Harold T. Shapiro will leave Princeton University after the end of the current academic year following 13 years as president.
Shapiro announced his plan to leave on Sept. 22, in a regularly scheduled meeting with the university's board of trustees.
According to Robert H. Rawson, Jr., chair of the Princeton trustee executive committee, the university will be sad to see him go.
"Thanks to his vision, his sensitivity to the concerns of everyone in the Princeton family, and his unlimited energy, Harold Shapiro has provided extraordinary leadership for Princeton over these past 12 years -- strengthening its faculty and its student body, enhancing its programs of teaching and research, revitalizing its campus and dramatically increasing its endowment," he told the Princeton community.
Shapiro was the 18th president of Princeton. He is a Canada native and received his Ph.D. in economics from Princeton in 1964. After serving as president of the University of Michigan for eight years, he returned to Princeton.
As well as being president, he also holds an appointment at Princeton as professor of economics and public affairs. After leaving the university, he plans to return to full-time teaching and research.
Following Shapiro's announcement, the board of trustees formed a search committee to look for the 19th president of Princeton.
The president search committee will be composed of nine trustees, five faculty members, three students and one staff member.
According to a letter sent from Rawson to the community, the committee is working on a short timeframe and is expected to convene for the first time in October.
Student government president PJ Kim '01 will be one of the two undergraduates serving on the 18-member committee. Kim -- who has been authorized by the trustees to select the other student for the committee -- received about 100 applications for the position.
The university's graduate student body will be represented on the committee by graduate student government chair Lauren Hale.
The resignation of Shapiro makes Princeton the third Ivy League school to be in search of a president. Both Brown and Harvard Universities are currently without presidents.
Harvard's president of 10 years, Neil L. Rudenstine, resigned last May citing the end of the university's capital campaign and the stresses of the job.
Brown's Gordon Gee shocked the Ivy League and the academic community by stepping down from his post February 2000 after only two years in the position, becoming chancellor of Vanderbilt University.
