John O’Keefe ’96 was a double major in music and American studies at Lafayette. (Photo courtesy of John O’Keefe ’96)

Lafayette College’s vice president of information technology services and chief information officer, John O’Keefe ‘96, will depart in October after over two decades of work at the institution.

O’Keefe will be the eighth member of Lafayette’s senior leadership team – a group comprised of the college’s 11 most senior administrators – to exit under college President Nicole Hurd’s three-year tenure. He is currently the only vice president that pre-dates her administration.

O’Keefe will be taking a newly minted position in information technology within Princeton University’s facilities department.

“There are two places I’ve ever wanted to be in higher education: Lafayette and Princeton,” O’Keefe wrote in an email. “It’s an amazing opportunity at an amazing place.”

According to Hurd, Lafayette will pursue a national search to find O’Keefe’s successor. As of Thursday, there has been no official announcement of the search’s commencement.

In his time at Lafayette, O’Keefe has seen the college from almost every angle: as a student, an alum, a staff member, an educator and as one of the president’s close advisors.

But, according to O’Keefe, this was not always part of the plan.

O’Keefe stated that, in 2000, when he returned to Lafayette just four years after graduating for an instructional technologist position in the college library, he “had planned on sticking around 5 years max.”

“But it turned into a career,” he continued. “I stayed for two reasons: the people and the opportunities.”

O’Keefe was promoted to Lafayette’s senior leadership team, then known as the cabinet, by college President Daniel Weiss, who served from 2005 to 2013.

“The college needed somebody leading technology who was a member of the president’s cabinet, given how important technology is,” Weiss said. “It just so happened fortuitously that John O’Keefe was there and I never had the slightest doubt for a second that he was the right person to lead that for us.”

According to Weiss, O’Keefe’s promotion came at a time when the college was hoping to expand and invest in its information technology department. 

“If you think about where technology was when he started, and where it is now, Lafayette owes him a great debt,” Weiss said.

Since taking on the associate vice president role in 2011 and his vice president title in 2013, O’Keefe has contributed to projects in many areas of campus. 

Specifically, O’Keefe stated that he was proud of his involvement in a wide array of campus construction projects, the development of Lafayette’s film and media studies program and, most of all, the “high level of professionalism, performance, and excellence” of the information technology services team.

Andrew Smith, a film and media studies professor with whom O’Keefe co-chaired the committee to investigate the possibility of the program, said that O’Keefe has been “deeply involved” since its early days.

“Our existence, we owe a lot to John,” Smith said of the program.

From his faculty perspective, Smith said he has found that O’Keefe’s varied Lafayette background has allowed him to function as a sort of “bridge” in his position on the senior leadership team.

“He’s asking professors, he’s asking students, he’s asking lower level staff, all kinds of people, community members, asking them what they think, because we see things differently,” Smith said. “He really is a guard against groupthink.”

Former college President Alison Byerly, whose administration immediately preceded Hurd’s, worked alongside O’Keefe as a member of her cabinet for her entire tenure. Byerly said that in their time together, she valued O’Keefe’s ability to “think institutionally.”

“John was someone who both had a long history at the institution but also was fairly new in his role,” Byerly said. “He had an energy and entrepreneurialism about him that I thought was a nice balance.”

With the departure, only one member of the senior leadership team will have worked at Lafayette before taking their current job: Forrest Stuart, the vice president for enrollment management.

O’Keefe worked at Lafayette for more than 23 years. The other 10 members of the senior leadership team, including its two interim members, have worked at Lafayette for two years and four months on average. 

Hurd was optimistic about maintaining the team’s ability to ensure “all members of our community are seen, valued, and heard.”

“Community belonging is one of the values our campus articulated and adopted through an inclusive process last year,” Hurd wrote. “I am incredibly proud of this leadership team and the way we live out this value.”

At Princeton, O’Keefe will become the executive director of facilities information technology, where he will “effectively serve as CIO of Princeton Facilities,” according to Justin Walter, the Princeton administrator who will work directly above O’Keefe.

At Lafayette, O’Keefe reports directly to the president. At Princeton, he will report to an administrator three levels removed from the president, according to a spokesperson for Princeton’s facilities department. The spokesperson cited a set of Princeton organization charts.

To O’Keefe, comparing positions between Lafayette and Princeton “is really comparing apples and oranges.”

“My position at Princeton offers opportunities to learn new things that I couldn’t do here, in part because of the scale, and in part because of the level Princeton operates,” he wrote. “Just about everything will be different. And that’s really exciting.”

Editor-in-Chief Isabella Gaglione ’25 contributed reporting.