Yale President Richard C. Levin announces he will step down

Yale University President Richard C. Levin today announced that he will step down at the end of the current academic year, after 20 years of service. He has served his institution longer than any other president currently in the Ivy League or the 61-member Association of American Universities. 

Levin had a clear vision and set of objectives for Yale when he became President in 1993, and they have been realized.

In his two transformational decades, Levin has:

• advanced Yale’s Schools and academic programs and particularly strengthened science, engineering and medicine at Yale,

• transformed Yale’s physical campus with the largest building and renovation program since the 1930s,

• built partnerships with the City of New Haven to create a new model for how universities can be leading citizens for their host communities, and 

• re-envisioned what it can mean to be a university in a globalized world and then supported a dramatic expansion of  Yale’s international activities. 

In later years, Levin introduced other major initiatives in the areas of sustainability and the arts, with comparable success and impact. He also spearheaded a dramatic expansion of Yale’s financial aid programs to ensure access to Yale for students regardless of their family’s financial circumstances. One of Levin’s earliest priorities was to transform Yale’s historically difficult relationship with its labor unions. His tenure has seen a change in this relationship from contentious to collaborative, with a mutual commitment to job creation and workplace best practices.

Current Yale trustee Indra Nooyi, Chairman and CEO of PepsiCo, commented, “Rick Levin is simply one of the world’s great leaders. He has been transformational in envisioning how a university should be a leading citizen in its home community and he has boldly staked out how the leading universities should become global institutions. His example has been a guide for how universities around the world can have a much greater impact.”

For additional information, including President Levin’s letter, go to: news.yale.edu