He seems like an extremely well qualified leader, with prior experience at Stanford and also experience leading a university and as a senior executive in industry (Genentech). I think industry experience or at least strong ties is an important criterion for Stanford president these days, and that narrows the pool of candidates considerably.
In the ideal world, I was also kind of hoping for a Stanford alum, which is the norm at peer schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton etc (the current Harvard president is an exception, but women couldn’t go to Harvard College in her college years).
But Stanford has never particularly focused on alumni status as a criterion, and I believe you have to go back to Tresidder in the 1940s to find a president who was also a Stanford alum.
That said, great choice Stanford!
Hennessy is still in the back seat. Nothing should have changed much.
McGill undergraduate, Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Ph.D. from UCL, current president of the Rockefeller University. Not bad!
No good. White, male and straight. Don’t even have to wait for him to start work to start criticizing.
http://www.stanforddaily.com/2016/02/07/a-new-president-for-an-expired-status-quo/
The current Yale president Peter Salovey and his immediate predecessor Rick Levin are Stanford undergraduate alumni
^ Also both Yale PhDs so they’re Yale alums also. It’s interesting to me that Stanford seems to weight Stanford alumni status less heavily than other schools weight alumni status when choosing presidents.