Antonia Maioni took office July 1 as John Cabot University's seventh president, and its first woman president in the school's history.A political scientist who spent part of her career at Montreal's McGill University, where she served as Dean of Arts, Maioni also holds dual Canadian and Italian citizenship. A few weeks into the job, she sat down to talk about succeeding a two-decade president, defending liberal arts education in the AI era, and adjusting to life in Rome.Q: You’re JCU’s first woman president in the history of the institution. What does that distinction mean to you personally, and how will it shape your leadership? It’s not the first time for me, in the sense that I was the first dean of a major faculty at McGill University, my former institution, first dean of arts. So I think women of my generation are used to becoming the “first” at things. But every first still matters. Even though we’re more accustomed now to seeing women in leadership, it’s still an ongoing process, both in the North American and the European context. Italy, for example, has had its first female prime minister, and I think that’s also shifted a lot of perceptions about political leadership, and certainly about university leadership. We’re seeing many more women at the helm of both large and small institutions. Here at John Cabot, I’m the seventh president, and while I don’t want to say “finally,” it’s wonderful to be the first woman to take on this role. Q: JCU describes itself as a liberal arts university inspired by Rome. How does that historical connection shape the way you think about the university's mission? Two things come to mind. First, if you look at this over a wide sweep of history, Rome essentially created the liberal arts. Humanistic studies, the social sciences, even the idea of international markets and business, all of it is historically connected to Rome. So this feels like a logical and beautiful place to celebrate the liberal arts. Second, liberal arts education is about foundational skills and knowledge: how to debate, how to challenge ideas, how to communicate. Every student who comes here has to challenge themselves, whether they’re American, international, or Italian students stepping into an American university environment. That challenge is part of what a liberal arts education is. Q: You spent part of your career at McGill, a large public research university. How different is it stepping into a small, private, American-style university in Italy, and what have you had to unlearn? I’m still unlearning, honestly, it’s early days. One thing I no longer have to worry about is research-grant deadlines or the overwhelming emphasis on research and publication output. It’s a very different model here, because we can focus laser-sharp on students. Large research universities juggle research and teaching simultaneously, and the university carries responsibility for all of it at once. Here, we can really ask: what is our mission? Our mission is student success. We get there by providing excellent classes, the right physical and administrative infrastructure, and faculty who are inspired by their own research and training to be outstanding teachers. That’s the main difference. But one similarity stands out: McGill is a large, global institution, and the diversity of its student body closely mirrors the diversity here. That’s what makes this community so special to me. Q: As Dean of Arts at McGill, you oversaw the creation of the Max Bell School of Public Policy and expanded partnerships in Italy, including with Sapienza, now led by another impressive woman, and Johns Hopkins. Are any of those relationships assets you can bring to JCU? Absolutely, yes. My colleagues here already have contacts across Italy, but being familiar with the Italian university ecosystem myself is genuinely valuable. I have co-authors at the University of Milan, I’ve spent time in Bologna and at the European University Institute. Understanding how the Italian university system works, and where the opportunities are, matters a great deal. With the Max Bell School, for instance, we launched an MA program in public policy, and Johns Hopkins SAIS in Bologna became one of our partners. JCU already has an MA program here, so I’d like to explore similar partnership opportunities with North American institutions going forward. Q: You’ve said the humanities teach us to ask better questions. In an era when university leaders are under pressure to justify liberal arts education against career-focused degrees, and against AI tools that can answer questions instantly, how do you make that case to prospective students and the families financing their education? Liberal arts institutions understand perfectly well that students are motivated, in part, by wanting to prepare for the job market. What we want at John Cabot is to graduate students who are both future-ready and global-ready. I don’t think there has to be a hard line between career preparation, AI, and the liberal arts. In fact, the liberal arts can incorporate career readiness. We have an active internship office that helps students translate their skills into real internship experience, and professors who use AI as both a teaching tool and a research tool. So that line doesn’t need to be so rigid. What a liberal arts education really gives students is flexibility, the ability to adapt. We don’t know what careers will look like in five years; these are uncertain, fast-moving times, and none of us can predict the long-term future with confidence. Students with a liberal arts foundation can adapt, think critically, use AI tools while also understanding their limits, and grasp how these tools are changing how we learn, teach and do business. I don’t see the liberal arts as sheltering students from that world. I see it as preparing them to face a genuinely complex future with confidence. Q: You’re succeeding Franco Pavoncello, who led JCU for over two decades. How do you think about honoring that legacy while charting your own course? I’m standing on the shoulders of giants, as they say. One of the things that drew me to John Cabot was the sense that President Emeritus Pavoncello built and sustained a genuine community here, and that’s something I want to preserve: the