Past Presidents

Stephen Spinelli Jr. MBA’92, PhD is the 14th president of Babson College. A successful entrepreneur, academic leader, and scholar, he assumed the role of president in July 2019.

Dr. Spinelli has spent his career at the intersection of academia, business, and philanthropy. Under his leadership, Babson was named the No. 2 best college in the United States by The Wall Street Journal and has retained its long-standing place atop U.S. News & World Report’s undergraduate and graduate entrepreneurship rankings.

In collaboration with the Babson community, Dr. Spinelli launched a strategic planning process in 2019 aimed at ensuring the College’s continued success and financial stability amid market headwinds. The plan, centered on the strategic belief that Babson empowers entrepreneurial leaders to impact communities everywhere, continues to yield positive outcomes from the College and its 46,000 alumni around the world.

As a self-made entrepreneur with an innovative vision for creating and scaling successful business models, he co-founded Jiffy Lube International and was chairman and CEO of the American Oil Change Corporation, helping to pioneer the quick-lube industry across the United States and turning Jiffy Lube into the America’s dominant competitor with more than 1,000 service centers.

Dr. Spinelli is a long-standing member of the Babson community. He spent 14 years of his career as a member of the College’s faculty, as vice provost for entrepreneurship and global management, and as director of The Arthur M. Blank Center for Entrepreneurship.

In 2007, he became president of Philadelphia University, which later merged with Thomas Jefferson University to form the new Jefferson, where he was named chancellor in 2017.

His entrepreneurial spirit and successful business acumen have led him to numerous leadership roles as a board member, investor, advisor, and educator. He currently serves as the Chairman of the Board of Planet Fitness and a member of the board of directors for Fyzical Therapy and Balance Centers and board of advisors for the Berwind Corporation.

Dr. Spinelli earned his PhD in economics from The Management School, Imperial College, University of London, his MBA from Babson College, and his BA in economics from McDaniel College.

Dr. Kerry Healey took office as President of Babson in July 2013, following nearly three decades of service in academia, government, and humanitarian work both in the United States and internationally.

Healey is the 13th President of Babson and the first woman to hold this title. Under her leadership, Babson has strengthened its reputation and position as the recognized global leader in entrepreneurship education, consistently ranked the No. 1 undergraduate school and No. 1 MBA program for entrepreneurship, and No. 1 college for international students.

President Healey has worked to expand global access to entrepreneurship education on campus and around the world. She created and launched Babson’s prestigious Global Scholars program, a full-tuition, need-based scholarship for exceptional international students. During her tenure, Babson has expanded its presence in Boston and Miami, and brought free, online entrepreneurship courses to more than 100,000 students in 200 countries and territories worldwide. Through the creation of Babson Connect: Worldwide, the College’s annual entrepreneurship summit, President Healey has coalesced Babson’s global community of 41,000 alumni and friends in 119 countries. Since she took office, alumni participation has increased 100 percent.

Healey has presided over many Babson milestones: welcoming the most diverse and well-qualified students in Babson history, celebrating the historic successes of Babson Athletics, and taking unprecedented steps to enhance higher education access and affordability.

Under Healey’s leadership, Babson is now preparing to commemorate its Centennial in 2019. The College’s Centennial Strategy is focused on preparing entrepreneurs of all kinds to lead in a new way, creating social and economic value simultaneously, and, in doing so, transforming lives, businesses, and communities for the better. To help achieve this vision, Babson is building a campus for its next 100 years. Several major construction projects are currently underway or recently completed, including the new Babson Recreation and Athletics Center, Centennial Park, Babson Commons at Horn Library, and Weissman Foundry.

Prior to Babson, Healey served with distinction as the 70th lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. During that time, she introduced, enacted, and implemented a wide range of policy and legislative initiatives for the Romney-Healey administration, highlighted by a successful bipartisan effort to craft first-in-the-nation healthcare reform legislation.

Healey has led numerous philanthropic initiatives in the United States and abroad. In 2008, she was appointed as a founding member of the Executive Committee of the U.S. State Department’s Public-Private Partnership for Justice Reform in Afghanistan (PJRA). She also spent more than a decade as a public policy consultant to the U.S. Department of Justice for Cambridge, Mass.-based think tank Abt Associates. She has been a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics and Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership.

Healey is a trustee of the American University of Afghanistan and the Prince Mohamad Bin Salman College of Business and Entrepreneurship in Saudi Arabia. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the World Economic Forum expert network. She serves on the advisory boards of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, and Taubman Center for State and Local Government. Healey is also a member of the advisory council for Concordia and the Junior Achievement USA Board.

Healey holds an AB in government from Harvard College and a PhD in political science and law from Trinity College Dublin.

In May 2018 Healey announced that she would be stepping down as President in June 2019 at the end of her second term.

Beginning in 1908, Roger Babson offered a correspondence course on how to sell bonds through the Babson Statistical Organization (BSO). This endeavor was an instant success and courses in economics, finance, and distribution followed. Babson saw the need for a private college that specialized in business education and in June 1919, in a special letter to clients of the BSO, Roger Babson announced the establishment of a school of business administration to provide not only practical but also ethical training for young men wishing to become business executives.

Representing the tenth generation of Babsons to live in Gloucester, Massachusetts, Roger Babson valued his heritage. He researched his ancestors, investigating their personalities, professions, and lifestyles. Beginning with Isabel Babson, who came to Massachusetts from England in 1637, Roger Babson discovered a lineage of farmers, merchants, midwives, religious preachers, and sea captains. Believing that personality traits were hereditary, he continually looked for opportunities to foster and benefit from his ancestors’ individual attributes.