Yale University has appointed a new university president.
McInnis, a cultural historian, serves as president of Stony Brook University.
She will assume the role on July 1, succeeding Peter Salovey, who is returning to the faculty full-time after 11 years as president.
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McInnis, 58, first came to Yale in 1989 as a graduate student in the Department of the History of Art.
Yale said McInnis was the unanimous choice of the school's Board of Trustees.
“I look forward to many things when I begin my service,” McInnis said in a statement. “At the top of the list is to reconnect with those I know and to meet so many more of you. You make this university what it is.”
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She added, “Our faculty members are not only international leaders in their own fields but also drive innovation in other academic disciplines and progress in other sectors. Our talented staff advance every aspect of our university and bring excellence to all they do. Similarly, our students excel in their studies, while also making Yale a richer community through their art making, advocacy, and deep engagement with the local community.”
McInnis said she plans to schedule listening sessions and individual meetings later in the summer.
Josh Bekenstein, ’80, senior trustee and chair of the presidential search committee, told the Yale community that McInnis has held teaching, research and leadership roles during her three-decade career in higher education.
She was associate dean at the University of Virginia as well as a vice provost, a statement from Yale says.
While she was at the University of Texas at Austin, she was the provost and she is responsible for the academics, research and operations at Stony Brook.
Yale said she has also written and edited numerous books and articles focused on the politics of art and slavery in the 19th-century American South.
McInnis will be returning to Yale and New Haven with her husband, Dean Johnson, who is retired from a career in business, and their two children.
Yale has had only one other female leader, Hanna Holborn Gray, who served as acting president from 1977 to 1978. Yale later removed the “acting” designation after her tenure.
Yale and Stony Brook were among schools nationwide that saw protests over the Israel-Hamas war, and students at both campuses were arrested. McInnis did not mention Gaza in her comments.
At Stony Brook, McInnis said that while the school supported students' rights of free expression and peaceful assembly, “protests and demonstrations will not be allowed to disrupt the academic environment, create safety issues, or violate university guidelines regarding time, place and manner.”
Earlier this month, a proposed censure of McInnis over the arrests of 29 protesters at Stony Brook was narrowly rejected by the school's faculty Senate.
In a statement, Yale’s search committee praised McInnis for her academic leadership experience and scholarship.
“What excites me about President-elect McInnis is that she comes to the job as a practicing humanist in all dimensions,” said Jacqueline Goldsby, a professor of African American studies, English and American studies at Yale.
Her books on antebellum visual culture are award-winning and represent the incisive, rigorous scholarship Yale faculty produce and that we want our students to study."
The committee also lauded McInnis for her work on climate change. She is the first board chair of the New York Climate Exchange and led the founding of an international climate change solutions center in New York City, Yale said.
Yale said she also oversees Brookhaven National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy facility for particle physics and nuclear energy, data, and quantum information sciences, and led the establishment of an international climate change solutions center in New York City as the inaugural chair of the board of the New York Climate Exchange.
Yale, which was founded in 1701, has a $40 billion endowment, about 12,000 undergraduate and graduate students, 5,500 faculty members and about 11,600 staff.
