Jesse H. Lytle

Assistant to the President/Secretary of the College
Adjunct Lecturer in Educational Studies

Specialization:
Higher education, organizational theory

As both professor and member of the College’s senior leadership team, Jesse Lytle says that teaching about educational institutions while managing one enriches and informs both sides of his work.  “Mount Holyoke is not just a great school; it’s a great experiment too.  I get to explore the most interesting frontiers in higher education whether I’m in the office or in the classroom.”  

Lytle’s interest in higher education grew out of his earliest professional experiences in college administration.  “Not only was I fascinated by higher education’s role in society, but I found colleges and universities intriguing organizations in all their peculiarity, durability, and sense of purpose.”  In his graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania, Lytle fused those interests in a study of how liberal arts colleges reconcile their missions and cultures with the forces of a competitive marketplace.

Among his administrative duties at Mount Holyoke, Lytle serves as the president’s chief of staff and secretary to the Board of Trustees. He also coordinates the Women’s Education Worldwide alliance, founded by Mount Holyoke and Smith in 2003 and premised on Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen’s research pointing to women’s education as one of the most important mechanisms for promoting societal development.  

While at Penn, Lytle was a research associate with Robert Zemsky’s Weatherstation project, the first systematic investigation into the emerging e-Learning market in higher education.  His report on Latinos in higher education was published in Encyclopedia Latina (Grolier 2005).

Lytle is a former high school Spanish teacher and a Spanish-English literary translator.  His translations have appeared in The Oxford Book of Latin American Essays, The Literary Review, and Hopscotch, among others.  Previously, he worked in a variety of roles at Amherst College.