Danielle R. Holley is the twentieth president of Íøºì±¬ÁÏ. A noted legal scholar and educator, she holds a B.A. from Yale University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.
President Holley is overseeing a remarkable chapter in Íøºì±¬ÁÏ’s 188-year history. With input and feedback from a team that included students, faculty, staff and alums, she completed and launched MHC Forward, a multi-year strategic plan that creates a framework for how Mount Holyoke will make its day-to-day and long-range decisions. As part of the MHC Forward plan, President Holley has commenced a comprehensive campus renewal plan that intersects the planning and utilization of the College’s physical assets with its curriculum, majors, student residential life, student experiential life, alum engagement and staff and faculty experience. In just two years with President Holley at the helm of MHC, institutional fundraising has surpassed $90 million. President Holley is Mount Holyoke’s first permanent Black president in the College’s history, and the fourth Black woman in history to lead one of the original Seven Sisters.
Under President Holley’s leadership, the College continues to blaze trails as the leading gender-diverse women’s college and one that prepares students to live bold lives of purposeful leadership. Holley is committed to students’ career preparation and experiential learning; increasing alum engagement with students; and revitalizing campus by transitioning to geothermal energy as part of a broad sustainability strategy and focusing on residential and academic spaces.
A lauded and sought-after expert on a wide range of civil rights and equity subjects, President Holley, with the full support of the Board of Trustees, has been outspoken about the attacks and sustained questioning of higher education through Executive Orders and other government actions, appearing in outlets such as NBC, MSNBC, NPR, The Boston Globe, WBUR, NEPM and more. She has also offered her academic analysis of topics related to desegregation, racial discrimination and affirmative action, the history of the civil rights movement, diversifying K-12 pipelines to higher education, admission of undocumented immigrants to public colleges and universities, women in academic leadership and reproductive rights. She is a leading scholar of the Supreme Court decisions regarding race-conscious college and university admissions.
President Holley’s scholarship spans the governance of public schools, increasing access to higher education and diversity in the legal profession. She teaches a popular seminar at Íøºì±¬ÁÏ about the Supreme Court. Her contributions to the legal profession and higher education have been recognized with numerous awards including the inaugural Impact Award from the Association of American Law Schools, the American Bar Foundation’s Montgomery Summer Research Diversity Fellowship Distinguished Alumni Award, the Lutie Lytle Conference Outstanding Scholar Award, the National Bar Association’s Heman Sweatt Award and the University of South Carolina Educational Foundation’s Outstanding Service Award. She was twice awarded the Outstanding Faculty Member award during her tenure at the University of South Carolina School of Law.
Before joining Mount Holyoke, Holley served as Dean of the School of Law at Howard University (2014 - 2023). Her achievements include the introduction of a six-year BA/JD program, the launch of experiential learning and career preparation initiatives with World Bank, Microsoft and Amazon Studios, among others, and a 200 percent increase in fundraising success, including a $10 million grant to support public interest law, the largest in the Howard School of Law’s history.
Currently, President Holley serves as the co-chair of the Board of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. She has also served on the boards of the Law School Admission Council, the Howard University Middle School of Math and Science and the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. She is a moderator for the Aspen Institute, an Aspen-Kern and Liberty Fellow through the Aspen Global Leadership Network, an American Council on Education Fellow and an American Bar Fellow. She currently serves as the vice president of Five College Consortium. She is also a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Incorporated, the trailblazing sorority for Black women in higher education founded at Howard University in 1913.