The 17th participant in the Wheelock Succession, and the first Asian-American President of Dartmouth College, will be Jim Yong Kim, MD, PhD, who currently chairs the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Kim is 49 years old, and he will succeed President James Wright, who has served as the College's President for the last 11 years. Dr. Kim will take office on July 1, 2009.
This decision by the College's trustees, I feel, demonstrates a continuation of positive events on the Hanover Plain.
Everything I read about Dr. Kim on Dartmouth's President-Elect page is extremely impressive. He is a widely-recognized leader in global health, infectious diseases, and public policy. Formerly a high-ranking official at the World Health Organization, he co-founded Partners in Health, an NGO dedicated to providing meaningful healthcare options for the poor, while he was still a medical student.
Dr. Kim was chosen as a MacArthur Fellow in 2003, named as one of "America's 25 Best Leaders" by US News & World Report in 2005, and selected as one of Time's "100 Most Influential People in the World" in 2006.
Quite a long way from Muscatine, Iowa, where his parents settled after coming from Seoul, Korea when Jim was five years old. His father was a dentist associated with the University of Iowa, where his mother earned a doctorate in philosophy. High school valedictorian and quarterback, he earned his undergraduate degree at Brown, medical degree at Harvard, and doctorate in anthropology at Harvard.
I'm thrilled at this milestone in the Wheelock Succession. While the College has not yet been led by a woman or an African-American, naming an Asian-American President-Elect is a great step forward for Dartmouth. While Kim is neither the first non-WASP in the Succession -- both John Kemeny and James Freedman were Jewish -- nor the first foreign-born President of Dartmouth (Kemeny was Hungarian), this was an unexpected choice by my alma mater. It represents, I believe, the continuation of a very positive direction for Dartmouth, taking it that much farther from its unfortunate image as the home of the odious Dartmouth Review and the likes of D'Souza and Ingraham.
It says something about my own wonkiness, I suppose, that one of the first things I did after learning of the selection of Dr. Kim was to search for his political contributions on the FEC website. I very much like what I found -- a solid contribution to the Obama campaign, and he maxed-out to Sherrod Brown in the 2006 cycle. In addition, he wrote a nice check to Brown's America Works PAC. Dr. Kim's wife, pediatrician Younsook Lim, also contributed significantly to Brown and his leadership PAC. One has to wonder why they are so highly supportive of Senator Brown, as they have no connections to Ohio that I can see.