NYU’s Board of Trustees has named Linda G. Mills to be NYU’s 17th President.
Mills [photo above] has served over a decade as NYU’s Vice Chancellor and Senior Vice Provost for Global Programs and University Life. She will be the first female President at NYU and will take over on July 1 for Andrew Hamilton, who is stepping down from the position after eight years.
Her appointment follows a six-month international search conducted by a Presidential Search Committee with members representing trustees, deans, faculty, students, and administrators that reviewed over 100 candidates. Mills was the unanimous choice of the Board of Trustees and its Executive Committee. She is a chaired professor of social work, public policy and law, a social scientist, licensed clinical social worker, and an attorney known for her groundbreaking research on domestic violence, as well as an award-winning filmmaker. Mills is also a longtime member of the University’s senior leadership team.
Professor Mills, who first joined the NYU community in 1999, will assume the presidency of one of the most respected universities in the world, a 192-year-old institution with preeminent faculty who have made its programs in the humanities, the social sciences, the sciences, the professions, and the arts among the most selective, highly regarded, and sought-after; a research enterprise that exceeds $1 billion per year; and an extraordinary global academic network that encompasses three degree-granting campuses (New York [including Brooklyn], Abu Dhabi, and Shanghai) and 12 additional sites on six continents, and more students studying abroad and more international students than any other American university.
William Berkley, the Chair of the Board of Trustees, said, “We couldn’t be more pleased by the selection of Linda Mills as president. Linda has been deeply involved in many of NYU’s most important undertakings over the past decade. She brings a data-driven approach to analysis and decision-making, yet never loses sight of the very human elements at the heart of a university – the passion of scholars for their field, the interaction between faculty member and student, the ambitions and welfare of students in and out of the classroom, and the trust that students’ families place in us. As Board Chair and an alumnus, I take great pride in NYU and how far it has come since my student days; nevertheless, there is still much work to do. My colleagues on the Board and I have complete confidence that Linda is just the right person to continue to carry on NYU’s academic trajectory.”
Evan Chesler, the Chair-Designate of the Board of Trustees and Vice-Chair of the Presidential Search Committee, said, “Throughout her long tenure at NYU, Linda Mills has demonstrated a profound commitment to the University. She has a deep familiarity both with NYU’s great strengths and with those areas that need additional attention, support, and investment for NYU to achieve the next level of excellence. We looked at many very smart, talented, and highly credentialed applicants during the search; Linda stood apart, though, as the person for whom this was the ideal assignment, and the ideal match between candidate and role.”
President-Designate Linda Mills said, “This is a tremendous honor. One of the wonderful things about NYU is that, even after dedicating 24 years of my life to this extraordinary university, there is always more to discover. I am eager to meet so many more of NYU’s remarkable people; I intend to step into this new role with fresh eyes, excited to see the University and all its possibilities through their unique perspectives. I love NYU, both its glories and its challenges; I am filled with enthusiasm, emotion, and, most of all, gratitude, both for the trust that the Search Committee and the Board have placed in me, and for everything that the members of the NYU community do each day to make this such a remarkable university.”
Andrew Hamilton, NYU’s current president, said, “I am thrilled by the selection of Linda as NYU’s next president. Throughout my time as president, she has been deeply involved in the University’s strategic decision-making, bringing to our deliberations not just savvy but also a keen and passionate understanding of our students’ welfare and experience and of the human factors that make a university education so much more than a simple transfer of knowledge. The Board’s naming Linda was a wise and excellent choice. I congratulate her, and couldn’t be happier for her and NYU.”
Linda G. Mills is the Lisa Ellen Goldberg Professor of Social Work, Public Policy, and Law. She is also the Executive Director of the NYU Center on Violence and Recovery. She first came to NYU as an associate professor of social work in 1999 and in 2001 was promoted to full professor. Prior to coming to NYU, from 1994 to 1998, she was a lecturer in the School of Law and an assistant professor in the UCLA School of Public Policy and Social Research, where she received early tenure.
Her principal areas of scholarly focus are trauma, bias, and domestic violence; her groundbreaking research funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Justice has reshaped the field of treatment in domestic violence, and her restorative justice-based programs are currently being adopted in several jurisdictions across the U.S. She is a widely published author of articles appearing in Harvard Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Journal of Experimental Criminology, and Nature: Human Behavior, among others. Her books have been published by Princeton University Press, University of Michigan Press, Springer, and Basic Books. As a filmmaker, she has produced award-winning films that have debuted at Tribeca Film Festival and the Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival and have been shown in the UAE, Austria, and Tunisia. Of Many: Then and Now appeared on ABC to 8.1 million viewers.
She has been NYU’s Vice Chancellor and Senior Vice Provost for Global Programs and University Life since 2012. In 2002, she was named Vice Provost (and in 2006 Senior Vice Provost) for Undergraduate Education and University Life.
Mills received her PhD in Health Policy in 1994 from Brandeis University, where she was a Pew Scholar; her MSW from San Francisco State University in 1986; her JD from the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco in 1983; and her BA in history and social thought from the University of California, Irvine in 1979. She was admitted to the California Bar in 1983 and first became a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in 1990.
Her husband, Peter Goodrich, is a professor of law at Cardozo School of Law and a visiting professor of law in the Division of Social Science at NYU Abu Dhabi. They have a son who is a 2019 graduate of NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study.
