Julio Frenk, a public health expert who has led the University of Miami since 2015, was named Wednesday as the next permanent chancellor of the University of California, Los Angeles. He will oversee an elite public institution still reeling from intense protests and a violent attack on student protesters this spring.
Dr. Frank will become the first Latino to lead UCLA, whose student body is one of the most diverse in American higher education. He will succeed Gene Block, who will step down at the end of July.
The 17-year tenure of Dr. Block saw the university boost its academic reputation by attracting more research dollars and top students, but ended with an outcry over his government’s response to pro-Palestinian protests.
“We’ve had a lot of controversy and a lot of things going on,” Richard Leib, chairman of the University of California Board of Regents, told Dr. Frenk on Wednesday. “You are a man of healing who can help bring this campus together.”
Dr. Frenk, 70, was born in Mexico City — his grandparents had fled Germany in the 1930s — and served as Mexico’s health secretary from 2002 to 2006. Soon after, he became dean of the Harvard School of Public Health. he left that position in 2015 to take over the University of Miami.
Every previous UCLA chancellor has been a white man, a record that stands in contrast to the school’s rich history of racial and ethnic diversity. The city’s first black mayor, Tom Bradley, was a graduate, as were athletes and civil rights icons Jackie Robinson and Arthur Ashe.
Dr. Frank will not become chancellor until January. The UCLA Board of Regents appointed Darnell Hunt, UCLA’s executive vice chancellor and provost, to serve as interim chancellor beginning in August and lasting until Dr. Frank’s arrival.
“Students are here to thrive, to learn,” Dr. Frank said at a news conference Wednesday. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. They must have an environment that enables and enables learning. We have to balance that with a very clear commitment to free expression.”
He added that “there is no room for any kind of harassment and discrimination in this freedom of expression.”
Mostly, though, Dr. Frank struck a cautious tone during the press conference, where he sat next to Mr. Leib and Michael Drake, the president of the University of California system. Dr Frank said he wanted to hear from all constituencies and spoke broadly even when asked how he had bridged divides in the past.
UCLA is considered one of the jewels of higher education in California, and competition for coveted spots in its undergraduate ranks has become increasingly fierce. The university accepted just 9 percent of applicants for last fall’s entering freshman class.
The university’s athletic teams participate in the Big Ten Conference, which will bring in more revenue for the school, but will also require far more travel across the country than in years past, when their opponents were concentrated in the West.
Dr. Frank was not always a popular figure in Miami. In 2021, he was convicted by the University of Miami’s faculty senate for firing the dean of the law school. He was also criticized by fans of the proud Miami football team, who said he didn’t care enough about athletics. (Dr. Block has faced similar criticism at UCLA, where the athletic program has run a deficit in recent years.)
But Dr. Frank was not tested in Miami by anything like the protests that have rocked his future campus in recent months.
In April, a protest encampment spread across a central block at UCLA was allowed to stand for several days, in sharp contrast to the University of Southern California, where administrators called in Los Angeles police to arrest protesters within hours of start of camp. there.
The UCLA camp drew one of the nation’s largest counterprotests by Israel supporters, who rallied next to the camp and set up a large screen showing images of the Oct. 7 terror attack on Israel by Hamas. Some Jewish students said pro-Palestinian protesters had begun blocking their access to certain parts of the campus.
Then, on the night of April 30, a large group of people whom Dr. Blocks later described as “instigators” and who seemed largely unrelated to the university, attacked the pro-Palestinian camp, shooting fireworks and beating some protesters. Law enforcement remained for hours without intervening. The next night, police in riot gear dispersed pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel encampments and arrested more than 200 people.
Dr. Block narrowly avoided a formal reprimand from the school’s governing body over the university’s handling of the matter. When asked to testify before a congressional committee about how universities have combated anti-Semitism on their campuses, Dr. Blok, who is Jewish, said the university should have dismantled the pro-Palestinian camp earlier.
College leaders across the country face deep challenges, including budget shortfalls, political polarization and campus turmoil. An unusually large number of American universities now have vacancies at the top to fill.
Security has been tight on the UCLA campus since the first encampment was broken up in early May. More than 20 pro-Palestinian protesters were arrested on campus Monday night.
On Wednesday, the Luskin Center, the campus building where the regents of the University of California voted to appoint Dr. Frank, was surrounded by a chain-link fence. Dozens of security guards stood at the entrances to the center and police officers patrolled the premises. Outside the building, about 100 members of the University of California system’s largest labor union, which has gone on strike on some campuses over the treatment of pro-Palestinian protesters, waved signs and chanted.
Jonathan Wolfe contributed reporting from Los Angeles. Kirsten Noyes contributed to the research.
