Marcy directed a grant-funded national project on the Future of Higher Education which explored issues of cost and quality of American Higher Education.  As a major policy initiative, the project identified and convened an advisory Board consisting of distinguished scholars and administrators across the country whose work in higher education was making significant contributions to the field.  Over the three-year period the project published several policy papers creating a broad based conversation on the most critical issues facing the future of higher education.

Dr. Marcy has a B.A. with honors in Political Science from the University of Nebraska, and an M. Phil. and a D. Phil in Politics from the University of Oxford.  She has published widely on issues of cost, accountability, diversity and leadership in higher education.  Among some of these publications are: “Democracy, Leadership, and the Role of Liberal Education,” and “Rawls, Neustadt and Liberal Education:  Reflections on Two Scholars, journal of Liberal Education, “When Diversity and Dollars Collide,” Innovative Higher Education, “Why Foundations Have Cut Back in Higher Education,” The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Dr. Marcy serves on the Brookings Institute Higher Education Policy Forum and was a participant in the Aspen Institute’s Justice and Society Program.  In addition to her position as provost, Dr. Marcy is a vice president at Bard College and is on the teaching faculty at Bard College at Simon's Rock.