Clayton Spencer

Clayton Spencer (born December 18, 1954) is currently serving as the eighth president of Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. She is an attorney, and a former Harvard University dean and vice president.

Biography

Early life and education

Ava Clayton Spencer was born in 1954 in Concord, North Carolina, to Samuel Reid Spencer Jr., a Harvard-trained historian who served as president of Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Virginia, from 1957 to 1968 and Davidson College in North Carolina from 1968 to 1984.

In 1977, Spencer earned her bachelor’s degree from Williams College, magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, with highest honors in history and German, then earned a B.A. in theology from Oxford University in 1979. She received a M.A. in religion from Harvard University in 1982 and a law degree in 1985 from Yale Law School, where she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal and winner of the Moot Court competition.

Career

After law school, she clerked for Judge Rya W. Zobel of the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts from 1985 to 1986 and then practiced law at the Boston firm of Ropes & Gray from 1986 to 1989. Spencer served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Boston from 1989 to 1993 until becoming chief education counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources from 1993 to 1997 under U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy's chairmanship.

After leaving government, Spencer served as associate vice president for higher education policy at Harvard and then executive dean of the newly founded Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and as a lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. In September 2005, she was appointed vice president for policy at Harvard University, serving until her appointment as president of Bates College in 2012.^[1][2]

Spencer was married to United States Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, with whom she has two children, William and Ava Carter.^[3]

References

External links

• Bates College biography