Stanford University’s next president will be Jonathan Levin, an economist who currently serves as dean of the graduate business school and whose association with the university dates back to his undergraduate days in the 1990s.
The choice of Dr. Levin, announced Thursday, was based in part on his deep understanding of the university’s culture, the school said.
His appointment is also seen as a stabilizing force as Stanford faces turmoil stemming from protests over the Israel-Hamas war, as well as controversy over a predecessor, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, who resigned as president last summer amid questions about with the quality of the scientific research conducted in the laboratories he supervised.
Jerry Young, the technology entrepreneur who is the chairman of Stanford’s board of trustees, said the selection committee chose Dr. Levin, 51, as someone who could chart a course for the university in these politically troubled times.
Administrators held dozens of listening sessions, Mr. Yang said. “People wanted someone with a very distinguished academic record, someone who has a deep familiarity with Stanford, who understands our spirit and our culture,” he said Thursday. “And they wanted someone with deep integrity.”
In selecting Dr. Levin, who serves on a White House advisory committee on science and technology, Stanford’s 20-member search committee also chose someone steeped in academia.
Dr. Levin holds multiple degrees, has served on the Stanford faculty since 2000, and is the son of former Yale University President Richard Levin.
After earning undergraduate degrees in mathematics and English from Stanford, Dr. Levin received his master’s degree from the University of Oxford and then earned his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was chair of Stanford’s economics department before becoming dean of the business school in 2016.
His research has been wide-ranging, covering topics such as early admissions to selective colleges, subprime lending, and the impact of financial incentives on health and health care delivery. As rector, Dr. Levin has promoted the training of entrepreneurs in developing countries through a program called Stanford Seed.
In an interview on Thursday, shortly after his selection was made public, Dr. Levin did not immediately comment on the scandal with Dr. Tessier-Lavin, but touched on another controversial issue on the Palo Alto, Calif., campus: free speech. .
Referring to a speech he gave at a Faculty Senate hearing this year, Dr. Levin repeated his comments that universities should “get out of the business of making statements about current events.” Instead, he said, “we should focus on encouraging students to listen to different perspectives and engage in dialogue and form their own opinions.”
After campus protests erupted over the Israel-Hamas war, the university’s interim president, Richard Shaler, said in January that the university would refrain from making statements about national and international affairs unless they directly affect the university and its missions. But the declaration of institutional neutrality has not subdued the confrontations on college campuses.
Just this week, the university became a defendant in a lawsuit by a former instructor, Ameer Hasan Loggins, who is black and Muslim. The lawsuit accuses Stanford of discrimination for firing Mr. Loggins because of a lecture on colonialism several days after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7.
Even before the campus protests, the university was at the center of a battle over free speech when student protesters beat Stuart Kyle Duncan, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit who had come to speak to the university department of the Federal Society.
Dr. Levin will take over as Stanford’s 13th president in August, succeeding Dr. Schaller, a scholar of Roman history who began serving as interim president last September after the resignation of Dr. Tessier-Lavin, a neuroscientist.
Dr Tessier-Lavigne resigned after a university report last summer found flaws in studies he had overseen, dating back decades.
But the review, conducted by an outside team of scientists, refuted the most serious allegation about his work – that a major 2009 Alzheimer’s study was the subject of research that found falsified data and that Dr Tessier-Lavin had covered it up.
