I am delighted to interview Dr. Layli Maparyan, the 16th President of the University of Liberia (UL), appointed by His Excellency Joseph Nyuma Boakai, Sr., President of the Republic of Liberia.

On January 10, 2025, I was honored to witness the Inauguration of my friend and colleague Dr. Layli Maparyan, along with distinguished Government of Liberia Officials and UL Board of Trustees including Hon. Dr. Jarso Maley Jallah, Minister of Education, Hon. Augustine K. Ngafuan, Minister of Finance & Development Planning, Hon. Senator Numene T.H. Bartekwa, UL Board Chair, and other UL Trustees, former Presidents of the UL, students, faculty, faculty senate, alumni, staff, administrators other University Presidents, and guests, who shared in this auspicious occasion.

His Excellency Joseph Nyuma Boakai, Sr., President of the Republic of Liberia, and Visitor of the University of Liberia, appointed Dr. Layli Maparyan as the 16th President of the University of Liberia, founded in 1951, formerly Liberia College founded in 1862. This historic appointment follows the approval of the University’s Board of Trustees in accordance with the University of Liberia’s Charter. In his letter of appointment, President Boakai expressed confidence in Dr. Maparyan’s ability, integrity, and extensive experience, emphasizing his trust that she would demonstrate these qualities in service to the University and the nation. Her selection followed a rigorous search process conducted by the University of Liberia Board of Trustees’ Search Committee, which identified her as a leading candidate for the position, so stated the Press Release from the Executive Mansion.

Dr. Maparyan holds a Ph.D. in Psychology from Temple University and an M.S. in Psychology from Penn State University. She earned her undergraduate degree in Philosophy (cum laude) from Spelman College. She has a distinguished academic career, having served as Associate Professor and Assistant Professor at Georgia State University’s (GSU) Women’s Studies Institute and Assistant Professor at the University of Georgia’s (UGA) Department of Psychology and Institute for African American Studies. She was also the Executive Director of Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College.

Madame President, please share with us your background and how it prepared you for your leadership role as the UL’s 16th President.

I’ve been an academic for the last thirty years. During that time, I’ve been fortunate to gain experience with or exposure to most of the operational aspects of successful higher education institutions. As you mentioned, my first job was at the University of Georgia (UGA), a large land-grant institution with many globally recognized programs. There I served as Assistant Professor of Psychology with a joint appointment in the Institute for African American Studies. I learned to secure large federal and foundation grants with some of the biggest grant-getters in my field, I supervised Ph.D. students in my own lab, and I helped build the institution’s inaugural multicultural curriculum. I was there at a time when the University launched the HOPE Scholarship program, which made tuition free for all first-year students who qualified for admission. UGA was like a city unto itself, and it was a great place to launch my academic career.

After UGA, I spent the next dozen years at Georgia State University (GSU), a highly diverse metropolitan research university in Atlanta, where I became Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and affiliated faculty of the African American Studies Department. I supervised Masters-level students at this institution and also served as Graduate Director. I published my first and second books, The Womanist Reader and The Womanist Idea, respectively, while in this post. In 2009, while a professor at Georgia State, I made my first trip to Liberia to attend the International Colloquium on Women’s Empowerment, Leadership Development, International Peace and Security with a delegation led by you, Cynthia, as well as Deborah J. Richardson, then CEO of the Atlanta Women’s Foundation. I fell in love with Liberia the moment my foot touched the ground, and, from that point forward, a significant portion of my professional life was devoted to Liberia. While at GSU, I led two delegations of study abroad students to Liberia to study gender development and gender mainstreaming under the administration of Africa’s first democratically elected woman head of state, H.E. President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and I was invited by the late Dr. Emmet Dennis, then president of the University of Liberia (UL), to spend time in the country as a Fulbright Specialist doing a feasibility study for a gender studies program at UL. These were exciting times.

