Rick Levin

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Richard Charles Levin (b. 1947) is an American economist, who has served as president of Yale University since 1993. He is currently the longest serving Ivy-League president still in office.

Born in San Francisco, California, Levin graduated from Lowell High School in San Francisco in 1964. At Lowell, he was a member of the Lowell Forensic Society and debated in high school debate tournaments regionally. He graduated from Stanford University in 1968 with a B.A. in history. He received a Bachelor of Letters in politics and philosophy from Oxford University. He earned his Ph.D. in economics from Yale in 1974. His academic specialties include industrial research and development, intellectual property, and productivity in manufacturing.

Levin became an Assistant Professor of Economics at Yale in 1974 and was elevated to Associate Professor in 1979. In 1982, he was promoted to Professor of Economics and Management at the Yale School of Management. In 1992, he was appointed Frederick William Beinecke Professor of Economics. Before becoming president, he served as chairman of the Economics Department and dean of Yale's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

On February 6, 2004, Levin was appointed to the Iraq Intelligence Commission, an independent panel convened to investigate U.S. intelligence surrounding the United States' 2003 invasion of Iraq and Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. He had previously served on government panels on baseball economics and the U.S. Postal Service.

Although he used to describe himself in Who's Who as a Democrat, Levin is known to be fairly close to President George W. Bush. Levin was one of the president's first guests in the White House during his first term and the president stayed at Levin's house when he received, amid protests, an honorary degree from Yale in 2001.

Since Levin's appointment, three of his provosts, the officer serving directly under him, have gone on to head other universities: Judith Rodin as president of the University of Pennsylvania, Alison Richard as vice-chancellor of the University of Cambridge, and Susan Hockfield as president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In addition, Richard Brodhead, the former dean of Yale College, left to become the president of Duke University.

Levin has been praised during his tenure for an unparalleled expansion of the University's endowment and for overseeing an ambitious renovation plan. Yale's admissions standards and academic prestige have generally increased since Levin's appointment. He has been criticized for his anti-union policies, particularly his hard-ball bargaining with unions representing clerical, technical, service, and maintenance workers; his attempts to break the graduate employee union GESO; and his refusal to implement a fair licensing policy to prevent Yale-licensed products from being made in sweatshops.

Levin and his wife, Jane, a professor at Yale, reside in New Haven, Connecticut. They have four children.

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