Leading an institution of higher learning can be like parsing particularly challenging literature, the president-elect of Sarah Lawrence College said yesterday: One must learn to read between the lines, covey ideas precisely, and choose words very thoughtfully.

When Karen Lawrence takes over the presidency of the 1,600-student liberal arts school near Bronxville, N.Y., next August, she’ll be leading an institution at which she’ll have to summon her experience in academia to maintain a tradition of personalized education while moving aggressively to increase a $70 million endowment that even the chairman of the board of trustees concedes is “modest.”

“We just don’t have the alumni base or history that produce the endowment that some schools have,” the chairman, Robert Riggs, who headed the search committee for the president, said.

The college was founded in the 1920s as a school for ladies to take their proper place in society. It went fully co-ed in the late 1960s, according to an official college history.

The board unanimously chose Ms. Lawrence this fall after narrowing a field of some 200 candidates who applied to lead Sarah Lawrence. Earlier, a search committee was unanimous in picking her to be the college’s 10th president.

Ms. Lawrence, who isn’t related to the college’s namesake — like a scholar, she researched the genealogy of William Van Duzer and Sarah Lawrence against that of her husband’s family — will succeed Michele Myers, who has led the institution for nine years and succeeded in increasing the college’s endowment.

Ms. Lawrence, a James Joyce aficionado who says her favorite book by the author is “Ulysses,” will relocate to New York from the University of California, Irvine, where she has been dean of the School of Humanities since 1998. Her husband, who will move with her into the campus presidential mansion, is a prominent vascular surgeon at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Giving its students the kind of personalized attention Sarah Lawrence is known for isn’t cheap. But Ms. Lawrence said she will be devoted to providing opportunities to all students regardless of whether they can afford the hefty tuition that helps pay for that renowned personalized education.

“The kind of education that students get at Sarah Lawrence is an expensive form of education,” Ms. Lawrence said, adding that “part of the challenge is continuing to have undergraduate education available to a wide range of students.”

In addition to being a student of English literature, Ms. Lawrence says she’ll be drawing from her scholarship of feminist theory when she leads Sarah Lawrence.

“Even a place as good as Sarah Lawrence needs to be able to question its own assumptions in a quest to avoid complacency and be as good as it can be,” Ms. Lawrence said.