feeling that we’re all rowing in the same direction, whether we’re administrators, professors, students, or Board members, all working toward the same mission. He achieved that, and I want to maintain it. We also have a beautiful physical campus and strong foundations to build on. What has changed is the pace of our growth: JCU has expanded from a small college into a full-fledged liberal arts university, attracting both degree-seeking and visiting students. We need to make sure we have the right conditions to sustain that growth. That will require some change, but a change in leadership is also a natural moment to look back at where we’ve been and think carefully about where we’re going. Q: What are your priorities for your first year, and is there anything you plan to change quickly versus deliberately leave alone while you learn the institution? The first days are like drinking from a fire hose, adapting not just to a new institution but to a new city. In many ways I’m experiencing exactly what our students experience when they arrive: learning to live in Rome, learning this institution, getting to know this community. That adjustment will take the whole first year. As for university priorities, it really comes down to a theme of continuity and change. First, I want to keep providing the conditions for student success, academically and personally; personal growth matters enormously for the students who come here. That also means providing the right conditions for the people who work here to do their jobs well. Second, I want to make sure we’re preparing students, in our liberal arts tradition, for the challenges I mentioned earlier: do we have academic programs that respond to their needs, and are there partnerships, in Italy or globally, that could open new opportunities for them? Third, I think it’s time to shine a brighter light on John Cabot. We’re something of a hidden jewel in Rome. The Roman community knows us well, but we need to be more visible, both in our American footprint and our global one. We already bring the world to John Cabot; now I think John Cabot needs to make sure the world knows about it too. Q: JCU sits at an unusual intersection, an American-accredited university operating under Italian law, serving a largely international student body. What’s the hardest part of navigating that triple identity from the president’s chair? That’s a hard question, because it really is a small niche. Picture a Venn diagram: we sit right in the overlap. There are other American universities abroad in Europe, like the American University of Paris, but it’s still a very particular space that demands a certain nimbleness and understanding. It’s not just about being U.S.-accredited, although our ongoing accreditation process matters enormously to us, and it’s not just about embodying an American liberal arts tradition in our teaching and student services, which also matters. The real challenge is that we’re speaking to several different communities at once: in the U.S., here in Italy, and globally. We need to be clear about what we can offer each of them, and just as importantly, make sure we’re communicating that clearly to every audience. Q: You’ve been a public-facing academic for years, writing columns and appearing on television. How do you think about the role of a university president as a public voice, especially on politically sensitive topics? In my earlier life as a researcher, not an administrator, I always felt that being a professor is fundamentally an educational function, not just for our students but for the public as well. What can our knowledge and research contribute to public debate? How can it help us understand problems differently and find solutions? I’ve always seen that as part of our responsibility as academics. For a university president, it’s important that your public voice reflects the values of your institution, and the values of higher education more broadly. My predecessors did that beautifully; it’s not about getting on a soapbox, it’s about being part of the language that reminds society why higher education matters. The political dimension is genuinely difficult, because so much right now is politically sensitive. But as political scientists, we study soft power, and soft power isn’t about weapons or supply chains. It’s about how institutions, whether in higher education or culture, help societies understand one another, not necessarily reconcile every difference, but open a channel of communication. What’s happening at the level of governments and states is one thing; what we do is help the underlying conversation between societies and communities keep happening. It’s an intense responsibility, and I wish us all luck with it. Q: Having taught and studied in Quebec, the U.S. and Italy, what do you think American students studying abroad in Rome most misunderstand about Italy, and about Europe more broadly? First, this generation has never known a Europe that wasn’t a European Union, so there’s a tendency to think of Europe as a single thing. It isn’t. It’s a collection of very different entities. There may be no borders between countries, but there are real differences in culture, language and ways of life; Europe is not a monolith, and that’s an important thing for visitors to understand. Second, Europe isn’t only about history. We’re not frozen in time. Rome is an extraordinarily rich historical place, as Henry James put it, every step here is a historical discovery, but it’s also a center of innovation and the arts, a major economic market, and a crossroads for international organizations. It’s not stuck in the past; it’s moving forward. I hope people who come here understand that Europe, and Italy especially, is a genuine engine of innovation. We celebrate our past, but we’re focused on the future. Q: Enrollment, the cost of living in Rome, and global competition for international students are pressures facing every study-abroad-dependent institution. How do you plan to keep JCU competitive without diluting its identity? I’d put it this way: what American families now have to invest in a solid university education has become quite expensive. On a purely cost basis, JCU is actually competitive. And we benefit from attracting both visiting