Joyce Brown, the longtime president of The Fashion Institute of Technology, will resign from the college’s top post at the end of the 2024-2025 school year.
Brown became the first woman and first Black American president of FIT in 1998. She’s credited with helping to modernise the college by improving student diversity and expanding its degree programmes in areas such as computer animation, cosmetics and fragrances, and footwear and accessories design.
Under Brown, FIT added more than 30 new degree and credit-certificate programmes. It also launched the Center for Innovation at FIT, an off-campus facility for faculty research, and the DTech Lab, an on-campus lab merging design with new technologies.
In December 2021, she established the Social Justice Center at FIT, focused on increasing the number of Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour in roles across the creative industries. The centre connects students with educational and professional support, including internships, mentorships, apprenticeships, and real-world experiences with companies like Calvin Klein parent PVH Corp., Michael Kors, Carolina Herrera and Ralph Lauren. (Today, roughly 37 percent of undergraduate students at FIT come from minority groups, and more than 60 percent of all students identify as BIPOC, according to the college.)
FIT will use the academic year to search for Brown’s replacement, a process Brown will support, FIT board of trustees chair Robin Burns-McNeill said.
Learn more:
How 2020′s Culture Wars Are Changing Fashion School
As gatekeepers to the industry, fashion schools have a crucial role to play in uprooting systemic racism, but critics say they also have their own problems to fix.
