About
Margaret Sullivan was inaugurated as the 14th President of Alderson Broaddus University in October 2024, succeeding Dr. Andrew Reinhart after a 14-month national search. She came to College Hill from Eastern University, where she served as Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs for nine years, and prior to that as Dean of the Faculty at Hollins University — her undergraduate alma mater.
A first-generation college student raised in the coal-and-steel valleys of southwestern Pennsylvania, Sullivan describes her vocation as "the long sentence of a teacher's life." She holds a Ph.D. in Higher Education from the University of Virginia, an M.A. in Theology from Princeton Theological Seminary, and a B.A. (summa cum laude) in English from Hollins. She is an ordained American Baptist minister and continues to preach occasionally at small congregations across north-central West Virginia.
In her first eighteen months at AB, President Sullivan led the development of the Forging the Next 155 strategic plan, broke ground on the $42M Pickett Center for Rural Health Innovation, and launched a faculty-led review of the Hilltop Core curriculum. She lives in the President's residence on College Hill with her husband Ben, a hospice chaplain, and their two rescued retired-racing greyhounds, Tully and Junebug.
Education
- 2003Ph.D., Higher Education — University of Virginia. Dissertation: The Vocational Imagination: How Mission-Driven Universities Form Their Faculty.
- 1995M.A., Theology — Princeton Theological Seminary. Concentration in pastoral theology and the history of American Baptist piety.
- 1991B.A., English (summa cum laude) — Hollins University. Phi Beta Kappa. Senior thesis on Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping.
- 1989Certificate, Bread Loaf School of English — Middlebury College summer program. Studied with poets Robert Pinsky and Carolyn Forché.
Teaching
In addition to her executive role, President Sullivan teaches one Hilltop Core seminar each spring semester. She is a fierce believer that university presidents must stay in the classroom — "or they forget what the university is for."
- HC 401The Examined LifeSenior capstone of the Hilltop Core. A discussion-based reading of Augustine, Bonhoeffer, Wendell Berry, and Marilynne Robinson. Limited to 16 students.
- THE 320American Baptist HeritageA historical-theological survey of the American Baptist movement from Roger Williams through the present, with attention to AB's own institutional inheritance.
Scholarship & Public Voice
President Sullivan's scholarly work sits at the intersection of higher-education leadership, American religious history, and Appalachian studies. Her most recent book, The Quiet Renewal: How Faith-Rooted Institutions Renew Without Reinventing (Eerdmans, 2022), draws on five years of case studies across small religious colleges in the Rust Belt and Appalachia. The book was reviewed in The Chronicle of Higher Education as "a hopeful primer for the next generation of mission-driven institutional leaders."
She is a frequent contributor to The Christian Century, The Cresset, and Inside Higher Ed, and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of College & Character and the Appalachian Journal. She is currently writing a memoir-in-essays about her first decade as a university president, expected from Eerdmans in 2027.
Selected Publications & Presentations
- 2022The Quiet Renewal: How Faith-Rooted Institutions Renew Without Reinventing. Eerdmans.
- 2019Vocation & the Provost: Forming Faculty in Mission-Driven Universities. Stanford University Press.
- 2015The English Major's Vocation (co-edited with Lisa Sowle Cahill). Wm. B. Eerdmans.
- 2024"What Small Colleges Owe Their Communities." The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 12.
- 2023"The Long Sentence of a Teacher's Life." The Christian Century, August 2.
- 2022Plenary address, Council of Independent Colleges Presidents Institute, "The Renewal Question."
Honors & Service
- 2024Inaugurated 14th President of Alderson Broaddus University.
- 2023Honorary Doctor of Divinity, Andover Newton Seminary at Yale.
- 2022CASE Educator of the Year, Mid-Atlantic Region.
- 2018Henry Luce III Fellow in Theology, Association of Theological Schools.
- 2014Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar.
- 2008American Council on Education Fellow.
A university's job is not to be impressive. Its job is to be true — to its mission, to its students, to the small town that took it in, and to the long arc of the calling it answered the day it opened its doors.— Dr. Margaret H. Sullivan
Beyond the Classroom
President Sullivan is a long-distance runner (she has completed the Boston Marathon three times), an amateur quilter, and a passionate amateur ornithologist; she keeps a running life list of birds spotted on College Hill that currently stands at 89 species. She and her husband Ben are active members of First Baptist Church of Philippi, where she occasionally guest-preaches and he chairs the missions committee.
She is on the board of the Appalachian College Association and chairs the Faith & Higher Education working group of the Council of Independent Colleges. In her one-day-a-week off-campus volunteer commitment, she serves as a hospice chaplain-in-training at the Davis Health System — a discipline she calls "the most clarifying part of my week."