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On Friday, March 6 at 11 a.m. in Greensboro, the pews of Annie Merner Pfeiffer Chapel will fill with students, faculty, alumnae and community members drawn together by a shared premise: that women’s leadership is not only worth celebrating, but worth studying—carefully, globally and in context.
Bennett College will celebrate International Women’s Day with an ACES program featuring keynote speaker Alexious Butler, a retired Senior Foreign Service Officer with the United States Agency for International Development. Butler has spent a career navigating the intersections of democracy, governance, and development—often in places where the stakes were high, and the outcomes uncertain. Today, she serves as Distinguished Professor of Practice at Georgia Institute of Technology’s Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, where she mentors students preparing to enter an increasingly complex world.
Her résumé reads like a map of modern geopolitical challenges: South Sudan, Bangladesh, Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, Washington. In Haiti, she held senior leadership roles with USAID, including Deputy Mission Director. Earlier in her career, she worked with the National Democratic Institute supporting democratic participation in East Africa. The through line, colleagues often note, is not only technical expertise but an insistence on listening—on understanding how policy lands in lived experience.
At Bennett, Butler’s address is expected to reflect that sensibility. Amid our Centennial Celebration as an all-women’s institution, her presentation will situate women’s leadership within global systems of power, policy, and responsibility—an approach that resonates with a student body being prepared not just to lead, but to lead with context.
The program will also feature Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistants Hajar Barmoussa and Snothando Ngcobo, whose presence underscores the international dimensions of the day. Their participation offers a reminder that education, like leadership, is strengthened through exchange—through voices that challenge assumptions and widen perspective.
International Women’s Day celebrations can sometimes lean toward the symbolic. At Bennett, the emphasis feels more deliberate. This is a campus where history is not a backdrop but an active reference point, where the legacy of educating Black women has always carried global implications. Hosting a speaker whose career has unfolded across continents is less an exception than an affirmation of that legacy.
As Bennett College marks 100 years of choosing women, the International Women’s Day Celebration functions as both mirror and window: reflecting a century of impact while opening onto questions that remain unresolved. What does ethical leadership look like in fragile democracies? How do women navigate—and reshape—institutions not built with them in mind? And how should the next generation prepare for work that demands both conviction and humility?
On March 6, 2026, at 11 a.m., in a chapel that has witnessed countless moments of transition, those questions will not be answered definitively. But they will be asked—clearly, publicly and in the company of women prepared to carry them forward.
