Meet the new Penn board chair who will help pick the university’s next president

As new chairman of the University of Pennsylvania’s 49-member board of trustees, venture capitalist Ramanan Raghavendran will lead at a crucial time for the Ivy League school, Philadelphia’s largest private employer.

He replaces investment banker Scott Bok, who quit as chair last month following the departure of university president Liz Magill under pressure from billionaire donors, Jewish alumni, politicians, and other critics.

Under Penn’s board statutes, Raghavendran will convene a consultation committee of “trustees, deans, faculty, staff, and students” and a search committee mostly from consultation committee members to review candidates for Magill’s replacement. The trustees’ executive committee will recommend a final candidate to the board for a vote.

Calls for Magill’s ouster and other changes at Penn were led by Apollo Global Management leader Marc Rowan and fellow billionaires on Penn’s Wharton School advisory board, who said Penn administrators were not clear or forceful in rejecting staff, student, and visitor statements against Jews and Israel. Penn’s undergraduate student body is about one-sixth Jewish, higher than the general population, but half of what it was in the 1980s.

After Magill’s resignation, Rowan sent trustees a warning that Penn’s next president may fare no better if the trustees and other leaders don’t change the “culture” and review the “political orientation” of the Ivy League university.

Raghavendran was approved unanimously Jan. 4 as chair by his fellow trustees.

He graduated from Penn in 1989 with bachelor’s degrees in computer science from Penn’s engineering school and economics from Penn’s Wharton business school. Hired initially by management consultant McKinsey & Co., he took South Asia and global tech investing roles at East Coast venture capital organizations, including General Atlantic, Insight Partners, TH Lee Putnam, Kubera, and Staley Capital. Since 2012 he has chaired his own India-focused “social venture” firm, Amasia.

Mid-career he earned a master’s in liberal arts from Penn, joined the trustees and the executive committee, and headed the Penn Arts and Sciences advisory board.

Raghavendran’s appointment has been cheered by longtime fans such as Vijay Kumar, dean of Penn’s engineering school.

Kumar said he and colleagues are grateful that Raghavendran has accepted this responsibility, calling him “the kind of alum Benjamin Franklin might have imagined — someone who understands the ‘useful,’ which our students learn from professional schools, and the ‘ornamental,’ which is about human, societal values and, of course, the arts and humanities. More importantly, he is a great listener, thoughtful and deliberate in his approach, and a problem solver.”

Hopes are high among some critics of past administrations, too.

“I hope that Penn’s administrators and board under Raghavendran will foster a campus environment that de-emphasizes identitarianism and oppressor-against-oppressed paradigms, and rather cultivates a campus where opinions, ideas, or political preferences may be grappled with, debated, and heard,” said Aseem R. Shukla, a professor of surgery. “I am eager to see the end of an era where campus administrators and the loudest faculty wield veto power on who can speak and what ideas may be expressed.”

Raghavendran agreed to respond to several Inquirer questions, though he declined to comment on the controversies that led to Bok’s and Magill’s resignations. The interview was edited for clarity and space.

Primarily out of a sense of duty. I owe Penn and its people much of what is good in my life. We were in a difficult moment, and I felt a deep sense of obligation to stand up and be counted.

The great goals of the institution — for instance our core educational mission of advancing knowledge and tackling hard problems — continue to be our North Stars. For me personally, I am most focused on rebuilding trust and connection with the entire Penn community: faculty, students, alumni, parents, staff, and more.

We are very, very lucky to have [Penn medical school dean J. Larry Jameson, as interim president] — I believe Dr. Jameson could be the president of any leading higher education institution in the world.

I believe all such positions come with pressure. That is true in every realm of human endeavor. And yet there is a steady supply of motivated, talented, passionate, and experienced human beings who emerge, every time. Penn is an extraordinary institution and for the right person will be an extraordinary opportunity.

As I said on the occasion of my announcement as board chair, I believe great American universities, like the University of Pennsylvania, are the most important repositories of all that defines, and is good and laudable about, our modern civilization. Penn’s purpose, from its founding to this moment, is to create knowledge, share it for good, and educate the next generation. Our job as leaders is to continue to support that purpose.

Pretty much every student at Penn, then and now, is bright and driven. [My] path … reflects my milieu in India, where I attended high school; that was a very engineering-centric cohort. Coming to Penn completely opened my eyes to all the possibilities of a flexible educational environment. Academics were certainly always a priority in my family, but since my father was a fighter pilot, it is fair to say this was a new direction for my family.

The one theme I would call out from my professional career that is directly relevant to my Penn work is the idea of serving as a trusted counselor to the CEO. That has been essentially the entirety of my professional life in venture capital.

That role, and the “style” that comes with it, has been of great help to me [including in positions at Penn]. At each stage, with each new role, I have always sought to be a trusted counselor and to bring a deep appreciation for the complex stresses that leaders face while, of course, always holding people accountable, as they do me.

Inherent in doing two undergraduate degrees at once is the misfortune of having most of your elective options evaporate. As a result, I felt a consistent gap in my education, specifically in the humanities and the social sciences.

I was made aware of the Penn [masters of liberal arts] program by a friend, and it immediately felt like the right fit. It is essentially a part-time degree program in the liberal arts for working professionals with busy lives. I took courses in anthropology, sociology, and creative writing, and wrote a capstone project on identity. It was a life-changing experience, and I cannot recommend it enough for anyone interested in the liberal arts.

My Stanford M.L.A., while bearing the same degree name, is somewhat different. I am midway through it and expect I will need to put it on hold, as the limited “discretionary time” bucket just evaporated. I expect to write a thesis on digital culture.

Hand-wringing about the humanities has been going on for a very, very long time. I can tell you that the humanities at Penn are thriving and prospering — in terms of undergraduate and graduate interest, quality of academic work, donor support, any number of other criteria.

As for my own interests, as can be seen by my pursuit of the M.L.A.s, I am a true believer in the importance of the liberal arts for a well-rounded education. I see it even in my dual-degree classmates from long ago — almost invariably the courses they remember and treasure the most are in the liberal arts.

My day job is all about technology and business. I really wanted my Penn work to be very different, and it was logical to go deep into the liberal arts.

Penn has welcomed undergraduates and graduate students from India for a long time. What you are seeing more of at places like Penn simply reflects the continuing changes in societal demographics. This is not especially notable in my view. We have seen similar ebbs and flows at other times with other communities, and I expect this will be different in 30 years and 100 years.