students and degree-seeking students who spend all four years here and discover that Europe offers a genuinely different way of living. For many students, the cost of living here is significantly lower than in a comparably sized city in North America, Vancouver, for instance, is far more expensive. Even compared to other European cities, Rome is a place where you can invest in your education and still have the financial freedom to travel and enjoy life, which matters enormously in this culture. Q: You’ve built a reputation for collaborative, mentorship-driven leadership at McGill. What does that look like in practice now that you’re the one directing the university? Mentorship takes many forms depending on who you’re mentoring, but at its core it promotes open conversation and collective problem-solving. University presidents can’t solve every problem alone; we need collaborative relationships. Mentoring isn’t just about sharing your own experience, it’s equally about listening. One of my favorite parts of mentoring students was always what I’d call reverse mentoring: I learn as much from the student as they learn from me. I want to know what’s actually happening on the ground, so I bring students in to tell me. I want to understand what’s happening in academic departments, so I bring in faculty. The other piece is peer-to-peer mentoring: how students mentor each other, how faculty mentor one another, how administrative staff share best practices. All of that is part of building a genuine culture of mentorship. Q: If you could redesign one part of the undergraduate experience at JCU today, with no budget or bureaucratic constraints, what would it be? Completely unconstrained, no budget, no bureaucracy, not even scheduling logistics? Students who choose John Cabot, whether they’re American or part of our international community, come here in part because they want to be challenged through experiential learning, and in many ways they get that every single day just by living here. But in an ideal world, I’d want them to have even deeper, more intensive access to the places that bring their coursework to life. Take a World War II history class: how do we organize visits and access to primary sources and documents in a way that speaks directly to students, given how much of that history unfolded right here in Italy? Or our international business students: how do we give them direct engagement with major international markets as part of their training? That kind of experience matters, but it takes real collective organization, and of course cost is a factor we’d never want students to have to absorb. Q: What would you want a JCU student graduating in 2030 to say about their education when they look back on it twenty years from now? I’d want them to say they spent four years being challenged academically, challenged by daily life in Rome, and came away feeling genuinely confident about the future, whether they returned to the United States, went back to their home country, or pursued something more global. In other words, that their ambitions were met and pushed even further, and above all, that they experienced real personal growth alongside their academic program.

A political scientist who spent part of her career at Montreal's McGill University, where she served as Dean of Arts, Maioni also holds dual Canadian and Italian citizenship. A few weeks into the job, she sat down to talk about succeeding a two-decade president, defending liberal arts education in the AI era, and adjusting to life in Rome. Q: You’re JCU’s first woman president in the history of the institution. What does that distinction mean to you personally, and how will it shape your leadership? It’s not the first time for me, in the sense that I was the first dean of a major faculty at McGill University, my former institution, first dean of arts. So I think women of my generation are used to becoming the “first” at things. But every first still matters. Even though we’re more accustomed now to seeing women in leadership, it’s still an ongoing process, both in the North American and the European context. Italy, for example, has had its first female prime minister, and I think that’s also shifted a lot of perceptions about political leadership, and certainly about university leadership. We’re seeing many more women at the helm of both large and small institutions. Here at John Cabot, I’m the seventh president, and while I don’t want to say “finally,” it’s wonderful to be the first woman to take on this role. Q: JCU describes itself as a liberal arts university inspired by Rome. How does that historical connection shape the way you think about the university's mission? Two things come to mind. First, if you look at this over a wide sweep of history, Rome essentially created the liberal arts. Humanistic studies, the social sciences, even the idea of international markets and business, all of it is historically connected to Rome. So this feels like a logical and beautiful place to celebrate the liberal arts. Second, liberal arts education is about foundational skills and knowledge: how to debate, how to challenge ideas, how to communicate. Every student who comes here has to challenge themselves, whether they’re American, international, or Italian students stepping into an American university environment. That challenge is part of what a liberal arts education is. Q: You spent part of your career at McGill, a large public research university. How different is it stepping into a small, private, American-style university in Italy, and what have you had to unlearn? I’m still unlearning, honestly, it’s early days. One thing I no longer have to worry about is research-grant deadlines or the overwhelming emphasis on research and publication output. It’s a very different model here, because we can focus laser-sharp on students. Large research universities juggle research and teaching simultaneously, and the university carries responsibility for all of it at once. Here, we can really ask: what is our mission? Our mission is student success. We get there by providing excellent classes, the right physical and administrative infrastructure, and faculty who are inspired by their own research and training to be outstanding teachers. That’s