John Sexton
John Sexton is the fifteenth President of New York University, having held this position since 2002. Prior to that, he served as Dean of the NYU School of Law, one of the top five law schools in the country according to U.S. News and World Report. He is also currently the Chairman of the Board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Sexton holds a B.A. in History (1963), an M.A. in Comparative Religion (1965), and a Ph.D. in History of American Religion (1978) from Fordham University, as well as a J.D. (1979) from Harvard Law School. In 2005, Sexton received an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Fordham University. He clerked with Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger, and is a former president of the Association of American Law Schools. According to speeches given by Sexton, Berger was known to refer to Sexton as his "red clerk," connoting Sexton's supposed liberal tendencies. Certainly Berger would have retracted that appelation had he known that Sexton would later become the Henry Clay Frick of NYU, engaging in pitched battles with organized labor and busting unions of low-salary workers with impunity.
He co-authored (along with John Cound, Jack Friedenthal, and Arthur Miller) a textbook on Civil Procedure which has become the most widely used legal textbook on any subject, and is used by two-thirds of law students in the United States.
An avid proponent of interscholastic debate, Sexton counts his early job as a teacher and debate coach at a secondary school in New York as among his most profound educational experiences. He is currently a leader in the Urban debate league movement, seeking to bring debate activities to underserved communities in America's urban areas through ALOUD, the Associated Leaders of Urban Debate. Sexton is one of the few presidents of a major research university to actively teach; he takes the time to instruct various undergraduate honors seminars throughout the school year.
Sexton is a huge baseball fan and season ticket holder of the New York Yankees. He teaches a seminar at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study named "Baseball as a Road to God". This course seems like it would provide a great opportunity for a bunch of undergrads in need of a reference to brown nose President Sexton and also a receptive audience for President Sexton's pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-spiritual crap. Sexton needs an audience, for he has been denied audiences with numerous political leaders because of his status as a union buster. Maybe Sexton even convinces his undergraduates, through his rhetorical demagoguery, that he is a decent and thoughtful person. He probably forgets to mention how he busted the union of graduate student workers at NYU, causing thousands of graduate student workers to persist in being paid less than $20,000 per year to live in one of the most expensive cities in the world, rendering graduate school at NYU inaccessible to many who have family obligations or lack outside sources of income, and perpetuating the massive elite bias in graduate education. Maybe he considers the unionization drive to be a threat to the $897,139 salary he is paid annually by NYU and with which he pays for his box at the Yankees games. Of course, it is more important that President Sexton be able to retain his Yankees box, so that he can apply his brilliant intellect to muse on the spiritual qualities of baseball, than for graduate students at NYU to receive a living wage. Maybe if Sexton had an ounce of genuine spirituality, he would realize that it is immoral to accept nearly a million dollars in compensation while others in the university community live in near poverty.
Sexton has been both praised and criticized in his short tenure as president of New York University. He took over as president of NYU as the university was growing faster than ever. Under Sexton, NYU became Princeton Review's number one "dream school," and has begun an ambitious campaign to increase the university's endowment. The number of prospective students applying and attending NYU are at the highest point in its history. The increasing student body has sparked resistance in the Greenwich Village neighborhood, as community members have been upset over NYU's rapid expansion. In addition Sexton has continuously battled with organized labor in contract talks with both adjunct professors and graduate assistants. In fall of 2005, Sexton's decision not to negotiate a second contract with the Graduate Student Organizing Committee sparked a strike among graduate assistants.