Stanford University’s next president will be Jonathan Levin, an economist who is currently dean of the graduate business school and has been involved with the university since his undergraduate days in the 1990s.
The selection of Dr. Levin, who was announced Thursday, was based in part on his deep knowledge of the university’s culture, the school said.
His appointment is also seen as a stabilizing force as Stanford faces unrest due to protests over the war between Israel and Hamas, as well as controversy over his predecessor, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, who resigned as president last summer amid questions about the quality of the scientific world. research conducted in laboratories he supervised.
Jerry Yang, the technology entrepreneur who chairs Stanford’s board of trustees, said the selection committee selected Dr. Levin, 51, has been singled out as someone who could chart a course for the university in these politically charged times.
The trustees held dozens of listening sessions, Mr. said. Yang. “People wanted someone with a very distinguished academic record, someone who has a deep familiarity with Stanford, who understands our spirit and culture,” he said Thursday. “And they wanted someone with deep integrity.”
In choosing Dr. Levin, who serves on a White House advisory panel on science and technology, Stanford’s 20-member search committee also selected someone steeped in academia.
Dr. Levin holds multiple degrees, has been a faculty member at Stanford since 2000, and is the son of former Yale University President Richard Levin.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and English from Stanford, Dr. Levin received his master’s degree from the University of Oxford, and then earned a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He chaired Stanford’s economics department before becoming dean of the business school in 2016.
His research is broad in scope and covers topics such as: early admissions at selective colleges, subprime loans and the impact of financial incentives on health and healthcare. As dean, Dr. Levin 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 comment directly on the scandal involving Dr. Tessier-Lavigne, but he did discuss another controversial topic on the Palo Alto, California, campus: free speech.
Referring to a speech he gave at a faculty council hearing this year, Dr. Levin’s comments are that universities should “refrain from making statements about current events.” Instead, he said, “we should focus on encouraging students to listen to different perspectives, engage in dialogue and form their own opinions.”
After campus protests broke out over the war between Israel and Hamas, the university’s interim president, Richard Saller, said in January that the university would not make statements on national and international matters unless they directly affected the university and its missions. But the declaration of institutional neutrality has not subsided controversy on campus.
Just this week, the university was the defendant in a lawsuit by a former professor, Ameer Hasan Loggins, who is black and Muslim. The lawsuit accuses Stanford of discrimination because Mr. Loggins was fired for a lecture on colonialism just days after the Hamas attack on Israel.
Even before the campus protests, the university was at the center of a battle over free speech when student protesters heckled Stuart Kyle Duncan, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit who had come to speak to the university’s chapter of the Federalist Society.
Dr. Levin will take over as Stanford’s 13th president in August, succeeding Dr. Saller, a scholar of Roman history who began serving as interim president last September following the resignation of Dr. Tessier-Lavigne, a neuroscientist.
Dr. Tessier-Lavigne resigned after a university report last summer found flaws in studies he oversaw decades ago.
But the reviewconducted by an outside panel of scientists, refuted the most serious claim regarding his work: that a major 2009 Alzheimer’s study was the subject of an investigation that exposed falsified data, and that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had covered this up.
