Ronald Daniels has a history of fighting economic battles, and as the new president of Johns Hopkins University, he will need that experience to take on his most daunting challenge: the economy.
Daniels, provost at the University of Pennsylvania, was selected as Hopkins’ 14th president Tuesday when the board of trustees accepted a search committee’s unanimous recommendation from a pool of nearly 300 nominees.
The 49-year-old Toronto native served as dean of the law school at the University of Toronto for 10 years before leaving in 2005 to become provost and chief academic officer at Penn.
Maintaining Hopkins’ spot at the pinnacle of academic research while the U.S. economy crumbles worse than at any time since the Great Depression will be his greatest and most immediate challenge, Daniels and others said.
“The top 10 challenges are probably the economy,” said Dr. William Brody, who will continue as president of Hopkins through February, when he leaves to head the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif. “It’s probably the top 100,” he said after a news conference at Hopkins, Maryland’s largest private employer.
But it is a feat at which many believe Daniels will excel.
“It’s exhilarating, it’s challenging, it’s inspiring and yes, at times, daunting,” Daniels said at the news conference. “But it is a challenge and an opportunity that I am so privileged to be able to tackle.”
At Toronto, Daniels raised the law school’s endowment from $1 million to $57 million. He delicately worked to maintain the school’s accessibility while increasing tuition from a few thousand dollars a semester to almost $20,000, and he started a debt relief program to encourage students to enter public interest fields.
He increased financial aid at Penn for graduate students while working with the university’s president and vice president to create a financial aid program that eliminates loans for students with financial needs.
Michael Trebilcock taught Daniels at the Toronto law school before the student became his colleague, boss and co-author “Rule of Law Reform and Development,” about the role of legal institutions in economics of developing nations.
Trebilcock said Daniels most impressed him with his leadership at conferences about public policy on Hurricane Katrina and Sept. 11, and his service as chairman of several government task forces.
“It’s a brilliant appointment,” Trebilock said. “He’s a dazzling guy, one of the two or three most impressive people I have met in a 40-year academic career.”
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