After Georgia State, I landed at Wellesley College as Executive Director of the Wellesley Centers for Women (WCW), the nation’s leading academic women- and gender-focused research and action institute. This was my first executive-level administrative role. Running WCW was like running a soft-money NGO that just happened to be located on a college campus. I managed a $5-7 million budget (including funds from a $39-70M endowment) and a staff that ranged in size from 60 to over 100, depending on how many grants and contracts we had at any given time. At Wellesley, I had a dual appointment with the Africana Studies Department, where I achieved the rank of full Professor, published two more books – The Baha’i Faith and African American Studies and Womanism Rising, and pinched-hit as department chair for a number of years. Having this hybrid position made me able to “see from both sides” – faculty and administrator. It gave me great perspective-taking. Because of this both/and position, I was able to sit on many of the most influential college committees – those that decide tenure and promotion, approve the curriculum, and decide on merit raises, for example – as well as to lead the college’s employee resource group for Black employees and sit on a presidential commission on racial and ethnic equity. I made it my job to “be everywhere and do everything” so that I could really learn how institutions work inside and out, and also because I genuinely loved what I was doing. All of this was great preparation for becoming President of the University of Liberia.

Beyond these academic experiences, my board experiences have contributed greatly to what I bring. I have spent a decade on the Board of Directors of the Global Fund for Women, which is one of the largest philanthropic actors in the women’s social justice sector worldwide. My term as GFW board chair ends in June, and the great connections I made follow me to UL. My long relationship with the University Consortium for Liberia (UCL) is also a tremendous resource. I was a charter member when it started, and currently I sit on the board of directors. UCL brings nearly two dozen higher education institutions to the table, all of whom want to make connections in Liberia.

Dr. Maparyan’s inaugural address was inspiring and uplifting as she outlined her values as the incoming President of UL, with the “Five Es” to include Education, Effectiveness, Efficiency, Excellence, and Ethics.

Dr. Maparyan, please describe in a bit more detail how the “Five Es” will assist you in your desire to help put UL back on track as a respected educational institution of higher learning.

The Five E’s are my mantra for guiding the University of Liberia back to greatness. They are a simple formula for getting many things right at once. EDUCATION is the university’s reason for being. It is why we exist. It is what we are here to do. It is the standard by which we will be judged. It is our role as a societal institution. It requires us to think deeply about what education is, and then to go about delivering it. If we don’t deliver it, we are nobody. If we do deliver it, we are worth our weight in gold. Yet, we are only achieving education if we are effective. EFFECTIVENESS means we achieve what we set out to do. We don’t just say we are doing it, we don’t just go through the motions – we prove it through the results of our actions, the impact we can demonstrate using measurable standards. In academia, we are talking about the effectiveness of teaching and learning. We are also talking about the effectiveness of our graduates in society: problem-solving and nation-building. To be effective, however, requires some level of efficiency. EFFICIENCY is simply doing as much as we can with as little as we can, in terms of money, time, and energy. It is a form of focus – focusing resources on the task at hand and not getting distracted or derailed. As an institution with limited resources, we have to make maximum use of what we have. We have to reduce waste and plug leaks and very carefully check for fairness through the creation of transparent systems of accountability. Efficiency is, in itself, a form of excellence. EXCELLENCE more broadly means doing things to the highest and best degree. With excellence, the how is as important as the what. It can be summed up as “being all that you can be” or “living up to your potential.” It is impossible to have excellence, however, without a very clear sense of the good, and that is where ethics comes in. ETHICS means having principles and following them. None of the other E’s is achievable without ethics. Ethics tells us right from wrong, good from bad, helpful from unhelpful, that which gives life from that which diminishes life. There are many systems of ethics in this world, but the bottom line is, there must be some system in place to guide our decision-making so that it always points and moves toward the good – that which confers wellbeing upon individuals, communities, institutions, our environment, and society writ large. With everything I do at the University of Liberia – and with everything I ask of others – I think about the 5 E’s.

Recognizing that as President you are now responsible for managing and providing leadership to four campuses, namely the Capitol Hill campus, the Fendall Campus, the Health Sciences campus, and the Straz-Sinje campus, what is your vision for libraries, science laboratories, computer labs and other resources to help strengthen faculty teaching and student learning?

