Christina Paxson, who led Brown University to new strengths while many of her Ivy League peers were forced to resign under pressure, announced she is stepping down voluntarily at the end of this academic year.
When Paxson took over as president of Brown University in July 2012, the campus had a reputation for left-leaning activism. It still does. Yet while Vanderbilt’s Daniel Diermeier, Yeshiva University’s Ari Berman, and even Dartmouth’s Sian Beilock have grabbed more headlines for challenging campus conformism, Paxson has in a more understated way accumulated her own reputation among sophisticated observers for having steered Brown in the direction of intellectual rigor, open inquiry, and civil discourse. She was doing this years before the backlash to the post-October 7, 2023, pro-Hamas paroxysms on college campus that exposed the rot and added urgency to the drive for viewpoint diversity.
Among her accomplishments:
— She brought Air Force and Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps programs back to Brown in 2016 through partnerships with Holy Cross and the Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
— She managed to win faculty support in 2022 for establishing a Center for Philosophy, Politics and Economics, overcoming initial opposition from faculty concerned about funding from Charles Koch and the center’s libertarian tilt.
— She was an ally and participant in efforts to build a thriving Jewish community at Brown. In 2017, she spoke at an event marking the expansion of the Providence eruv, a legal boundary that allows Orthodox Jews to carry objects or to push strollers—actions otherwise prohibited—on shabbat. In November 2022, she announced kosher dining coming to Brown’s largest dining hall. During her presidency, the Jewish undergraduate population at Brown has soared, in marked contrast to other Ivy League institutions, where it has dwindled.
— Paxson publicly articulated the value of religious students to the Brown campus, in the tradition of Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island after the Puritans ejected him from Massachusetts. “Since our beginning, the radical idea of bringing people from different faiths together has blossomed into a culture that celebrates open inquiry and the exploration of new ideas. We stand for learning, not indoctrination,” she said in 2021 at a convocation for incoming students. In 2022 she told Bloomberg News, “I want students from rural areas and urban areas. I want students who grew up on army bases. I want students who are from tight-knit Christian communities.” In March 2026, in an appearance at the center-right American Enterprise Institute, she spoke about using admissions as a way to increase the diversity of perspectives on campus. “We’re doing recruiting in religious day schools,” Paxson said.
— She parted from the worst COVID-19 alarmists, advocating in April 2020 for in-person reopening. “As amazing as videoconferencing technology has become, students face financial, practical and psychological barriers as they try to learn remotely,” she wrote in a New York Times opinion piece.
— Unlike Harvard, which has waged a costly, time-consuming, scorched-earth legal campaign against the Trump administration, Brown quickly reached a settlement agreement with the government in July 2025. Among the provisions of the settlement was that “in Brown Athletics facilities, the University will provide female student-athletes with intimate facilities such as locker rooms and bathrooms strictly separated on the basis of sex,” and that Brown would abide by the definitions of “male” and “female” in Trump’s executive orders. That dismayed the Brown College Democrats, whose vice president, Jacqueline Zhang, told the Brown Daily Herald, “I think that’s really disappointing that trans students’ livelihood and their experience at Brown is so easily given up to this capitulation. … The agreement also adds to this overall unwelcoming, unsafe environment for the trans community.”
— She took on the anti-Israel activists. At a Hillel summit in February 2023 at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass., she spoke against academic boycotts, and was attacked in response by the anti-Israel group Students for Justice in Palestine. In November and December of 2023, Brown called in police to arrest dozens of anti-Israel protesters and charge them with trespassing. After a thorough process, the Brown Corporation voted in 2024 to reject a student proposal to divest from companies students claimed were facilitating “the Israeli occupation.”
Not everyone has gotten word. Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, who wrote speeches for President Reagan, mocked the university in a November 2025 column about volunteers for Zohran Mamdani’s presidential campaign: “Many are underemployed, for many reasons. They’ll volunteer at the public grocery stores. They’ll make lettuce chic. They’ll haul sacks of sweet potatoes through Park Slope, and their hedge-fund fathers will say, ‘I sent him to Brown for this?’” In a 2024 television appearance, Noonan described the Democrats as “the party of an academic administrator of Brown University.”
Brown certainly isn’t perfect. A campus shooting in December 2025 killed two students and exposed security shortcomings. There’s still at least one professor, Omer Bartov, going around publicly accusing Israel of genocide in a way that has been memorably discredited by other scholars including Jeffrey Herf and Benny Morris. Yet, thanks in part to Paxson’s leadership, it’s years ahead of many of its Ivy League peers, and it’s in much stronger shape than when she took over.
In announcing her decision to make this year her last, Paxson recalled her first year on the job. “I remember, at the time, feeling a profound sense of optimism and gratitude, coupled with the humility that comes with the enormous responsibility of leading a great university,” she wrote. “More than 14 years later, the experience has been all that I could have hoped for, and more. I fell in love with Brown and all that Brown stands for: its embrace of excellence in education and research in the service of society; the priority it places on intellectual curiosity and independence; and its strong sense of community that binds students, faculty, staff and alumni together.”
The words—optimism, gratitude, humility, excellence, intellectual curiosity, community—may not be the ones on the tips of everyone’s tongues in 2026. But they’re a reminder that for all of a college president’s responsibilities for fundraising and academic administration and government relations, leadership success in education, and in a lot of other spheres, depends a lot on culture and values. The best of these educational institutions are teaching more than strictly academic subjects.
As Paxson put it in her remarks in 2013 at the dedication ceremony for the expanded eruv, “we recognize the arc of Rhode Island’s early rise as a bastion of religious liberty. And we affirm College Hill as a crossroads of many faiths, a place where the Eruv may also encompass calls to Muslim prayer, the peal of Christian church bells, or Buddhist chanting. … Put another way, God’s presence is reflected across the public good, in many beautiful and meaningful ways, and I think what we’re doing here adds to that.”
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