Former Provost Andrew Hamilton joins an elite club today: Yale administrators who have gone on to run their own universities.
The list dating back to when University President Richard Levin took office in 1993 is prodigious. It begins with Judith Rodin, herself a Yale provost, who was named to the presidency of the University of Pennsylvania a few months after Levin was inaugurated. Following her have been Alison Richard at Cambridge; Jared Cohon at Carnegie Mellon; Susan Hockfield at MIT; Dick Brodhead at Duke; Rebecca Chopp at Colgate; Kim Bottomly at Wellesley; and, as of today, Hamilton at Oxford.
With Hamilton in place — meaning that every former Yale provost in the last two decades has now claimed a college presidency — we can turn to a new parlor game: guessing where Peter Salovey will wind up as president. Yale, perhaps?