Harry C. Payne

President
Williams College

Since Payne assumed the Presidency of Williams College on Jan. 1, 1994, he has initiated three major planning processes focusing on the curriculum, student life outside the classroom, and the college's major financial priorities. He has overseen the total renovation of Griffin Hall, the college's oldest classroom building, and guided to the construction stage a $45 million unified science building project. His major priorities for the future are strengthening core commitments in the teaching of the College, building attention to the civic life and civic virtues, and making Williams a model of engagement with new information technologies.

Before coming to Williams, Payne was President of Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y. from 1988 to 1993. He was previously at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, where he was Provost from 1985 to 1988 and Acting President in 1987 to 1988. At Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., Payne was Director of the Division of Social Science from 1982 to 1985, Acting Dean of the Faculty and Provost from 1980 to 1982, Assistant Dean of the Faculty in 1980, and Acting Chair of the History department in 1979.

He has taught European intellectual history at Colgate, Haverford, and while President of Hamilton. As Professor of History at Williams, he teaches a course on historiography.

Currently he is Chair of the Board of Directors of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities for 1997-98, the national organization that represents nearly 900 independent colleges and universities on public policy issues with the federal government.

Payne has served as President of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the field in which most of his scholarly work has focused. He is the author of The Philosophes and the People (pronounced fee-low-zoffs), edited three volumes of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, and produced more than 50 scholarly articles and reviews.

He served as Overseas Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge University, in 1977; was a Danforth Fellow from 1968 to 1973; and was an honorary Woodrow Wilson Fellow in 1986. His awards include a National Endowment for the Humanities summer stipend in 1975 and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies' annual article prize for 1975-76.

Payne graduated as the highest ranking B.A. candidate in the Yale College Class of 1969 and earned an M.A. at the same time. His Ph.D. in history, also from Yale, came in 1973. He has been awarded honorary degrees by Hamilton (1988), Colgate (1989), Williams (1993) and Amherst (1994).

Payne was born and raised in Worcester, Mass. His wife, Deborah, directs the Science and Mathematics Resource Center at Williams. Their son, Jonathan, is a member of the Williams class of 1997, having been admitted Early Decision before his father was considered for the Presidency. Their other son, Samuel, will attend Princeton University in the fall.