Caltech Confirms Don Michael Randel as the Inauguration Ceremony Keynote Speaker

Caltech is pleased to announce that University of Chicago President Emeritus Don Michael Randel will deliver an address at the inauguration of Thomas F. Rosenbaum. The ceremony will take place on Friday, October 24, at 2 p.m. on Beckman Mall.

Don Michael Randel serves as chair of the board of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation's oldest and most prestigious learned societies. He is president emeritus of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and of the University of Chicago, and he has served as provost of Cornell University and as dean of Cornell's College of Arts and Sciences. Prior to his administrative service, Dr. Randel served for 32 years as a member of Cornell's faculty in the department of music.

A prominent musicologist, Dr. Randel earned his degrees (bachelor's, master's, and doctorate in music) at Princeton University. His scholarly expertise is in Spanish and French music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. As a music historian, Dr. Randel is widely published, particularly on medieval liturgical chant. He has also written on topics as varied as Arabic music theory, Latin American popular music, and 15th-century French music and poetry.

From July 2006 to March 2013, Dr. Randel was president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, an organization dedicated to supporting the arts and humanities as well as higher education. For the preceding six years, he served as president of the University of Chicago. There, he led efforts to strengthen the humanities and the arts on campus while supporting a broad range of interactions with the city of Chicago and further strengthening the university's programs in the physical and biomedical sciences and its relationship with Argonne National Laboratory. He also led the university's two-billion-dollar campaign, the largest in its history.

Dr. Randel has served as the editor of the Journal of the American Musicological Society, The Harvard Dictionary of Music, 4th ed., The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music, and The Harvard Concise Dictionary of Music and Musicians. He is also a member of the editorial board of Encyclopedia Britannica.