Christina Paxson Starts Final Year as Brown's President

By now, everyone has heard that Dr. Christina Paxson is starting her final year as President of Brown, and will leave on July 1. 2027. She took office in July, 2012, as Brown's 19th president, and will complete 15 years on the job. That's a long time for someone to be a major university president these days. In the last 5 years, Dr. Paxson led Brown through the pandemic and its many challenges; the Federal research grant funding crisis; and the response to the terrible student shootings on campus in Dec., 2025. Those things alone would be major accomplishments. She also led the $4.4 billion "Brown Together" capital campaign, made Brown affordable for much of the middle class, and oversaw many big campus improvements.

To put this in perspective:

• Dr. Paxson is currently the longest-tenured president of the 8 Ivy schools, plus MIT, Cal Tech, Stanford, and the Univ. of Chicago (an arbitrary choice of elite schools outside the Ivy League, an athletic conference).

• The new holder of the “longest tenured” title in that group, if he stays until mid-2027, will be Christopher Eisgruber at Princeton, who started a year after Dr. Paxson at Brown.

• No one else in that group took office before 2021. You may recall the presidents of Penn and Harvard were the subject of contentious Congressional hearings in 2024.

• Dr. Paxson is also the longest-serving president of Brown since Henry Merritt Wriston, who was president for 18 years, from 1937 to 1955, and the second (consecutive) female president.

Personally, I hope Dr. Paxson's final year is less tumultuous than the last few. Her tenure has embodied Charles Evans Hughes's belief that "It is always the old Brown, and always the new Brown" - in many ways.