Each of our campuses serves a different function in our university ecosystem. The Capitol Hill campus is our historical campus, the original site of Liberia College going back to the 19th century. It is near Liberia’s seat of government and, hence, has the most exchange with the Executive Mansion, the Legislature, the Judiciary, and other government Ministries and agencies. It houses our college of business and public administration, our law school, and our graduate school. This campus must be able to serve working professionals who are continuing their education as well as those who aspire to work and serve in government in Liberia. Our Fendall campus, located about 20 miles outside Central Monrovia in the suburbs, is our main campus for undergraduate programs. It is home to most of our science, social science, and arts and humanities disciplines. Our health campus is actually geographically distributed, with our medical school in Congo Town, our pre-clinical campus at Fendall, and a few other programs at Capitol Hill. Last but not least is our vocational and technical school located some distance away from the main campus in Grand Cape Mount County. This institution offers Associate degrees and fulfills important societal gaps in skilled labor fields.

My vision for the campus as a whole is to get everything up and running. My long-term goal is to make sure that the students and faculty of the University of Liberia have all of the same types of resources as students and faculty anywhere – access to online resources through computers and reliable internet, access to library resources, including books and journals, and access to the basic equipment and technology needed for classroom learning and research, including lab materials. I also intend to strengthen the overall digital infrastructure of the university, because it affects the administrative as well as the academic systems. Any university with stature today is able to take its digital infrastructure as a given, as UL needs to reach that threshold. Many other initiatives will follow from this.

With over 20,000 students at UL, educating Liberia’s youth provides both a challenge and an opportunity. Under your leadership, what do you consider to be your key priority projects and initiatives you can share at this time?

Students from the University of Liberia deserve to graduate with a credential that serves their career advancement not only within Liberia, but in the region, across the continent, and globally. Students themselves have expressed to me their desire for a higher standard of academic excellence at UL. This is why I introduced the 5 E’s – Education, Effectiveness, Efficiency, Excellence, and Ethics – as my guiding platform. I know how the civil conflict (1989-2003) decimated the university – not only in terms of its physical infrastructure, but also in terms of its faculty, many of whom were killed or had to flee the country. Twenty-plus years later, we are still recovering from that, and I plan to accelerate this recovery under my administration. We have a wonderful roadmap in the form of H.E. President Joseph Nyuma Boakai’s ARREST Agenda for Inclusive Development (AAID), the details of which were released last month. ARREST stands for Agriculture, Roads, Rule of Law, Education, Sanitation, and Tourism – all areas that UL, as the national university, can and must serve educationally. We must produce the experts! I plan to strengthen or introduce academic programs that relate to these priorities – not for political reasons, but because they address the real needs of everyday Liberians. A top priority for me is more Ph.D.’s among UL’s faculty, and that’s where other universities as well as donors can help, by providing slots for qualified UL faculty to get advanced degrees and providing the funding to make it a reality.

Fundraising will be a key priority in your administration to help upgrade infrastructure, beautify the campuses and to help bring new resources to help strengthen teaching and learning. Please give us some insight into your plans and what role the UL family can play to assist you in achieving your goals. How do you see the UL alumni getting involved and playing a role in UL’s development agenda?

Thank you for asking about this important priority. My plan has three parts: First, I’d like to connect with all of the University’s current and past funders and strengthen the relationships, so that funding can continue. Second, I plan to identify new funders – multilaterals, bilaterials, foundations, and industry and corporate sources, as well as untapped individual donors of high net worth – and forge new relationships. Third, I plan to build UL’s endowment through an endowment campaign. A healthy endowment will provide a necessary measure of security for all of UL’s operations moving forward. UL’s alumni – in Liberia and throughout the Diaspora – will be pivotal contributors to all of these efforts. I will tap them for connections to funders, find out what kinds of in-kind support they are able to direct to UL, and engage them in any fundraising events that we have over time. UL’s alumni are our best ambassadors, and the leadership of the Alumni Associations in Liberia and the U.S. have already proven themselves to be enthusiastic and ready to roll up their sleeves.

Finally, Madame President, is there anything else you would like to add at this time?

This is a time of great global change and churn. Humanity is stretching, trying to find its mature identity as a world-embracing, peaceful and prosperous species living harmoniously with the rest of earth. Higher education institutions play a key role in this process. University presidents today, particularly in struggling economies, have a responsibility to make sure that their populations are not left behind and that, in fact, their populations contribute their own unique genius to the global conversation. It is in that spirit that I have assumed the role of president of the University of Liberia, and I am grateful to all who will pursue this mission with me.

On behalf of iF Magazine in Houston, Texas, Atlanta, Georgia and Monrovia, Liberia, thank you Madame President.

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