Claremont McKenna College announced the election of legal scholar Hiram E. Chodosh as the next president of the college in an e-mail to the CMC community yesterday evening by Board of Trustees Chair Harry T. McMahon CM ’75 and Presidential Search Committee Chair David. G. Mgrublian CM ’82. Chodosh will begin his presidency July 1, 2013.
Chodosh will be introduced today at CMC’s Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum.
Chodosh, who will be the fifth president of CMC, currently serves as Dean of the S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah. He has written about many topics in international and comparative law.
Pamela Gann, the current president of CMC, announced she would step down from her position after the 2012-2013 school year in an e-mail to the CMC community on May 15. Gann, who has served as president since 1999, also announced that she plans to return to CMC for the 2014-2015 year as a professor of legal studies.
Chodosh graduated from Wesleyan University with a bachelor’s degree in history and received his J.D. from Yale Law School. He later served as a faculty member, adviser and associate dean at Case Western Reserve University School of Law in Cleveland, Ohio.
Chodosh has worked as “an advisor to the U.N. Development Programme in Asia, the World Bank Justice Reform Group, the International Monetary Fund Legal Department, the State Department, and many supreme courts, ministries, and commissions in the Middle East and Asia,” McMahon and Mgrubian wrote.
Despite CMC’s reputation as the most politically conservative of the Claremont Colleges, Chodosh will be the second consecutive CMC president to have given money to a Democratic candidate. A form filed with the Federal Election Commission shows that he donated $1,000 to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008.
McMahon and Mgrubian expressed excitement about the president-elect.
“As an educator and administrator, Hiram is recognized as a leading architect of groundbreaking educational models that enhance the experiences of students,” they wrote. “Additionally, he has developed interdisciplinary research projects, the adaptive use of technology, and global legal education that encourage a culture of social engagement within the world of higher education.”