The University of Chicago is getting a new president: Robert Zimmer, who's being reported as the provost at Brown even though that was just a brief break from a long career with U of C. Interesting that their goal was to find "an accomplished scholar with proven managerial skills" -- a pointed statement when you think about recent events at Harvard, or maybe just U of C's true colors, I can't decide. But usually I think a sense of vision would be higher on the list than proven managerial skills for a position like this.
Baude is charmed that Zimmer is a mathematician, but the thing that struck me most about his resume was his role with Argonne. I wonder how much the university's bid to keep control of Argonne influenced his selection.
Mathematicians getting top university jobs, that's pretty good from my perspective! Although I don't know anything about Zimmer, he's from a completely different area of math than I was.
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