Neal Abraham, executive director of the Five College Consortium, announced Monday that he will retire next year.

Abraham, who has headed Five Colleges Inc. since 2009, said that he will stay in the position until June 2018. Abraham said he will likely remain a Five College professor of physics, teaching a yearly physics course at Mount Holyoke College.

“It’s about the right time, given what I want to do with my life and how much I’ve committed to Five Colleges,” said Abraham, 67. “It’s a good time for me, and it’s a good time for the consortium.”

Under his leadership, campus enrollment in less commonly taught language courses has increased by 40 percent, and construction has begun on a library annex in Hatfield that will eventually house 2 million rarely circulating books and journals.

Abraham told the Gazette that he’s proud of the increased collaboration during his tenure between Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke and Smith colleges and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which make up the consortium.

“Mostly what the consortium does is people related, so I’m part proud of the way we’ve built more opportunities for people from the campuses to find each other and collaborate on issues of interest to them,” Abraham said. 

Abraham also mentioned increased educational partnerships with regional k-12 educators as a bright spot of his time with the consortium.

Prior to his work at Five Colleges Inc., Abraham was an administrator and professor at Indiana’s DePauw University, and a physics faculty member at Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr colleges.

With some newfound free time next year, Abraham said he plans to get more involved with community organizations, to travel with his wife Donna Wiley and to devote more energy to their gardening.

Dusty Christensen can be reached at dchristensen@gazettenet.com.

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