Miami Provost Named New GW President

The chief academic and budget officer of the University of Miami in Florida — not to be confused with Miami University in Ohio — will become George Washington University’s 17th president Aug. 1, succeeding Steven Knapp. On Jan. 6, GW’s board of trustees voted unanimously to approve Thomas J. LeBlanc as the next leader of D.C.’s largest university.

Knapp, whose total annual compensation topped $1 million, will conclude his 10-year tenure in July.

Executive vice president and provost of the Coral Gables-based university since 2005, LeBlanc, 61, was previously dean of the faculty of arts, sciences and engineering at the University of Rochester in New York. Both universities, and GW, are private institutions with medical and law schools, among other graduate and professional schools.

LeBlanc was also a professor of computer science and electrical and computer engineering at the University of Miami, which has about the same number of undergraduate students as George Washington (11,000), a smaller overall student body (17,000 vs. GW’s 26,000) and a budget three times as large ($3 billion-plus vs. GW’s $1 billion).

He served as the University of Miami’s interim president in 2015, until former Mexican Minister of Health Julio Frenk took over as the official successor to Donna Shalala. (Shalala, Bill Clinton’s secretary of Health and Human Services, is now president of the Clinton Foundation.) In 2007-08, LeBlanc chaired the team that evaluated GW for reaccreditation by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education.

The new president, who is married with two grown sons, holds a bachelor’s degree from the State University of New York at Plattsburgh and master’s and doctoral degrees in computer science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

The 19-member search committee was chaired by Madeleine Jacobs, executive director and CEO of the American Chemical Society. “I believe we have found the ideal person to lead the university into its third century,” said GW Board of Trustees Chair Nelson Carbonell.

Founded in 1821 as Columbian College on what is now Meridian Hill, George Washington University relocated to Foggy Bottom in 1873 and took its current name in 1904.