
University of Rochester president Sarah Mangelsdorf has overseen two years of record donations totaling nearly $350 million on the heels of a pandemic, painful social unrest, and campus protests—and against a backdrop of national political pressures on higher education ranging from affordability to ideological expression.
With her contract recently renewed until 2029, Mangelsdorf is credited by key constituencies with a collaborative style that has helped steer Rochester’s largest employer through a tumultuous period. Founded in 1850, UR today has more than 1,000 faculty members and 30,000 staff, with an enrollment that tops 12,000 students.
Inaugurated in October 2019, Mangelsdorf remembers a sense of excitement as she spoke at Meliora Weekend that year. She was on an extensive “listening and learning tour” at the university’s River, medical center, and Eastman School campuses, and traveling the country to meet alumni and engage with local community groups.
That early period, filled with promise, ended abruptly when COVID-19 struck. By March 2020, she would be appointing a coronavirus response team, sending students home, helping the institution shift to remote learning and telework, and furloughing 15 percent of UR’s workforce of 30,000. Public health and fiscal solvency became overarching goals.
Mangelsdorf approached the unprecedented situation with extraordinary attention and trust, recalls Mark Taubman M.D., CEO and dean of the University of Rochester Medical Center from 2010 through 2023. URMC is one of only a handful of academic medical centers still owned by a university and is less wealthy than its peers.
The medical enterprise—the top clinical care referral center for Western New York and one of the highest-ranked medical schools in the country—desperately needed updates to maintain state-of-the-art health care and adequately serve the region in a rapidly evolving health care environment.
“She came into a situation where we were making plans to spend a billion dollars,” Taubman says, referring to the expansion now underway at Strong Memorial Hospital and the recently built Orthopaedics and Physical Performance Center at Marketplace Mall in Henrietta.
Even without a then-mysterious, deadly virus bearing down and a financial “roller coaster” due to a state-mandated shutdown of elective procedures, Taubman says, many new leaders would have paused such ambitious spending while they learned more about the university’s needs.
“She took a look at the situation, and decided that leadership of the medical center knew what we were doing,” Taubman says. “She took time to understand what it was all about. She was fully supportive of both endeavors. Extraordinary.”
Similarly, Mangelsdorf trusted Taubman on decisions about URMC management as the nightmarish illness gripped New York City, an early infection zone for the novel coronavirus.
“She gave me the message: You guys know what you’re doing. You run the clinical show.”
At the same time on the River Campus, Mangelsdorf impressed political science professor Gerald Gamm, then a co-chair of the Faculty Senate.
“We’ve had many strong presidents at the University of Rochester,” Gamm says. “She has brought an openness that I’ve never seen.”
A collaborative leader
Mangelsdorf arrived more than a year after the resignation of President Joel Seligman, who came under fire when women accused the university of failing to address claims of sexual harassment against a professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Gamm says Seligman, in office from 2005 to 2018, brought incredible energy and drove growth in enrollment, construction, international relations and business programs, but by 2018 many faculty felt a disconnect with the administration.
Mangelsdorf, a professor of psychology, was selected in part due to her collaborative style when the university community needed to heal, Taubman says. She had most recently been provost at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, overseeing all academic programs and budget planning for 12 schools and colleges. Before that, Mangelsdorf was the dean of arts and sciences at Northwestern University.

Taubman notes that amid tumult internally and externally, Rochester and its university are adapting to a massive transition in the regional economy, now led by a nonprofit organization when the largest employer for decades had been Eastman Kodak Co.
“Rochester comes from a history where Kodak was running the town, with huge profits that they put back into the community,” Taubman says. “Now it’s a nonprofit with a medical center, research and education. We can’t solve the problems the way Kodak could, but being forward facing, and Sarah recognizes this, the university now has a responsibility to deal with the issues of the community.”
When the pandemic hit in early 2020, Gamm remembers Mangelsdorf immediately reaching out to faculty leadership for guidance on financial cuts. URMC—ordered by then Gov. Andrew Cuomo to cancel elective procedures—accounts for more than 80 percent of the university budget. The institution also needed to quickly adapt to online education, Gamm says.
“She wanted to understand how reductions would affect different faculty in different ways. It was genuinely refreshing,” he says. “She was willing to open up the university books to us.
“It turned out fine,” Gamm adds. “The reductions were minor and temporary, and many were reversed and paid back. But it signaled something important about her way of working.”
Mangelsdorf asked to sit in on Faculty Senate meetings and invited its leaders to attend her sessions with university administrators, Gamm says. That kind of consultation has continued into current issues such as antiwar protests on campus.
New challenges
“The last year has been a very painful year for the campus,” Gamm says, referring to students protesting the bombing of Gaza after terrorists attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Several students faced suspension in the spring for violating policies on protests, and university staff removed protest encampments in the weeks leading up to graduation ceremonies in May.
“No person would say Sarah made the right decisions in every case,” Gamm says, “but she’s listening consistently to every constituency on campus—students, faculty, trustees, community members.”
In July, Mangelsdorf wrote for the research publication Elsevier and reflected on her decision-making, concluding that the campus would need to impose some limits on speech and protests.
“We must find ways to engage our communities and learn to talk across our differences,” she wrote. “Higher education is meant to be a context where such discussions can happen, a ‘marketplace of ideas.’ I think this ideal is often met, but the events of this past year made that ideal harder to achieve.”
She notes that administrators were working to identify students who had staged a “die-in” on a River Campus lawn during alumni events Sept. 28. As protests took over parts of the campus last spring—including students occupying the administration building three times and 17 demonstrations including shouting through bullhorns in a library—Mangelsdorf says she came to learn that the institution already had guidelines for protests that were rarely enforced.

