The University of Liberia has inducted its 16th President, Dr. Layli Maparyan, who was appointed by President Joseph Nyuma Boakai following a recommendation from the Vetting Committee, set by the Visitor of the University.
The induction coincided with the Conferral of a Doctorate Degree of Laws Honoris Causa on the Visitor of the University and President of Liberia, Dr. Joseph Nyuma Boakai.
Dr. Maparyan earned her Master’s in Psychology from Penn State University and PhD from Temple University, with a focus on Adolescent Psychology.
As an undergraduate, she was involved with students’ activism, speaking out against the Apartheid rule in South Africa. During her graduate studies, she got involved with critical theory liberation and the dynamic of social movement.
In her early academic job, she wrote about womanism, a social and ecological change perspective rooted in experiences and perspectives of women of African descent around the World.
Three books have been published on this subject, with the latest one published just recently.
After her elevation from Assistant to Associate Professor at both the University of Georgia and Georgia State University, she began serving as the Executive Director of the World Street Center for Women, a woman in gender, research institute, where she gained full rank as professor, then went on to serve as Chair of the Department for African Studies for several years.
She vowed to bring her vast experience in administration and fundraising gained from the centers to the University of Liberia.
Dr. Maparyan also served as Board Chair for Global Fund for Women and currently chairs the Board; a philanthropist organization with a 20-million budget that funds women-led organizations.
According to her, serving has been an experience generating many valuable connections in the philanthropist sector, something she vowed, as UL President to bring every knowledge she has acquired, experience gained, and connections to the University of Liberia.
Dr. Maparyan has vowed to institute her values, the 5-Es at the University of Liberia including, education, effectiveness, efficiency, excellence, and ethics.
According to Dr. Maparyan, her first 100 days in office will focus on a learning and listening tour to know everyone, from UL Vice Presidents, Staff, faculty and students, and alumni, to government stakeholders and community partners. That will include touring every part of the UL campus and other campuses to see firsthand the prevailing circumstances.
She termed this approach of touring and learning as important, and not to make assumptions of what needs to be done. Dr. Maparyan said the scientific approach to solving problems; includes asking questions and gathering data.
Since her arrival, she noted that her sense of urgency has increased to ensure certain things are done.
As delivered her induction speech, she immediately announced the resumption of academic activities beginning Monday, January 13, 2025, following the long closure of the UL. She extended a hand to all staff, faculty, and students to report, noting they can solve any problem together, once they are present.
As part of the many reforms, her administration will undertake, Dr. Maparyan intends to regularize faculty pay and find out why pay has been delayed in the past, and how to prevent its recurrence in the future.
As part of that, she vowed to clean up the UL payroll and verify to identify errors, which will ensure more money available for the institution. She wants to ensure that faculty are not worried about their pay, transportation, and children’s school fees including other things while they are working.
Over the years, the UL calendar has been unpredictable, and in most cases leaving students confused and sometimes leading to protests on the campuses of the UL, Dr. Maparyan is going to solve this problem once and all.
The 16th UL President, Dr. Maparyan has vowed to ensure the UL academic calendar is regularized, predictable, and dependable year in and year out. She said this would inform students about when school is starting and ending. “Students should be able to plan properly to await other academic opportunities” Dr. Maparyan noted.
According to Dr. Maparyan, she will also focus on the sanitation of the UL, ensuring safe and functioning bathrooms and campus, with adequate supply to support public health.
On another front, Dr. Maparyan is keen on fundraising to ensure outside resources are available to support the UL programs. With the already connections she has made in the US and other parts, Dr. Maparyan wants to leverage those to bring in resources to accomplish UL goals.
She said though the allocation from the national budget is helpful if the UL wants to address its problems, additional resources are needed, stressing that a healthy public University must leverage outside resources to aid its programs and goals.
Gender equality and social inclusion, including addressing disability, and access to ensure gender balance is another reform in the heart of the UL 16th President. It is no doubt, given that she is and has been in gender balance advocacies for the past years.
According to her, every action, she takes gender balance is going to be considered. She termed gender balance as equal power, equal accomplishment, equal consideration, equal contribution, and equal safety.
She maintained that gender balance and social inclusion including respect for people living with disability will characterize her administration, noting that disability is a priority consideration.
According to her the Liberia National Disability policies set goals and targets that have not been met, which requires infrastructure improvement. Dr. Maparyan said:” These are necessary changes that will modernize the University of Liberia.”
She vowed the UL will take concrete actions to address the issues and needs of the students with disability at the University of Liberia.
To ensure an effective University, Dr. Maparyan said the UL will derive and launch a four-year strategic plan to guide the institution toward development.
Brief Profile of Dr. Layli Maparyan
Layli Maparyan, Ph.D., is the Katherine Stone Kaufmann ’67 Executive Director of the Wellesley Centers for Women and Professor of Africana Studies at Wellesley College. She is best known for her scholarship in the area of and is the author of two groundbreaking texts in the field of womanist studies, The Womanist Reader (Routledge, 2006) and The Womanist Idea (Routledge, 2012); a third book is forthcoming.
Maparyan has also published significantly in the areas of adolescent development, social identities, (including biracial/ethnic identity and the intersections of racial/ethnic, sexual, spiritual/religious, and gender identities), Black LGBTQ studies, Hip Hop studies, and history of psychology.
Maparyan’s scholar-activist work interweaves threads from the social sciences and the critical disciplines, incorporating basic and applied platforms around a common theme of integrating identities and communities in peaceable, ecologically sound, and self-actualizing ways.
Background
Before joining WCW, Maparyan was an Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and associated faculty of African American Studies at Georgia State University (GSU). While there, she served as the inaugural Chair of the University Consortium for Liberia (UCL), a regional collective of Southeastern U.S. institutions with projects in Liberia, West Africa.
In 2009, Maparyan was a Contemplative Practice Fellow of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, and, in 2010, she served as a Fulbright Specialist at the University of Liberia, where she developed a model gender studies curriculum.
Before GSU, she was an Assistant Professor of Psychology and African American Studies at the University of Georgia (UGA). While at UGA, she co-founded and co-directed the Womanist Studies Consortium, a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowships residency site, for which she recruited and supported scholars and interns from the U.S. and around the world and published a journal, The Womanist (later Womanist Theory and Research).
Maparyan holds a Ph.D. in Psychology with an emphasis on lifespan human development from Temple University and an M.S. in Psychology with an emphasis on developmental psychology from Pennsylvania State University. She is a graduate of Spelman College, where she majored in philosophy.
Maparyan currently sits on the Board of Directors of the Global Fund for Women, where she serves as Chair of the Governance Committee. She also serves as the International Board Chair of the Sustainable Market Women’s Fund (SMWF) and is a long-time member of the Ms. Magazine Committee of Scholars.
She has held past positions of leadership in the National Women’s Studies Association, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights Women’s Initiative, the University Consortium for Liberia, (formerly Aid to Children of Imprisoned Mothers), the National Council for Research on Women (NCRW), and the Atlanta Women’s Foundation’s Faith, Feminism, and Philanthropy Initiative.
In 2014, she served on the planning committee for the White House Research Conference on Girls. She is a member of the Constructive Resilience Working Group of the Association for Baha’i Studies (ABS).
