You Belong Here
So much is in store for you at Lesley University! Now that you’ve been accepted, RSVP for our exclusive celebration for new undergraduate and Threshold students for either Saturday, March 23 or Saturday, April 27.
NewsJul 9, 2016

Jeff Weiss joins Lesley University as sixth president

New president committed to strengthening mission of developing socially minded leaders with impact

On July 1, Jeff A. Weiss officially began his term as Lesley University president, succeeding the retiring Joseph B. Moore, who had been president for nine years.

Prior to joining Lesley, President Weiss was a partner at Vantage Partners, an internationally recognized consulting firm, of which he was a co-founder. Over close to 20 years at Vantage, he co-led the Alliance Practice and built and ran both its IT and its Healthcare industry practices. His work focused on helping leading organizations around the world improve how they structure and manage strategic partnerships, negotiate complex transactions, manage change, drive innovation, and engage in shared decision-making.

weiss-body-1
President Jeff Weiss, right, with Provost Selase Williams

“I admire Lesley for working hard toward making education affordable and more widely accessible,” President Weiss told the Lesley Public Post. “I find very attractive our commitment to the community, working with our neighbors, being a resource to the community and having real impact in Cambridge, Boston and nearby.”

Before founding Vantage, President Weiss was a partner at Conflict Management, Inc., and helped to found Conflict Management Group (now part of Mercy Corps), a not-for-profit that works with governmental and community leaders to resolve international conflict and effect social change. His work in these organizations had roots in the Harvard Negotiation Project, of which he was a member while studying at Harvard Law School.

President Weiss was a long-time adjunct professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College where he taught extensively in the MBA program and the Master of Health Care Delivery Science program. In addition, he served for over a decade as an adjunct professor at the United States Military Academy, and was a co-founder and co-director of the West Point Negotiation Project. President Weiss was awarded West Point's 2010 Apgar Award for Excellence in Teaching. He is also the recipient of the Department of the Army's Commander's Award for Civilian Service and a recipient of the Department of the Army's Outstanding Civilian Service Medal.

President Weiss has written extensively on enabling effective internal collaboration, external partnering, multi-party alignment to drive change, and negotiation. He is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review, and is most recently the author of the “HBR Guide to Negotiating.” He is also working on a new book on leadership.

He spoke to The Jewish Advocate about some of the factors that shaped his career in conflict resolution, including the WGBH-TV public-affairs program “The Advocates,” conceived by his eventual mentor, the late Harvard professor Roger Fisher.

“I realized that if you look carefully, as Roger interviewed Arabs and Israelis, that they were telling the same stories, they had the same concerns, the same passions, the same crises, the same fears,” Weiss told the Advocate.

President Weiss views Lesley as a center of knowledge, transformational education and activism, and as a community which embraces appreciating, understanding, and leveraging difference in order to effectively collaborate, creatively innovate, and solve complex problems. He adds that he is highly committed to sustaining and strengthening Lesley’s mission of developing socially minded leaders who seek to have real impact in their professions and within their communities.

President Weiss notes that effecting change starts at home by continuing to seek to make education more affordable and accessible. Lesley accomplishes this through programs such as the Urban Scholars Initiative — which provides scholarships, advising and mentoring relationships to qualified students from economically challenged cities in Massachusetts — and the Community College Partnerships, which provide associate’s degree-holders a clear and affordable pathway to a four-year degree at Lesley.

As President Weiss told The Jewish Advocate, “The world is full of inequities and challenges and it’s incumbent upon us at Lesley to not only understand those challenges, but help work on the solutions.”

President Weiss holds an A.B. (magna cum laude) in government from Dartmouth College and a J.D. (cum laude) from Harvard Law School. He is married to Gerri B. Weiss, a nurse practitioner, and is the father of two adult sons, Sam and Alec.