VP Lorimer retiring in April

When Rick Levin ’74PhD became president of Yale in 1993, his first appointment was Linda Koch Lorimer ’77JD.

At the 15-year mark, Levin called Lorimer “my right hand and senior counselor since the day I was inaugurated.”

Now, Lorimer will become the second long-serving university officer to retire after Levin’s own decision to step down last year.

“It is almost impossible to capture in a single message the breadth and depth of Linda’s contribution to the life of this institution,” President Peter Salovey ’86PhD wrote today, announcing that Lorimer—whose current title is vice president for global and strategic initiatives—will retire in April “after twenty-nine years of extraordinary service to Yale.”

A Yale Law School graduate, Lorimer returned to her alma mater in 1978 as a young lawyer in the new Office of General Counsel. (A coworker, Dorothy Robinson, took the office’s helm in 1985 and retired this year as general counsel and vice president, also after 29 years.)

Lorimer left Yale in 1987 to become president of Randolph–Macon Woman’s College (now Randolph College) in Virginia. She was elected to the Yale Corporation in 1990; three years later, Levin recruited her back to New Haven full-time as university secretary.

“Linda has guided an amazingly diverse set of departments—from the Office of International Affairs to campus security, public affairs, the Yale Press, and the Association of Yale Alumni—and she leaves every unit stronger,” Salovey writes.

Among other initiatives, she created the Office of New Haven & State Affairs, greatly increasing Yale’s involvement in real estate development and other local matters. And she led the planning for Yale–NUS College, the controversial collaboration with the National University of Singapore. (She is also a longtime member of the board of directors of Yale Alumni Publications Inc., which oversees this magazine.)

After April, Lorimer will continue part-time through December 2016 as senior counselor to the president. “She will help the provost and me with special projects and continue to supervise the Office of Digital Dissemination and Online Education,” Salovey writes.

For a fuller overview of Lorimer’s career, see the YaleNews article from the Office of Public Affairs & Communications.

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The Yale Alumni Magazine is published by Yale Alumni Publications Inc., an alumni-based nonprofit that is not run by Yale University. Its content does not necessarily reflect the views of the university administration.