The new president of Yale University will be Maurie D. McInnis, currently president of Stony Brook University, a New York state university where she is known for raising the profile, donations and prestige of the school.
When he takes over for outgoing Yale president Peter Salovey in July, Dr. McInnis, who earned master’s and Ph.D from Yale in the 1990s, will become the university’s first permanent female president.
Her selection followed a search that began last fall. The delay in announcing the successor of Dr. Salovey, who steps down at the end of June, prompted speculation that the university’s selection committee was struggling to find someone during a tumultuous time on campuses.
Joshua Bekenstein, founder of Bain Capital who heads the Yale Corporation, the university’s board of trustees, said the search committee had undertaken a “very thorough” selection process.
“We felt it was important to do all the work,” he said. Expressing confidence in Dr. McInnis, he added: “He’s going to do a great job.”
Dr. McInnis, who serves on Yale’s board of trustees, will assume the presidency at a complicated time when universities face challenges stemming from last year’s Supreme Court ruling banning race consciousness and from the likely continuation of pro-Palestinian protests over Israel. Hamas war.
As if to underscore the dangers he might face, a group of 200 professors calling themselves the Scholars for the Public Good began circulating a letter within minutes of the announcement calling on Dr. McInnis to resist pressure from donors and politicians seeking to undermine campus diversity, free expression and educational excellence.
In a brief interview Wednesday, Dr. McInnis said she was committed to maintaining a diverse campus at Yale, in New Haven, Conn., despite the Supreme Court ruling last year.
“My deep commitment to advancing opportunities for students and for our prospective students is steadfast, certainly in my work at Stony Brook, and that will continue at Yale,” Dr. McInnis said in the interview, adding, “And nothing from this does not change with the court decision”.
Yale has yet to release demographics for its incoming class.
Dr. McInnis survived a vote of censure by the faculty senate at Stony Brook after her decision to arrest campus protesters there in May. Defending that decision on Wednesday, he said: “No president wants to have to ask authorities to step in to break up student protesters. And once we understood that they would not disperse, everything proceeded in a calm and orderly manner.”
At Stony Brook, Dr. McInnis, 58, secured a $500 million grant from the Simons Foundation and won a competition to lead the creation of a statewide climate change campus on Governors Island in New York.
Lisa Benz Scott, a professor who directs Stony Brook’s public health program, applauded Dr. McInnis during the pandemic and said Dr. McInnis was “continuous” with the students.
“You could see her in jeans and a Stony Brook T-shirt at student events,” said Dr. Benz Scott.
Richard K. Larson, the head of Stony Brook’s Faculty Senate, agreed that Dr. McInnis had an “outstanding performance” during her first three years as Stony Brook president, but faulted her most recent management.
“Where things got a lot more difficult, and where this administration hit its sell-by date, was in the last year,” Dr. Larson said, criticizing Dr. McInnis’ decision to arrest student protesters. That’s why the vote on the censure motion was so close, failing with 51 votes to 55 with three abstentions, according to Dr. Larson, a linguistics professor.
Before joining Stony Brook, Dr. McInnis had served as provost at the University of Texas, where she was sometimes seen rowing the crew of a skiff on Lady Bird Lake. She spent much of her earlier career at the University of Virginia, where she received her undergraduate degree and later served as a professor and vice president.
The academic field of Dr. McInnis is the history of art. Much of her scholarship has focused on the interaction of the arts and politics, particularly the politics of slavery. Her most recent book, published in 2019, is “Educated in Tyranny: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s University.”
Although Dr. McInnis is set to become the first woman to serve as Yale’s permanent president, the university has had a woman lead it once before, when historian Hannah Holborn Gray was selected in 1977 as interim president. Dr. Gray went on to serve as president of the University of Chicago and is currently a professor emeritus there.
Reflecting on her own choice to make history, Dr McInnis said she was keenly aware of how she could serve as a role model for other women aspiring to take on leadership positions.
