Date: January 30, 2023
To: The NYU Community
From: William R. Berkley, Chair, NYU Board of Trustees
Re: The Election of Evan Chesler (CAS ‘70, LAW ‘75) as Board Chair-Designate

It is my pleasure to announce that the NYU Board of Trustees has elected Evan Chesler as Chair-Designate. He will take on the role of Chair at the conclusion of my term at the end of August.

A senior partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP who served as the firm’s presiding partner from 2007 to 2012 and its chair from 2013 to 2021, Evan is widely recognized as one of the nation’s leading litigators. A proud graduate of both our College of Arts and Science and our School of Law (where he was named to the Order of the Coif and a John Norton Pomeroy Scholar), he has been an involved and invaluable member of the NYU community for more than five decades. A Trustee since 2006, he has been a respected presence on the Board, often entrusted with leadership roles on important and sensitive matters. Acclaimed professionally and as a Board member for his good judgment, rectitude, wise counsel, savvy, insight and foresight, and down-to-earth warmth and manner, Evan is currently a vice-chair and a co-chair of the Board’s Development Committee. Tapped to chair NYU’s “Momentum Campaign,” which raised more than $1 billion for financial aid, he brought to that assignment his belief in the transformative power of an NYU education and a deep sympathy to issues of affordability, having himself received a scholarship as an NYU undergraduate that was indispensable to his own success.

In addition to his Board service, he is also chair of the Faculty of Arts and Science Board, a member of the NYU School of Law Foundation, an adjunct professor at NYU School of Law, founder and chair of the NYU Lawyer Alumni Mentoring Program (LAMP), and a member of the Board of Advisors for the Center on Civil Justice. Student, alumnus, the parent of two NYU graduates, faculty member, advisor, Board member, and now Trustees Chair-Designate, Evan Chesler is a devoted NYU citizen, through and through.

I know I speak for the entire Board when I say congratulations and express our delight at Evan’s election as Chair-Designate. He has our utmost confidence in his leadership.

For my own part, I simply want to say that it has been the singular honor of my nearly 60 years of affiliation with NYU to have served as Chair. Over the decades, everything I have loved and admired and respected about NYU has only gotten better. I am grateful to the University for the education it gave me and path it set me on, and I am glad to have had a chance, in return, to be of service to its extraordinary advancement. With the naming of Evan Chesler as the incoming Chair of the Board, I am very confident to leave NYU in such good hands.