The University of Michigan appointed Syracuse University’s chancellor as its president on Monday, a bid to end four years of leadership upheaval at one of the country’s most respected public schools.
Kent D. Syverud, the Syracuse chancellor since 2014, is expected to take over at Michigan by July 1. Mr. Syverud is a familiar face at the university’s campus in Ann Arbor, where he married, received his law degree and was later an associate dean in the law school.
Michigan, which also has campuses in Dearborn and Flint, has more than 68,000 students and is one of the country’s biggest federally backed research operations. Now, months after Michigan’s interim president warned that “higher education in this country is currently under attack,” it will fall to Mr. Syverud to try to stave off funding cuts and counter mounting mistrust in top universities.
Mark J. Bernstein, the chair of the university’s Board of Regents, said Monday as he introduced Mr. Syverud that American academia was facing its most significant challenges since World War II and that “the stakes cannot be higher for our university and our society.”
Speaking shortly after Mr. Bernstein, who described the Michigan presidency as “the best and most challenging job in higher education,” Mr. Syverud said the university could “curl up in a ball and say woe is me and whine, or we can do what Michigan has always done when it’s at its best: We can lead.”
The university, he added, could lead “not by arrogantly lecturing others, but by modeling each day, in small ways and in big ones, the values and the ideas and the innovation and the civil engagement that this world so badly needs.”
Although pressure from President Trump has thrown parts of the higher education industry into crisis, some of Michigan’s turmoil predates Mr. Trump’s second term in the White House.
Mr. Syverud will be the fifth person to run Michigan since the start of 2022, when regents suddenly fired Dr. Mark Schlissel after they learned of his relationship with a university employee.
Mary Sue Coleman, a previous Michigan president, led the university on an interim basis for much of 2022, when regents installed Santa J. Ono.
Dr. Ono left Michigan suddenly last May, when he was named the sole finalist to become the president of the University of Florida. But the Florida system’s board refused to confirm Dr. Ono, who had been a target of Republicans skeptical over his previous support of diversity initiatives.
Michigan had once been seen as a model of diversity, equity and inclusion programs, but it began to back away after Mr. Trump was re-elected in 2024. The university eliminated its main program last March, while Dr. Ono was still in Ann Arbor.
He left soon after, and Domenico Grasso became Michigan’s interim president. His short tenure included the firing of the university’s football coach over a relationship with an employee.
Regents voted unanimously Monday to hire Mr. Syverud, who was a clerk to Justice Sandra Day O’Connor after law school. Following a brief stint in private practice, he began teaching law at Michigan. He went on to run the law schools at Vanderbilt University and at Washington University in St. Louis before winning the job at Syracuse.
Mr. Syverud was at the university’s helm in 2019 when a burst of racist episodes, including vandalism and slurs, rocked the campus and led to debates about Mr. Syverud’s stewardship.
Pressured by students, some of whom held a sit-in at the campus center, and elected officials, Mr. Syverud agreed to many of the protesters’ demands, including mandatory diversity training and a pledge of at least $1 million for what demonstrators described as the “creation of a unified, required curriculum that educates the campus on diversity issues, specifically antiracism.”
Mr. Syverud, however, resisted calls for his resignation, even as he said he regretted the university’s initial response.
“I hate testifying for myself, but my whole career has been about caring about students, particularly about international students and students of color,” Mr. Syverud told The New York Times that year.
This past August, he announced that he would step down from Syracuse in June 2026. Mr. Syverud said he had been reluctant to interview for the Michigan job but, persuaded by his family, agreed.
Alan Blinder is a national correspondent for The Times, covering education.
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