Heather K. Gerken, the dean of Yale Law School, will become the president of the Ford Foundation later this year, the group said Tuesday.
Ms. Gerken, who was seen last year as a contender for the Yale presidency, will take over one of the country’s wealthiest and most influential philanthropies at a time of especially fraught debate about social justice and inequality, two of the foundation’s touchstones.
In a statement on Tuesday, Ms. Gerken said she was looking forward to working at the foundation “to protect democracy and the rule of law and further our mission to create a more just and fair world for everyone.”
Ms. Gerken will succeed Darren Walker, who announced last summer that he would conclude a 12-year tenure in 2025. About a decade ago, he began to redirect Ford’s philanthropy toward combating inequality, writing then that the foundation would work on “not just wealth disparities, but injustices in politics, culture and society that compound inequality and limit opportunity.”
It was a shift in focus for the philanthropy, which was founded in 1936 by Edsel Ford, the only child of Henry Ford, the auto magnate. For many decades, the foundation’s giving was wide-ranging. An early grant helped create what ultimately became PBS, and the foundation went on to spend on everything from orchestras to disaster relief. In 2014, after the City of Detroit filed for bankruptcy, the foundation was at the center of a daring effort that limited the cuts to retired city workers’ pensions and protected the Detroit Institute of Arts. (The foundation, whose endowment is valued at roughly $16 billion, has also supported journalism programs, including some at The New York Times.)
The Ford Foundation remained a powerhouse after it adjusted its focus. In its most recent publicly available tax return, it reported spending more than $600 million on contributions, gifts and grants, with hundreds of millions more scheduled to be paid in the future. Much of the money recently has gone toward projects it classifies as related to “civic engagement and government,” but it still spreads its largess on an array of initiatives.
In June, for instance, grant recipients included the American Civil Liberties Union’s foundation in Louisiana, the Clinton Foundation, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the National Down Syndrome Congress and Spelman College.
Ms. Gerken is expected to take over in November, leaving Yale before her second term was scheduled to conclude in mid-2027.
Ms. Gerken, who earned a law degree from the University of Michigan, clerked for Justice David Souter, worked in private practice and taught at Harvard Law School before her arrival at Yale. After more than a decade there, she became dean in 2017. She won wide praise for increasing enrollment of veterans and a program covering law school tuition for scores of low-income students.
She also led a revolt against the law school rankings published by U.S. News and World Report, a cultural juggernaut in its own right. Even though Yale’s law school had been a fixture in the top spot of the rankings, Ms. Gerken argued that the for-profit publisher relied on an arbitrary formula that led law schools to shape their priorities to match a publisher’s preferences and whims.
In November 2022, Ms. Gerken said that Yale’s law school would no longer respond to U.S. News’s requests for data that helped power its rankings. Harvard made a similar announcement soon after, and dozens more medical and law schools followed.
U.S. News has continued to rank law schools — its latest list has Yale and Stanford tied for best in the nation — but the uprising dented the publisher’s brand.
During Ms. Gerken’s tenure, Yale Law School has occasionally drawn sharp criticism. In 2022, for instance, after student protesters disrupted a Federalist Society event, two federal appeals court judges accused the school of hostility toward conservative speech and said they would not hire its graduates for clerkships.
The judges, both appointees of President Trump, later agreed to speak at Yale.
More recently, the law school ousted a pro-Palestinian activist, Helyeh Doutaghi, from her role as deputy director of the Law and Political Economy Project after a website that described itself as “empowered” by artificial intelligence accused her of membership in a terrorist group. Dr. Doutaghi denied wrongdoing and told The Times in an interview this year that she was “not a member of any organization that would constitute a violation of U.S. law.”
Yale fired Dr. Doutaghi within weeks, saying it was acting because she refused to aid in its investigation of the matter. The school’s decision sparked an internal backlash, and some of Dr. Doutaghi’s former colleagues accused Yale of a “fear-based and excessive” reaction.
Still, Ms. Gerken’s background in constitutional law — in 2009, she wrote “The Democracy Index: Why Our Election System Is Failing and How to Fix It” — appealed to the foundation’s leaders and supporters as they searched for Mr. Walker’s successor.
Statements from Ms. Gerken’s allies, which Ford distributed on Tuesday, suggested that they expect the foundation to have a sustained focus on preserving democratic norms under her leadership.
Christopher L. Eisgruber, Princeton University’s president, said Ms. Gerken, an alumna of the university and a trustee, was an ideal choice “in a moment when constitutional democracy needs urgent attention and engagement.”
J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge and a titan of the conservative bar who has sharply criticized Mr. Trump, was even more effusive.
“Wherever there is hope, promise, and common cause to be found for an embattled and beleaguered nation and world, Heather Gerken will find it,” he wrote.
Alan Blinder is a national correspondent for The Times, covering education.
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