Columbia’s twenty-first president, Jennifer L. Mnookin, a legal scholar and former chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, started her new job in July. “I arrive with deep respect for Columbia’s history, with clear eyes about the challenges before us, and with great confidence in what our University can accomplish,” she wrote in her first-day message to the Columbia community. “Great universities like ours must insist on intellectual seriousness while recognizing the varied ways serious inquiry proceeds. That means balancing rigor with open-mindedness and shared purpose with pluralism.”
