Cornell University named Elizabeth Garrett as president, the first woman to lead the 149-year-old Ivy League institution based in Ithaca, New York.
Garrett, a law professor and provost at the University of Southern California, will succeed David Skorton, who is leaving next year to run the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, Cornell said Tuesday in a statement. She will assume leadership of the selective school in the midst of a historic expansion, building a $2 billion technology campus in New York City.
“I am honored to have been selected as the next leader of this remarkable institution,” Garrett said in the statement. “Cornell is one of the world’s truly great universities, with a stellar commitment to excellence in teaching, research, scholarship and creative activity.”
Half of the eight-member Ivy League will have female presidents when Garrett takes up the post. The others are Drew Faust at Harvard University, Amy Gutmann at the University of Pennsylvania and Christina Paxson at Brown University.
Cornell, founded in 1865, is nearing the end of a record-breaking fundraising campaign that began when Skorton was hired from the University of Iowa in 2006. The university said this month it has collected $4.79 billion through June 30 for the Ithaca campus and Weill Cornell Medical College in New York.
As provost at USC since 2010, Garrett has been the second highest-ranking officer at the private school in Los Angeles and was the first woman to hold the position. Before joining the faculty there, she was a professor of law and a deputy dean for academic affairs at the University of Chicago. In 2005, President George W. Bush appointed Garrett to a nine-member advisory panel on federal tax reform.
“She will be deeply missed at USC,” President C.L. “Max” Nikias said in a letter Tuesday. “She has proven to be a remarkably dynamic leader, showing boundless energy in advancing the university’s initiatives, and a singular gift for innovative and tactical thinking.”
Garrett received her undergraduate degree in history from the University of Oklahoma and a law degree from the University of Virginia. She clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall on the U.S. Supreme Court.
She will become a tenured faculty member in Cornell’s law school, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government in the College of Arts and Sciences, Cornell said. Her primary scholarly interests include legislative process, the design of democratic institutions, the federal budget process and tax policy. (Bloomberg)
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