A Harvard Business School professor and dean who is the author of a book on reproductive medicine and “the commerce of conception” will be the next president of Barnard College.

Debora Spar will assume the role on July 1. She succeeds Judith Shapiro, who for 14 years served as president of the liberal arts school in Morningside Heights. In April, Ms. Shapiro announced her intention to step down.

The author Anna Quindlen, a Barnard alumna and chairwoman of the school’s board of trustees, described Ms. Spar in a statement announcing the appointment as a “charismatic intellectual deeply committed to the value of single-sex education for women.”

Reached by telephone, Ms. Quindlen added that Barnard trustees are looking to Ms. Spar to increase the school’s endowment. “Certainly one of the reasons we chose Debora is because we think she will be a terrific fund-raiser,” she said.

Addressing faculty members yesterday morning, Ms. Spar acknowledged her circuitous path to Morningside Heights.

“I realize that I am not an obvious person to be your next president. I did not attend a women’s college, I’m not coming directly from a liberal arts college, and I’m coming, heaven forbid, from a business school,” she said. “But I am here today precisely because this strange journey of mine has impressed upon me how absolutely critical both liberal arts colleges and particularly women’s colleges are.”

In a telephone interview, Ms. Spar told The New York Sun that one of her priorities will be to “make sure that young women from all parts of society have equal access and equal opportunities to get into a place like Barnard.”

Founded in 1889, Barnard College has a long affiliation with Columbia University. The college has 2,390 undergraduate students and 319 faculty members. In a statement, the university’s president, Lee Bollinger, called Ms. Spar a “respected scholar,” whom he looked forward to working with.

A graduate of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, Ms. Spar, 44, earned a doctorate in government at Harvard. The author of multiple case studies, her most recent book, “The Baby Business,” describes the economics of reproductive technology.

Yesterday, colleagues at Harvard described her as a popular and productive scholar. “She has been one of the most successful women teachers at the school in her career here,” a senior associate dean at Harvard Business School and a member of Intel’s board of directors, David Yoffie, said. “It can be challenging to be a successful teacher in this environment for men or women. Debora was successful on all accounts.”

In recent months, Columbia and Barnard have made headlines over divisive issues, including a decision by Columbia to invite the president of Iran to speak on campus in September. The university has grappled with a string of apparently racist and anti-Semitic vandalism incidents, and this fall, several students staged a hunger strike to protest what they said was a Eurocentric core curriculum.

In November, Barnard granted tenure to a professor, Nadia Abu El-Haj, whose writing on Israeli archaeology has been criticized. Ms. Spar declined to comment on events that occurred before her time and offered diplomatic words regarding tenure decisions. “What I do know is that the tenure process is sacred,” she said. “The critical thing is that you have a tenure process you can believe has the highest level of integrity.”

Barnard professors said they were impressed with Ms. Spar’s resume and the tone she brought to yesterday’s faculty meeting.

“It’s really hard to move into a job where somebody has been there a long time, but Debora Spar looks like someone who can,” the English department’s chair, Achsah Guibbory, said.