Elizabeth Garrett first female president at Cornell

Cornell University has announced the appointment of Elizabeth Garrett as university president. She will step up to the new position on July 1, 2015, replacing David Skorton. She will be the first woman to hold that position, making Columbia and Darthmouth the only two Ivy League schools who have yet to appoint a woman as president.

Skorton will see the university through the celebrations of its 150^th anniversary, but had already announced he would be stepping down in June 2015 to lead the Smithsonian Institution.

Garrett is currently the provost at Southern California University, a position she has held since October 2010. Although Cornell is significantly smaller than her current institution, it has the added prestige of being an Ivy League school and Garrett will be joining the university as it in the process of building a new applied sciences campus in New York City together with Technicon Israel Institute of Technology.

Skorton leaves the university in a good financial position, having added $5bn to its endowment during his tenure.

Elizabeth Garrett said: “I think about some of the great women who have come before me who have laid a path I could follow.” She also joked that she was now looking forward to “switching hiking trails from the Santa Monica mountains to the gorges around Ithaca. I was in Chicago before I went to Los Angeles, so I have some knowledge of winter.”