Julio Frenk, a public health expert who has led the University of Miami since 2015, was named on Wednesday as the next permanent chancellor of the University of California, Los Angeles. He will oversee an elite public institution still reeling from intense protests and a violent attack on student demonstrators that occurred this spring.
Dr. Frenk will become the first Latino to lead U.C.L.A., whose student body is one of American higher education’s most diverse. He will succeed Gene Block, who will step down at the end of July.
Dr. Block’s 17-year tenure saw the university enhance its academic reputation by attracting more research dollars and top-notch students, but it ended with outcry over his administration’s response to pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
“We’ve had a lot of controversy and a lot of things going on,” Richard Leib, chairman of the University of California Board of Regents, told Dr. Frenk on Wednesday. “You’re a man of healing who can help bring this campus together.”
Dr. Frenk, 70, was born in Mexico City — his grandparents had fled Germany in the 1930s — and served as Mexico’s secretary of health from 2002 to 2006. Soon after, he became the dean of Harvard’s School of Public Health; he left that post in 2015 to take over at the University of Miami.
Every previous chancellor of U.C.L.A has been a white male, a record that stood in contrast to the school’s rich history of racial and ethnic diversity. The city’s first Black mayor, Tom Bradley, was an alumnus, as were the athletic and civil rights icons Jackie Robinson and Arthur Ashe.
Dr. Frenk will not become chancellor until January. The University of California Board of Regents appointed Darnell Hunt, the executive vice chancellor and provost of U.C.L.A., to serve as interim chancellor, starting in August and lasting until Dr. Frenk arrives.
“Students are here to thrive, to learn,” Dr. Frenk said in a news conference Wednesday. “It’s a once-in-a lifetime opportunity. They need to have an environment that allows and enables learning. We need to balance that with a very clear commitment to free expression.”
He added that “there’s no room for any kind of harassment and discrimination in that freedom of expression.”
Mostly, though, Dr. Frenk projected a cautious tone during the news conference, where he sat alongside Mr. Leib and Michael Drake, the president of the University of California system. Dr. Frenk said he wanted to listen to all constituencies, and spoke in generalities even when asked how he had bridged divides in the past.
U.C.L.A. is considered one of the jewels of California higher education, and competition for coveted places in its undergraduate classes has grown ever more intense. The university admitted just 9 percent of applicants for the freshman class that entered last fall.
The university’s athletic teams are joining the Big Ten Conference, which will bring in more revenue for the school but will also require far more travel across the country than in past years, when their opponents were concentrated in the West.
Dr. Frenk has not always been a popular figure in Miami. In 2021, he was condemned by the University of Miami’s faculty senate for firing the dean of the law school. He also drew criticism from fans of Miami’s proud football team, who said he did not care enough about athletics. (Dr. Block has faced similar criticism at U.C.L.A., where the athletic program has run at a deficit in recent years.)
But Dr. Frenk was not tested in Miami by anything like the protests that have roiled his future campus in recent months.
In April, a protest encampment that sprawled across a central quad at U.C.L.A. was allowed to stand for several days, in marked contrast with the University of Southern California, where administrators called in Los Angeles Police Department officers to arrest protesters within hours after an encampment began there.
The U.C.L.A. encampment attracted one of the nation’s largest counterprotests from Israel supporters, who held a rally next to the encampment and erected a large monitor displaying images of the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas. Some Jewish students said that pro-Palestinian protesters had started to block their access to certain parts of campus.
Then, on the night of April 30, a large group of people whom Dr. Block later described as “instigators,” and who appeared largely to be unaffiliated with the university, attacked the pro-Palestinian encampment, shooting fireworks and beating some protesters. Law enforcement officers stood by for hours without intervening. The following night, police officers in riot gear dismantled the pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel encampments and arrested more than 200 people.
Dr. Block narrowly avoided a formal rebuke by the faculty’s governing body over the university’s handling of the matter. When he was called to testify before a congressional committee about how universities have combated antisemitism on their campuses, Dr. Block, who is Jewish, said the university should have dismantled the pro-Palestinian encampment earlier.
College leaders across the country are facing profound challenges, including budget shortfalls, political polarization and turbulence on campus. An unusually large number of American universities now have vacancies at the top to fill.
Security has been tight on the U.C.L.A. campus since the first encampment was dismantled in early May. More than 20 pro-Palestinian protesters were arrested on the campus Monday night.
On Wednesday, the Luskin Center, the campus building where the University of California regents voted to appoint Dr. Frenk, was surrounded by a chain-link fence. Dozens of security guards stood at entrances to the center, and police officers patrolled the grounds. Outside the building, about 100 members of the University of California system’s largest employee union, which went on strike at some campuses over the treatment of pro-Palestinian protesters, waved signs and chanted.
Jonathan Wolfe contributed reporting from Los Angeles. Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
