New York University President Emeritus to Address Drexel’s Thomas R. Kline School of Law Graduates

John Sexton, JD, served as New York University president from 2002 until 2015.

John Sexton, JD, who served as New York University president from 2002 until 2015, will address the graduates of the Drexel University Thomas R. Kline School of Law at commencement May 18.

The school will celebrate 181 graduates will at the ceremony, held at the Kimmel Center, 300 S. Broad Street.

Sexton was 15th president of NYU and is now the university’s Benjamin Butler Professor of Law and dean emeritus of the Law School. Currently, he is serving a six-month appointment as the Kluge Chair in American Law and Governance at the Library of Congress.

During his presidency, Sexton oversaw the university’s largest increase in the number of Arts and Science faculty, applications for undergraduate admissions reached record levels and NYU’s world rankings increased dramatically. Other milestones include a merger with Polytechnic University, now the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, and, in 2008, the most successful completed fundraising campaign in the history of American higher education.

A signature of his tenure was the emergence of NYU as a Global Network University, with a network of 11 international academic centers on six continents and degree-granting campuses in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai.

A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Sexton also serves on the board of the Institute of International Education and is past chair of the American Council on Education. In 2015, he received the TIAA-CREF Hesburgh Award for Leadership Excellence, recognizing outstanding university presidents, and the Institute of International Education’s Duggan Award for Mutual Understanding.

Before coming to NYU, Sexton clerked at the United States Supreme Court and the United States Court of Appeals. From 1966-1975, he was a professor of religion at Saint Francis College in Brooklyn.

Sexton received a bachelor’s degree in history, a master’s degree in comparative religion, and a PhD in the history of American religion, all from Fordham University. He received a law degree magna cum laude from Harvard Law School.