Meet Mary

Mary A. Papazian, Ph.D., is the founder of Arshag Consulting, where she coaches presidents and senior academic leaders and advises institutions and organizations working through change. She brings nearly four decades in higher education to the work, including two public university presidencies.

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From 2016 to 2021 she served as the thirtieth president of San José State University, the third woman to lead the institution, where she established the Division of Research and Innovation and the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and led the university through the first two years of the pandemic. Money magazine named San José State the most transformative university in the country during her tenure. From 2012 to 2016 she was president of Southern Connecticut State University, where she created a student success task force, founded the Office of STEM Innovation and Leadership, and secured a bioscience partnership between the university and the city of New Haven. Earlier she served as provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Lehman College, CUNY, as a dean at Montclair State University, and as an associate dean at Oakland University.

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She is Senior Fellow and Senior Consultant at the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, where she previously served as Executive Vice President and as the association’s principal voice on board governance. She serves as Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees of the American Public University System, which unified American Military University, American Public University, Rasmussen University, and Hondros College of Nursing under a single institutional accreditation in 2026 and now enrolls approximately 109,000 students. She is a Global Fellow at Arizona State University’s University Design Institute and Senior Education Advisor at CodeSignal.

Her work in Armenia includes founding and chairing the Armenian Society of Fellows, chairing the advisory board of the Foundation for Armenian Science and Technology, serving on Armenia’s Science and Technology Development Council under the Prime Minister, and serving as President of reArmenia US.

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A scholar of Renaissance literature and a past president of the John Donne Society, she holds B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in English literature from UCLA. She writes The Human Element, a monthly newsletter arguing that humanistic education develops the capacities artificial intelligence makes more valuable rather than less, and she speaks regularly on governance, leadership, and the future of learning.