Marvin Krislov

Marvin Krislov (born August 24, 1960) is the eighth and current president of Pace University in New York. Prior to his appointment at Pace, he served for 10 years as the president of Oberlin College and nine years as the vice president and general counsel of the University of Michigan.

Biography

Krislov was born in Lexington, Kentucky, to a Jewish family in 1960. A 1982 Yale College graduate with a degree in political science and winner of the Alpheus Henry Snow Prize, he attended Magdalen College, Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He then returned to New Haven to attend Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal.

He began his law career as a clerk for Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco. From 1989 to 1993, he served in an honors program at the U.S. Department of Justice, prosecuting cases involving police brutality and racial violence. He then spent three years at the White House Counsel's office before moving to the U.S. Department of Labor, where he served as Acting Solicitor of Labor until leaving the office to become vice president and general counsel at the University of Michigan. In 1998, he became the first person to serve as both vice president and general counsel at the University of Michigan. As general counsel to the university, he dispensed legal services on matters ranging from defending affirmative action to appealing penalties levied against the Michigan Wolverines basketball team by the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Krislov led the defense of University of Michigan in Gratz vs Bollinger in which the United States Supreme Court upheld appeals and lower court findings that the university's admissions practices based on race were unconstitutional although upholding the concepts of affirmative action in admissions.

He is a member of a variety of academic service organizations, including the American Anthropological Association's Project Advisory Board on Race and Human Variation, the Michigan Rhodes Scholars Selection Committee, and the Executive Committee of the University of Michigan Institute for Labor and Industrial Relations. Krislov was appointed to the National Council on the Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities in November 2009.

Krislov's community service activities include leadership positions in the Washtenaw County Jewish Foundation and the United Way of Washtenaw County, as well as membership on boards of arts organizations including the Mosaic Youth Theatre of Detroit and the University Musical Society. He also served as an alderman in New Haven shortly after graduating from Yale.

Family He was married to Amy Ruth Sheon; they divorced in 2015. He has three children: Zac, Jesse, and Evie Rose.

Notable publications The Next Twenty-five Years: Affirmative Action in Higher Education in the United States and South Africa David L. Featherman, Martin Hall, and Marvin Krislov, editors. Forewords by: Mary Sue Coleman, President of the University of Michigan and Njabulo Ndebele, Former Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of Cape Town. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2009.