Brown University President Christina Paxson surprised the academic community by announcing that she will retire at the end of the 2027 school year.
Paxson’s tenure has been challenging in recent years, with multiple anti-Israel protests and a campus encampment, followed by a campus shooting in 2025 that left two people dead and others seriously injured.
She has also clashed with President Trump, although left-wing students have been dissatisfied with her commitment to fighting his administration.
Reuters reports:
Brown University’s president, who clashed with Trump over funding, steps downBrown University President Christina Paxson said on Monday that she would leave her post at the end of the academic year, following a difficult period in which she clashed with President Donald Trump’s administration over its threats to slash the Ivy League school’s federal funding.Paxson said she had planned to leave her job one year earlier, but extended her tenure at the university, located in Providence, Rhode Island, to “navigate a federal funding freeze that imperiled our mission,” according to an open letter, opens new tab published on the school’s website.Brown was an early target of the administration during Trump’s second term in office as it cracked down on U.S. universities over what it called antisemitic student protests against Israel’s war on Gaza, diversity policies and a host of other issues.Protesters, including some Jewish groups, have said the administration has wrongly labeled criticism of Israel’s assault on Gaza and its occupation of Palestinian territories as antisemitism and advocacy for Palestinian rights as support for extremism.After administration officials threatened to block $510 million in federal grants for Brown, Paxson reached a deal in July 2025 to restore the funding. The terms required the university to conduct a third-party evaluation of its campus climate, including for Jewish students, and propose actions to improve it.In October, though, Paxson declined an administration offer sent to nine elite universities, which said schools would be favored for federal funding if they capped the number of international students, defined gender based on biology and banned the use of race or sex in hiring and admissions.
Here is an excerpt from Paxson’s official resignation letter:
Dear Members of the Brown Community,My first year as Brown University’s 19th president began on July 1, 2012. I was excited to be joining a university with such a distinguished and distinctive history. 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.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.And so, it was with mixed emotions that I informed the Corporation of Brown University earlier today that the 2026-27 academic year will be my last as Brown’s president. This is the right decision for me and my family. And I firmly believe that it is the best path for Brown. Fifteen years is a significant tenure for any president, and in that time, this amazing community of faculty, staff, students, alumni, parents and friends showed up in so many ways to achieve the bold aspirations in the strategic plan we developed together near the beginning of my presidency. We worked vigilantly to demonstrate the value of Brown to the world, and we all can be proud of and deeply grateful for the transformative impact of a community-driven fundraising campaign that made so much of our work possible.
There have been some bright spots during Paxson’s tenure.
Ira Stoll writes at the Washington Free Beacon:
— 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.”
See a video report from WPRI News below:
Featured image via YouTube.
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