1 June 2024

By Göran R Buckhorn

In the middle of the week, Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, announced that the school’s new president will be cultural historian Maurie D. McInnis. She takes over the presidency from Peter Salovey on 1 July. Earning master’s and doctoral degrees from Yale in the 1990s, Dr McInnes, 58, will become Yale’s 24th president and the first permanent female president.

Dr McInnes is currently the president of Stony Brook University, a New York state public university on Long Island. She received her undergraduate degree at the University of Virginia where she later served as professor and as vice-provost.

In between her time at University of Virginia and Stony Brook, Dr McInnes served as provost at the University of Texas in Austin – and now it becomes interesting for us HTBS Types. In an article in The New York Times on 29 May, the newspaper’s reporter on college and university matters writes, that during Dr McInnes’s period in Austin, “she was sometimes seen rowing single scull crew on Lady Bird Lake” (my italicizing).

I will let this pass with no more than a sigh, but why oh, why didn’t the reporter consult The Times’s brilliant columnist Juliet Macur, who knows more than a bit about rowing as she once was the captain of the Columbia University women’s rowing team.

Nevertheless, let us rejoice that the university of the Bulldogs will have a rower at the helm. Maybe we will even see her mingling with the crowds at Gales Ferry when it is time for The Race.