John Sexton Biography Quotes 31 Report mistakes

Early Life and Formation
John Sexton, born in 1942, is an American educator and legal scholar whose career became closely identified with the transformation of New York University into a global institution. He emerged from a tradition that valued both rigorous intellectual inquiry and public service, and he carried those impulses throughout his professional life. Before rising to national prominence as a university leader, he built a reputation as a thoughtful teacher and institutional builder, cultivating an approach to higher education that fused ambition with a strong sense of community.

Path into Law and Academia
Sexton joined the faculty of the NYU School of Law and quickly became known for his breadth of interests and his ability to connect legal doctrine to larger questions of civic life. A gifted classroom teacher, he proved equally adept at academic administration. He worked alongside colleagues who would shape modern legal education, and he became affiliated with major scholarly projects that marked him as a leading voice in civil procedure and federal litigation. As his responsibilities grew, he developed partnerships across the university and beyond, laying the groundwork for a career that would span scholarship, teaching, and executive leadership.

Dean of NYU School of Law
From 1988 to 2002, Sexton served as dean of the NYU School of Law. The school modernized significantly during his tenure, expanding its faculty, clinics, and research centers. He helped recruit prominent scholars and teachers, elevating the school's profile and securing the resources needed to support ambitious students and programs. His scholarly work was notable as well: he co-authored the widely used casebook Civil Procedure: Cases and Materials with Jack H. Friedenthal, Arthur R. Miller, and Mary Kay Kane, a collaboration that reflected both his doctrinal expertise and his talent for team-oriented academic projects. When he stepped down as dean to lead the wider university, the law school was positioned as one of the premier programs in the country; Richard Revesz succeeded him as dean and continued to build on that trajectory.

President of New York University
In 2002, Sexton became the 15th president of New York University, succeeding Jay Oliva. The transition marked a shift from leading a distinguished professional school to stewarding a large, multifaceted university with campuses, institutes, and hospitals woven through New York City. Working closely with the university's Board of Trustees, and in particular with board chair Martin Lipton, he set out to articulate a comprehensive vision. His goal was to turn NYU into what he called a Global Network University, one that would give students and faculty the opportunity to live and learn across borders while remaining fully integrated into a single academic community.

The Global Network University
Sexton's signature initiative was the creation and expansion of degree-granting campuses outside the United States. Under his leadership, NYU established NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU Shanghai, built in partnership with the government of Abu Dhabi and with East China Normal University and local authorities in Shanghai. These campuses attracted highly competitive students and faculty, developed distinctive curricula, and undertook research programs in fields ranging from the sciences to the humanities. The project was ambitious: it sought not merely to place satellite classrooms abroad but to create genuinely integrated nodes of one university, enabling movement of people and ideas across New York, Abu Dhabi, Shanghai, and a network of study-away sites.

Debates and Controversies
The global expansion, while pathbreaking, was also accompanied by controversy. Faculty in several NYU divisions raised concerns about governance, transparency, and the allocation of resources. In 2013, a number of schools registered votes of no confidence in Sexton, reflecting anxieties about the pace of growth, faculty input into decision-making, and issues connected to labor practices in the construction of facilities in Abu Dhabi. Sexton defended the project's academic integrity and the university introduced measures meant to strengthen oversight and compliance. Throughout this period, he retained the support of the Board of Trustees, with Martin Lipton publicly affirming the strategic rationale and long-term necessity of the global approach. Sexton completed his presidency in 2015; Andrew Hamilton later succeeded him as NYU's president, inheriting a global system that remained the subject of active debate but had become a defining feature of the university.

Scholarship, Teaching, and Public Voice
Alongside his administrative responsibilities, Sexton remained a public teacher. He co-authored the long-standing civil procedure casebook with Jack H. Friedenthal, Arthur R. Miller, and Mary Kay Kane, which influenced generations of law students and instructors. He was also known for a celebrated seminar at NYU on baseball and spirituality, an exploration that led to the book Baseball as a Road to God, written with Thomas Oliphant and Peter J. Schwartz. The book and course captured well his broader educational philosophy: intellectual seriousness combined with an openness to the ordinary experiences that give meaning to people's lives. In building NYU Law, he helped attract major figures, including Ronald Dworkin, whose presence deepened the school's strengths in legal philosophy. Sexton's public lectures and essays often returned to themes of community, pluralism, and the responsibilities that universities bear in democratic societies.

Leadership Style and Collaborators
Sexton's leadership style blended storytelling with strategic planning. He worked closely with trustees, faculty leaders, and deans to advance large projects, from campus development in Greenwich Village to international partnerships. Even his critics acknowledged his ability to articulate a bold vision and to mobilize institutional energy behind it. Within the law school, his collaboration with scholars such as Arthur R. Miller and Mary Kay Kane exemplified his belief in the power of collective intellectual labor. At the university level, he relied on experienced administrators, and his partnership with board chair Martin Lipton was central to the governance of the global expansion. His successors, including Richard Revesz at the law school and Andrew Hamilton in the presidency, reflected a leadership pipeline that continued to carry forward the institution's ambitions.

Personal Life
Sexton's personal life was interwoven with the civic and cultural life of New York. His late wife, Lisa Goldberg, was a prominent philanthropic leader whose work in the nonprofit sector embodied the outward-looking ethos he championed at the university. Friends and colleagues often emphasized that his deepest satisfactions lay in mentoring students and young faculty, and in convening conversations across disciplinary and cultural lines. The baseball seminar, with its blend of narrative and reflection, echoed the way he approached relationships: through shared stories, respect for tradition, and curiosity about the different ways people find meaning.

Legacy and Influence
John Sexton's legacy is defined by two linked achievements: helping to elevate NYU Law into a powerhouse of scholarship and teaching, and reimagining NYU as a global network that offers students and scholars opportunities few other institutions can match. The controversies that attended his presidency are themselves part of that legacy, prompting ongoing debate about governance, academic freedom, and ethical standards in cross-border institutional partnerships. Yet the durable features of his tenure are plain: he championed talent, insisted on outward engagement, and treated the university as a commons sustained by trust and imagination. In colleagues like Martin Lipton and Richard Revesz, in public collaborators such as Thomas Oliphant and Peter J. Schwartz, and in the scholar-teachers he helped recruit, one sees the circle of people who shaped his work and amplified its impact. For many students and faculty who passed through NYU during those years, Sexton stands as an emblem of the aspirations and tensions of 21st-century higher education.

Our collection contains 31 quotes who is written by John, under the main topics: Nature - Art - Legacy & Remembrance - Aging - Teaching.