New Haven has a new top corporate CEO to do business with: Maurie D. McInnis, whom Yale has named its next president.
The board of trustees of the $40 billion-plus-endowed city-based Ivy League university announced the pick Wednesday morning on a livestreamed YouTube video. McInnis, an art historian, currently serves as president of Stony Brook University.
McInnis, who is 58 years old, will be the first (official) female president in Yale’s history. (More about that later.) She earned a master’s degree there in 1990 and a Ph.D. there in 1996. Her scholarship has focused on “the cultural history of American Art in the colonial and antebellum South,” according to a bio. One of her books is entitled Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade. She is currently a Yale trustee. (Read more about her background here.)
She said she plans to host “listening sessions” on campus after starting the job on July 1.
“I urge all of us to listen with empathy and compassion to the experiences of others. I will encourage us to ask ourselves: What change we wish to see in the world and how best might we accomplish that. I can’t wait to begin,” she said at the close of Yale’s 10-minute livestreamed announcement.
That final comment — a plea for civility amid harsh times — did not appear in the official text of her remarks that the university immediately emailed to the Yale community following the announcement.
The corporate board last met the weekend of April 19 – 21. At the time students protesting the war in Gaza set up a protest encampment on Beinecke Plaza outside where the trustees gathered and were expected to pick a successor to current Yale President Peter Salovey, who retires next month after 11 years in the position. The trustees made no announcement that weekend. By the time of Wednesday’s announcement, the spring semester had ended, graduation took place, and the vast majority of students (and potential protesters) had left campus.
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McInnis was a surprise choice: The name did not appear on lists of expected appointees.
McInnis immediately becomes a major civic leader in New Haven: Yale is the city’s largest private corporation, landowner, and employer.
Under Salovey’s predecessor, Rick Levin, the university increased its involvement in efforts to improve life in New Haven. It partnered with City Hall on innovative projects ranging from an employee-homebuying-assistance program to the “Promise” scholarship program guaranteeing tuition help for all New Haven public school students who keep their grades up. The city and university also quietly partnered on addressing short-term challenges like a pending foreclosure sale of revived commercial properties in the College-Chapel Street district.
Major town-gown initiatives disappeared during Salovey’s term as president, when the university increased its main focus on competing with other Ivy League schools for nine-figure donations from financial sector titans. (Yale did agree to up its voluntary payments to the city for its permanent property tax exemptions for six years.)
On its website bio of McInnis as a trustee, Yale emphasized her fundraising prowess as well as her environmental credentials: “She is the inaugural board chair of the New York Climate Exchange that was selected to build an international climate-solutions center on Governors Island in New York City. Under her leadership, Stony Brook received a transformational $500 million gift from the Simons Foundation — the largest-ever unrestricted endowment gift made to a U.S. institution of higher education.”
Yale’s public relations office added in its release about the announcement: “At Stony Brook, McInnis also shares responsibility for overseeing Brookhaven National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy facility for particle physics and nuclear energy, data, and quantum information sciences. And as the inaugural chair of the board of the New York Climate Exchange, she led the establishment of an international climate change solutions center in New York City.”
Through Salovey’s term, only white males had ever served as president of Yale. At least formally. One woman, Hannah Gray, did succeed Yale President Kingman Brewster, leading the university from 1977 to 1978. But the university never removed the “acting” from her title, and she went on to lead University of Chicago instead.
This story was first published May 29, 2024 by New Haven Independent.