President

Institutional context

Princeton University is one of the eight Ivy League institutions, founded in 1746 as the College of New Jersey. The President is the senior officer of the university. From 1747 through 2001 every president was male — a span of 254 years.

Career path

Shirley M. Tilghman (born 1946 in Toronto) earned a BS from Queen's University and a PhD in biochemistry from Temple University. She held faculty positions at the National Institutes of Health and at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, joining Princeton's molecular biology faculty in 1986. She served as founding director of Princeton's Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics from 1998.

Appointment

The Princeton Board of Trustees elected her President effective 15 June 2001. She is the first woman President of Princeton.

Tenure

Twelve years. Tenure included Princeton's substantial expansion of financial-aid programs, the elimination of student loans for undergraduates with demonstrated need, and the construction of the Frick Chemistry Laboratory and Lewis Center for the Arts. She left office on 30 June 2013.

Cluster context

Tilghman's 2001 appointment is one of two Ivy first-woman presidencies that began within three weeks of one another (Tilghman 15 June, Simmons 3 July). The 2001 pairing followed Judith Rodin's 1994 first-Ivy appointment at Penn and continued a sustained pattern of Ivy and equivalent first-woman appointments through the 2000s decade — Hockfield at MIT (2004), Faust at Harvard (2007). The university-pipeline data line is, by this metric, approximately a decade ahead of the broader institutional cluster.

Sources

• Wikipedia — Shirley Tilghman
• Wikipedia — President of Princeton University