Susan Georgia Nugent

Much like Kenyon’s first president, Philander Chase, Kenyon’s eighteenth president was a pioneer both in the realm of national higher education and at the College. Born March 14, 1951 in New Orleans, Louisiana, S. Georgia Nugent spent much of her childhood traveling throughout the eastern United States with her parents, following her father’s work as a thoroughbred horse trainer. Though she spent time in Detroit, Cleveland, and Louisville, the family called Miami their home base and returned to it for a portion of each year. The first in her family to set her sights on college, she secretly applied to Princeton University, all the while being urged by her parents to attend the University of Miami. Accepted into Princeton’s first class of women in 1969, and receiving a scholarship to attend, she could not refuse the opportunity.

Always having felt a desire to teach, Nugent went on to graduate school following the completion of her course of study in classics at Princeton. After completing her Ph.D. at Cornell University in 1978, she received her first professional academic appointment as an assistant professor of classics at Swarthmore College. The not-so-distant call of Princeton, however, persuaded Nugent to return to her alma mater in 1979, after only one year at Swarthmore, as the university’s first alumna to be appointed to the tenure-track faculty. In 1985, she accepted a post in the classics department at Brown University, where she won the Wriston Award for Excellence in Teaching and earned tenure. By then a noted scholar in the classics, she had published Allegory and Poetics: The Structure and Imagery of Prudentius’ “Psychomachia” and more than two dozen articles in her field, and she had provided audio and video lecture recordings to the Teaching Company.

Throughout her time at Princeton and Brown, Nugent felt a growing interest in higher-education administration. When the opportunity arose to become assistant to the president at Princeton in 1995, she accepted the job and returned for a third time to New Jersey. After several years of working closely with President Harold Shapiro, she was selected as associate provost, followed by a 2001 appointment as the first dean of the university’s Harold W. McGraw Jr. Center for Teaching and Learning. There, she worked closely with students and faculty members to implement initiatives to enhance and promote teaching and learning at Princeton. She also helped establish the university’s Educational Technologies Center, enabling faculty members to use digital materials for both distance and local instruction.

Nugent was named Kenyon’s first female president in February 2003, and assumed office in July of that year. Over the next decade, she led the College to new heights of applications for admission, diversity and quality of the faculty and student body, fundraising success, and financial security while becoming a nationally recognized voice for liberal arts education and related issues. She was especially noted for her views on equitable distribution of scholarship funds, the legal drinking age (through the Amethyst Initiative), and effective use of information technology in the classroom.

Although Nugent resisted being called a “bricks-and-mortar president,” and indeed left her mark throughout Kenyon’s operations, many important buildings were constructed during her administration. Among them are academic structures such as the Gund Gallery, Horvitz Hall, and Lentz and O’Connor Houses; athletic facilities such as the Kenyon Athletic Center; and the student residences known collectively as the North Campus Apartments. Several notable renovations also took place, including those of Peirce and Dempsey Halls as a centralized dining facility, and Finn House as the home of the Kenyon Review.

After leaving Kenyon, Nugent served as the interim president of the College of Wooster for the 2015-2016 academic year. In 2019, she became the first woman president of Illinois Wesleyan University and now heads that institution with her proven leadership and scholarship.

Nugent is married to Thomas J. Scherer, a fellow Princeton graduate who holds a law degree from Columbia University. He is general counsel and senior vice president of American International Group, Property and Casualty.