Bard College, whose longtime leader retired this year as he faced a furor over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, said on Friday that it had picked Marvin Krislov as its next president.
Mr. Krislov, a lawyer, has been the president of Pace University since 2017. He will take over at Bard next July.
Bard is a well-respected liberal arts school, but for months it has been mired in turmoil over new evidence showing a longtime relationship between Mr. Epstein, the convicted sex offender who died in 2019, and Bard’s former president, Leon Botstein. Mr. Botstein, who became the school’s president in 1975, has denied wrongdoing and insisted that his relationship with Mr. Epstein was intended to secure donations for Bard.
In the statement announcing Mr. Krislov’s appointment, Bard noted Mr. Botstein’s “transformative 51-year tenure.” But the college only hinted at how a central mission for Mr. Krislov would be to soothe nerves on the campus in Annandale-On-Hudson, N.Y.
“Marvin Krislov is the ideal leader to guide the college forward at a pivotal moment in the institution’s 166-year history,” Brandon Weber, the chairman of the college’s board, said. “Building upon Bard’s legacy of innovation and excellence, Krislov is committed to honoring and advancing the institution’s mission as a private college serving the public good.”
Before becoming Pace’s president, Mr. Krislov led Oberlin College in Ohio for a decade. Although he was a successful fund-raiser — a crucial talent for leaders of liberal arts colleges — his tenure was scarred by a dispute involving a bakery.
The episode began in 2016, when a Black student at Oberlin was accused of shoplifting. A subsequent altercation between students and a member of the family that owned the bakery prompted days of protests centered on whether the bakery had racially profiled the Black student.
The bakery said Oberlin and its employees had sided with the protesters, and it sued for defamation. In 2022, long after Mr. Krislov left Oberlin, the college agreed to pay the bakery more than $36 million.
Before his time at Oberlin, Mr. Krislov was the general counsel at the University of Michigan when it defended its affirmative action efforts in the early 2000s. In rulings in 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a points-based approach but nevertheless upheld the notion that schools could consider race in admissions.
Affirmative action remained a fixture of American higher education for another 20 years. In 2023, the Supreme Court blocked race-conscious admissions programs, though there is still significant squabbling over the scope of the ruling.
Bard named an acting president after Mr. Botstein stepped down. This month, though, Mr. Botstein returned to the spotlight after a top congressional Democrat said that the former Bard president “likely enabled and possibly even participated in” Mr. Epstein’s abuse.
Mr. Botstein resigned from all of his Bard-affiliated positions the same day. But he disputed having any role in a message that was purportedly sent from the Bard president’s email address asking whether a woman whom Mr. Epstein might have been trafficking was “for me, or are you keeping her for yourself.”
The college commissioned a review by a forensic firm, which could not confirm the message’s authenticity. Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee sharply challenged the firm’s findings.
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