The new president of Yale University will be Maurie D. McInnis, currently president of Stony Brook University, a New York state public university where she is known enhance the image of the school, contribution and reputation.
When she took over for Yale’s outgoing president, Peter Salovey, in July, Dr. McInnis, who holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from Yale in the 1990s, would become the university’s first permanent female president.
Her selection follows a search that began last fall. The delay in announcing a successor to Dr Salovey, who left the post at the end of June, fueled speculation that the university’s selection committee was having difficulty finding someone in Chaotic times on college campuses.
Bain Capital founder Joshua Bekenstein, who heads the Yale Group, the university’s board of trustees, said the search committee conducted a “very thorough” selection process.
“We felt it was important to do all the work,” he said. Expressing confidence in Dr. McInnis, he added: “She will do a wonderful job.”
Dr. McInnis, who serves on Yale’s board of trustees, will assume the presidency at a tumultuous time, as universities face challenges stemming from the Supreme Court’s decision last year. last banned race-conscious and improbable admissions continue belong to Protest in support of Palestine about the Israel-Hamas war.
As if to emphasize the dangers she might face, a group of 200 professors calling themselves Scholars in the Public Interest began just minutes after the announcement circulated a document. letters calls on Dr. McInnis to resist pressure from donors and politicians seeking to undermine campus diversity, free speech, 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 last year’s Supreme Court ruling.
“My deep commitment to enhancing opportunities for our students and future students is steadfast, certainly in my work at Stony Brook,” Dr. McInnis said in the interview. and that will continue at Yale,” Dr. McInnis said in the interview, adding, “And that doesn’t change with the court’s decision.”
Yale has not yet released demographic information about its incoming class.
Dr. McInnis survived a vote of censure by the faculty senate at Stony Brook following the decision to arrest campus protesters there in May. Defending that decision Wednesday, she said: “No president wants to have to ask the government to intervene to disperse student protesters. And once we realized that they were not going to disperse, everything would proceed in a calm and orderly manner.”
At Stony Brook, Dr. McInnis, 58, received a $500 million grant from the Simons Foundation and won a leadership competition to establish a state project on climate change university campus on Governors Island in New York City.
Lisa Benz Scott, a professor who heads Stony Brook’s public health program, applauded Dr. McInnis’s leadership during the pandemic and said Dr. McInnis has been “hands-on” with students.
“You might see her wearing a pair of jeans and a Stony Brook T-shirt at student events,” Dr. Benz Scott said.
Richard K. Larson, head of Stony Brook’s faculty senate, agreed that Dr. McInnis had performed “outstandingly” in her first three years as Stony Brook president, but he blamed management her recent case.
“Things have gotten much more difficult, and this administration hit its deadline last year,” Dr. Larson said, criticizing Dr. McInnis’s decision to arrest student protesters . According to Dr. Larson, a professor of linguistics, that is why the vote on the censure proposal was so close, failing by 51 votes to 54 with three abstentions.
Before joining Stony Brook, Dr. McInnis served as provost at the University of Texas, where she was sometimes seen canoeing on Lady Bird Lake. She spent most of her previous career at the University of Virginia, where she received her undergraduate degree and later served as both a professor and vice chancellor.
Dr. McInnis’s academic field is art history. Much of her scholarship focuses on the interaction between art and politics, especially the politics of slavery. Her most recent book, published in 2019, is “Educated for Tyranny: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson University.”
Although Dr. McInnis is set to become the first woman to serve as Yale’s permanent president, the university has previously been led by a woman, when historian Hanna Holborn Gray was named president interim in 1977. 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 is well aware of how she can serve “as a role model for other women aspiring to take on leadership positions ”.
