To the campus community,
I am pleased to announce that at a meeting earlier today the Lafayette College Board of Trustees voted unanimously to extend President Nicole Hurd’s contract through June 2030. Hurd was named Lafayette’s 18th president in July 2021, having served previously as the chief executive officer of the College Advising Corps, an organization she founded two decades ago.
This is a transformative time for higher education that requires us to respond to a rapidly shifting landscape and embrace the opportunity to demonstrate the distinctive value of a Lafayette education. Our ability to seize this moment will be pivotal for the institution as we embark upon our third century of service to the community, the nation, and the globe. We are fortunate to have an extraordinary college community and a visionary like President Hurd at the helm of Lafayette.
Her accomplishments are remarkable and in a number of cases historic for Lafayette. Since 2021, she has delivered on a vision to drive academic excellence and student success, advance the College’s global reputation, and build on a dynamic and strong culture of philanthropy. Under her leadership, applications have increased 28 percent from fall 2021 with a record total of 10,528 for the fall 2025 first-year class—the largest admissions applicant pool in the institution’s history. She has championed Lafayette as an engine of opportunity through a number of major initiatives, including decisions to make us the first liberal arts college to waive a complex financial aid form for students from high-poverty high schools and to increase to $200,000 the maximum family-income level for our no loan policy.
She has also spearheaded notable philanthropic advances in her work with faculty and staff across the institution. Early in her tenure, she secured a $5 million gift that created 1,000 new student opportunities for internships, study abroad, and faculty-student research across five years. She has recently launched fundraising for the College’s strategic plan, Becoming Lafayette, with more than $10 million in gifts for endowed professorships, academic, and co-curricular programming across three key initiatives: Democracy and its Technologies, From the Lehigh Valley to the Globe, and Interdisciplinarity, Engineering, and the Liberal Arts. This past year, the College also saw the most successful “Bring the Roar” fundraising effort in Lafayette’s history.
Finally, under her leadership the college remains financially strong with reaffirmation from independent credit rating services Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s of the College’s A+/A- and Aa3 bond ratings, respectively, and major renovations to buildings, classrooms, and residence halls.
This is an extraordinary time to be part of Lafayette, and there is much to look forward to as we launch our Bicentennial celebration, advance our ambitious strategic plan, and implement a campus master plan. We are grateful for President Hurd’s leadership, for her dedication to providing our students a truly life-advancing educational experience, for her commitment to promoting faculty research and scholarship, and for her joyous capacity to welcome alumni home. Together we look forward to seeing Lafayette continue its upward trajectory as we move into the next century.
On Lafayette!
Robert E. Sell ’84, H’18
Chair, Board of Trustees