She received forceful pushback from some faculty members who argued that the campus needed to support demonstrations as a normal part of democracy, something that young people do when they are distressed—that it is part of their education.
While she agrees, the university also has a responsibility to maintain its own operations.
“I don’t want to say I never want students to feel uncomfortable,” she says. “But I don’t want them to feel harassed or physically at risk.”
Mangelsdorf expects considerable discussion about this issue with other presidents at a meeting of the American Association of Universities later this month.
Jeffrey McCune, chair of the university’s Frederick Douglass Institute and Department of Black Studies, says the protests have brought the university to an inflection point in prompting more discussion and instruction about culture and race. The university is hosting speakers and discussion events to encourage difficult conversations.
He says Mangelsdorf was instrumental in hiring him from Washington University in St. Louis in 2020 to build a department infrastructure. She has made several appointments that expand diversity in faculty and leadership, including the newly created position of vice president for student life with an enhanced focus on creating a sense of belonging for all students.
“A university is about questions,” McCune says. “What does it mean that we have: a woman president? An influx of Black and Brown students? What does it mean, how do we accommodate Palestinian students? We can’t just be like, ‘don’t be Palestinian today.’ I think that what President Mangelsdorf helps us do is really explore who we are.”
Mangelsdorf is also said to be intent on helping Rochester know more about the university. Shaun Nelms, who served as superintendent of the East High School partnership with UR, now works as the university’s vice president for community partnerships and as a special adviser to the president. The East partnership had bidirectional benefits, touching about two dozen departments, from medical center vision care to mental health, resulting in better services and education, Nelms says, and he expects such relationships to grow in the city, suburbs and rural areas of the region.

Mangelsdorf is open and accessible, Nelms says.
“She allows us to unpack a problem, and empowers those who are best able to solve it. She’s not against pivoting as long as we stay true to university values and purpose,” he says.
Mangelsdorf says it’s a challenging time in higher education. Colleges and universities have been under scrutiny for many years on affordability, and faced regulation under the Obama administration to provide public data about return on investment. In more recent years, schools have faced claims from the right that instruction is too liberal.
If she could wave a magic wand, Mangelsdorf says, she would clear up misconceptions about how a place like UR compares to seemingly less-expensive schools, because most students qualify for enough aid that Rochester will be the better deal. In 2024-25, UR’s tuition before financial aid is $65,870.
Over the past year, Mangelsdorf has visited 14 cities to discuss the university’s strategic planning, simultaneously raising $170 million in fiscal 2023 and $175 million in fiscal 2024. She declines to discuss the campaign further, saying announcements are planned in the anniversary year of 2025. A master planning process is underway that is specific to facilities.
“I believe that education changes people’s lives,” Mangelsdorf says. “And the research that we conduct also changes people’s lives—whether we’re talking about more basic research that informs future scholarship or a deeper understanding of how the world works.”
She recalls a sabbatical earlier in her career, at Leiden University in the Netherlands, which dates to 1575.
“These institutions have withstood the test of time,” Mangelsdorf says.
Janice Bullard is a freelance journalist and author of ”Our Work Is But Begun: A History of the University of Rochester 1850-2005.” The Beacon welcomes comments and letters from readers who adhere to our comment policy including use of their full, real name. Submissions to the Letters page should be sent to [email protected].
That was a great article about such an important institution in Rochester. It outlines the value and power of collaborative leadership, a style very much at the center of our business and political transformation.
This Beacon article is important. The U of R’s recognition of a Kodak-like “biggest employer” opportunity to enhance life in Rochester must be communicated so the community can actively collaborate.
As a past Kodak medical director, I can attest to the shared community and business benefits. U of R profitably can be enhanced by well selected efforts. Bonus to the U of R: beloved employers get top people, the most important asset (George Eastman’s observation).
Janice, perhaps you can do a follow-up article that describe mechanisms for community input to the U of R processes of selecting high value efforts to champion?
As an example, I propose that the U of R assume a leadership role in correcting the low vitamin D levels in our community. High latitude, low levels of D in our diet, and indoor occupations are the main causes. Dark skin. obesity, and diabetes drive levels of D even lower. Cancer, Heart Disease, Depression, Diabetes, Alzheimer’s, Infections, and many other problems will be decreased by population vitamin D sufficiency, with perhaps 2 years of healthspan gained, thus lower healthcare costs and misery while increasing workforce productivity.
Supplementation to the optimal 50 ng/ ml is safe and cheap. With the credibility and health resources of U of R leadership, this sufficiency will be more widespread and even cheaper. Until then, get your level of D checked and supplement with a morning dose selected by your physician.