the main difference. But one similarity stands out: McGill is a large, global institution, and the diversity of its student body closely mirrors the diversity here. That’s what makes this community so special to me. Q: As Dean of Arts at McGill, you oversaw the creation of the Max Bell School of Public Policy and expanded partnerships in Italy, including with Sapienza, now led by another impressive woman, and Johns Hopkins. Are any of those relationships assets you can bring to JCU? Absolutely, yes. My colleagues here already have contacts across Italy, but being familiar with the Italian university ecosystem myself is genuinely valuable. I have co-authors at the University of Milan, I’ve spent time in Bologna and at the European University Institute. Understanding how the Italian university system works, and where the opportunities are, matters a great deal. With the Max Bell School, for instance, we launched an MA program in public policy, and Johns Hopkins SAIS in Bologna became one of our partners. JCU already has an MA program here, so I’d like to explore similar partnership opportunities with North American institutions going forward. Q: You’ve said the humanities teach us to ask better questions. In an era when university leaders are under pressure to justify liberal arts education against career-focused degrees, and against AI tools that can answer questions instantly, how do you make that case to prospective students and the families financing their education? Liberal arts institutions understand perfectly well that students are motivated, in part, by wanting to prepare for the job market. What we want at John Cabot is to graduate students who are both future-ready and global-ready. I don’t think there has to be a hard line between career preparation, AI, and the liberal arts. In fact, the liberal arts can incorporate career readiness. We have an active internship office that helps students translate their skills into real internship experience, and professors who use AI as both a teaching tool and a research tool. So that line doesn’t need to be so rigid. What a liberal arts education really gives students is flexibility, the ability to adapt. We don’t know what careers will look like in five years; these are uncertain, fast-moving times, and none of us can predict the long-term future with confidence. Students with a liberal arts foundation can adapt, think critically, use AI tools while also understanding their limits, and grasp how these tools are changing how we learn, teach and do business. I don’t see the liberal arts as sheltering students from that world. I see it as preparing them to face a genuinely complex future with confidence. Q: You’re succeeding Franco Pavoncello, who led JCU for over two decades. How do you think about honoring that legacy while charting your own course? I’m standing on the shoulders of giants, as they say. One of the things that drew me to John Cabot was the sense that President Emeritus Pavoncello built and sustained a genuine community here, and that’s something I want to preserve: the feeling that we’re all rowing in the same direction, whether we’re administrators, professors, students, or Board members, all working toward the same mission. He achieved that, and I want to maintain it. We also have a beautiful physical campus and strong foundations to build on. What has changed is the pace of our growth: JCU has expanded from a small college into a full-fledged liberal arts university, attracting both degree-seeking and visiting students. We need to make sure we have the right conditions to sustain that growth. That will require some change, but a change in leadership is also a natural moment to look back at where we’ve been and think carefully about where we’re going. Q: What are your priorities for your first year, and is there anything you plan to change quickly versus deliberately leave alone while you learn the institution? The first days are like drinking from a fire hose, adapting not just to a new institution but to a new city. In many ways I’m experiencing exactly what our students experience when they arrive: learning to live in Rome, learning this institution, getting to know this community. That adjustment will take the whole first year. As for university priorities, it really comes down to a theme of continuity and change. First, I want to keep providing the conditions for student success, academically and personally; personal growth matters enormously for the students who come here. That also means providing the right conditions for the people who work here to do their jobs well. Second, I want to make sure we’re preparing students, in our liberal arts tradition, for the challenges I mentioned earlier: do we have academic programs that respond to their needs, and are there partnerships, in Italy or globally, that could open new opportunities for them? Third, I think it’s time to shine a brighter light on John Cabot. We’re something of a hidden jewel in Rome. The Roman community knows us well, but we need to be more visible, both in our American footprint and our global one. We already bring the world to John Cabot; now I think John Cabot needs to make sure the world knows about it too. Q: JCU sits at an unusual intersection, an American-accredited university operating under Italian law, serving a largely international student body. What’s the hardest part of navigating that triple identity from the president’s chair? That’s a hard question, because it really is a small niche. Picture a Venn diagram: we sit right in the overlap. There are other American universities abroad in Europe, like the American University of Paris, but it’s still a very particular space that demands a certain nimbleness and understanding. It’s not just about being U.S.-accredited, although our ongoing accreditation process matters enormously to us, and it’s not just about embodying an American liberal arts tradition in our teaching and student services, which also matters. The real challenge is that we’re speaking to several different communities at once: in the U.S., here in Italy, and globally. We need to be clear about what we can offer each of them, and just as importantly, make sure we’re communicating that clearly to every audience. Q: You’ve been a public-facing academic for years, writing columns and appearing on television. How do you think about the role of a university president as a public voice, especially on politically sensitive topics? In my earlier life as a researcher, not an administrator, I always felt that being a professor is fundamentally an educational function, not just for our students but for the public as well. What can our knowledge and research contribute to public debate? How can it help us understand problems differently and find solutions? I’ve always seen that as part of our responsibility as academics. For a university president, it’s important that your public voice reflects the values of your institution, and the values of higher education more broadly. My predecessors did that beautifully; it’s not about getting on a soapbox, it’s about being part of the language that reminds society why higher education matters. The political dimension is genuinely difficult, because so much right now is politically sensitive. But as political scientists, we study soft power, and soft power isn’t about weapons or supply chains. It’s about how institutions, whether in higher education or culture, help societies understand one another, not necessarily reconcile every difference, but open a channel of communication. What’s happening at the level of governments and states is one thing; what we do is help the underlying conversation between societies and communities keep happening. It’s an intense responsibility, and I wish us all luck with it. Q: Having taught and studied in Quebec, the U.S. and Italy, what do you think American students studying abroad in Rome most misunderstand about Italy, and about Europe more broadly? First, this generation has never known a Europe that wasn’t a European Union, so there’s a tendency to think of Europe as a single thing. It isn’t. It’s a collection of very different entities. There may be no borders between countries, but there are real differences in culture, language and ways of life; Europe is not a monolith, and that’s an important thing for visitors to understand. Second, Europe isn’t only about history. We’re not frozen in time. Rome is an extraordinarily rich historical place, as Henry James put it, every step here is a historical discovery, but it’s also a center of innovation and the arts, a major economic market, and a crossroads for international organizations. It’s not stuck in the past; it’s moving forward. I hope people who come here understand that Europe, and Italy especially, is a genuine engine of innovation. We celebrate our past, but we’re focused on the future. Q: Enrollment, the cost of living in Rome, and global competition for international students are pressures facing every study-abroad-dependent institution. How do you plan to keep JCU competitive without diluting its identity? I’d put it this way: what American families now have to invest in a solid university education has become quite expensive. On a purely cost basis, JCU is actually competitive. And we benefit from attracting both visiting students and degree-seeking students who spend all four years here and discover that Europe offers a genuinely different way of living. For many students, the cost of living here is significantly lower than in a comparably sized city in North America, Vancouver, for instance, is far more expensive. Even compared to other European cities, Rome is a place where you can invest in your education and still have the financial freedom to travel and enjoy life, which matters enormously in this culture. Q: You’ve built a reputation for collaborative, mentorship-driven leadership at McGill. What does that look like in practice now that you’re the one directing the university? Mentorship takes many forms depending on who you’re mentoring, but at its core it promotes open conversation and collective problem-solving. University presidents can’t solve every problem alone; we need collaborative relationships. Mentoring isn’t just about sharing your own experience, it’s equally about listening. One of my favorite parts of mentoring students was always what I’d call reverse mentoring: I learn as much from the student as they learn from me. I want to know what’s actually happening on the ground, so I bring students in to tell me. I want to understand what’s happening in academic departments, so I bring in faculty. The other piece is peer-to-peer mentoring: how students mentor each other, how faculty mentor one another, how administrative staff share best practices. All of that is part of building a genuine culture of mentorship. Q: If you could redesign one part of the undergraduate experience at JCU today, with no budget or bureaucratic constraints, what would it be? Completely unconstrained, no budget, no bureaucracy, not even scheduling logistics? Students who choose John Cabot, whether they’re American or part of our international community, come here in part because they want to be challenged through experiential learning, and in many ways they get that every single day just by living here. But in an ideal world, I’d want them to have even deeper, more intensive access to the places that bring their coursework to life. Take a World War II history class: how do we organize visits and access to primary sources and documents in a way that speaks directly to students, given how much of that history unfolded right here in Italy? Or our international business students: how do we give them direct engagement with major international markets as part of their training? That kind of experience matters, but it takes real collective organization, and of course cost is a factor we’d never want students to have to absorb. Q: What would you want a JCU student graduating in 2030 to say about their education when they look back on it twenty years from now? I’d want them to say they spent four years being challenged academically, challenged by daily life in Rome, and came away feeling genuinely confident about the future, whether they returned to the United States, went back to their home country, or pursued something more global. In other words, that their ambitions were met and pushed even further, and above all, that they experienced real personal growth alongside their academic program.