Tomiko Brown-Nagin, one of the nation’s leading experts in educational law and policy, history, and constitutional law, will be the next dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE), Provost Jenny Martinez announced today.

Brown-Nagin joins Stanford from Harvard Radcliffe Institute, where she has served as dean since 2018. She will begin her appointment as dean of the GSE on Nov. 1, succeeding Daniel L. Schwartz, who has served as the I. James Quillen Dean for the past 11 years.

Brown-Nagin is a distinguished interdisciplinary scholar whose research is deeply entwined with the history of education in the United States and educational law and policy.

A leader in higher education, she has brought that perspective to reimagining what institutions can do for students and communities. While dean of Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Brown-Nagin led the institute through an ambitious five-year strategic vision, broadened a competitive fellowship to include fields from AI to the arts, and expanded opportunities for students to engage with interdisciplinary research, courses, and activities, including launching an emerging leaders program that pairs high school sophomores with Harvard undergraduate mentors – and now one of the largest community service offerings at Harvard.

“Brown-Nagin brings a deep record of interdisciplinary scholarship, strong experience leading organizations and institutional initiatives, and both a professional record and personal style of working with people from varied disciplines and perspectives to advance common goals,” Martinez said. “That integrative approach is well suited to the academic work of the GSE and to the GSE community, and will also help the school continue to build ties across the university. President Levin and I are thrilled to have her join Stanford’s leadership team.”

Since its founding in 1917, the GSE’s faculty, students, and alumni have worked to solve education’s greatest challenges and improve lives through research, teaching, and driving change in practice and policy.

“I came to the GSE because its mission is my mission,” said Brown‑Nagin. “I am deeply purpose‑driven, and I am committed to working alongside this community of innovative and collaborative scholars who are grappling with the most complex problems educators face today to ensure that every student has access to a high‑quality education. I look forward to seeing what we can accomplish together.”

A throughline across all of Brown-Nagin’s research is understanding the relationship between people and institutions and how they influence and interact with educational access and opportunity.

“My research agenda concerns the distribution of opportunities in American society, how law structures opportunities in education, and how people and institutions shape each other,” Brown‑Nagin said. “I’ve long been interested in how education can be a true engine of opportunity.”

“Tomiko Brown-Nagin’s career is an inspiring blend of deep academic excellence, integrative leadership, and a proven commitment to institutional change,” said Daniel McFarland, a professor of education and co-chair of the search committee. “She’s had a career-long focus on civil rights history and equal protection, so she will be a fierce advocate of equitable access to quality education. She’s also had a great deal of experience leading and uniting diverse minds as the dean of the Radcliffe Institute. Those intellectual and leadership experiences make her exceptionally well-suited to leading Stanford’s GSE.”

Brown-Nagin’s commitment to aligning values with institutional practice shaped her leadership at Harvard, where she oversaw university-wide endeavors, including chairing the Presidential Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery and coauthoring the committee’s report detailing the university’s direct, financial, and intellectual ties to slavery. In 2024, she co-chaired Harvard’s Working Group on Open Inquiry and Constructive Dialogue, a cross-campus effort that examined how to enhance a culture of open inquiry and constructive dialogue at Harvard.

Brown-Nagin previously held leadership roles at Harvard Law School, including serving as the faculty director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute (2017–2019) and as codirector of the Program of Study in Law and History (2013–2018).

This is a moment of remarkable opportunity for education, and particularly at the GSE, said Schwartz, who announced in February that he would step down as dean. “There are beautiful new buildings at the heart of the university, new faculty representing the many disciplines that speak to education, strong regional partnerships for teacher training and research, collaborations with technology companies, and a fabulous new dean with intellectual breadth and vibrancy. I look forward to the creative evolution of how the GSE continues to improve lives through learning.”

Schwartz will return to teaching and research full time and continue to lead the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, a university-wide initiative based at the GSE that researches and scales effective learning solutions.

Interdisciplinary problem-solving in the age of AI

For Brown-Nagin, the rapid rise of transformative technologies, including AI, with their potential to both improve and disrupt teaching and learning, has made this an especially consequential time for educators. “In institutions of higher education and for K-12 education, we have to create a way of thinking about AI and a plan for interacting with the technology that centers human flourishing and the important work that educators at all levels perform in the classroom,” she said.

This is a pivotal moment, she said, to reflect meaningfully on what makes us human and how to create a future in which all students thrive. It is also one that the GSE is uniquely positioned to help shape through its scholarship, collaborations with schools and educators, and its engagement with policymakers at all levels of government.

“What excites me about the work of the faculty and students at the GSE is the way the school spans the humanities, the social sciences, the sciences, and so many other fields. That breadth of inquiry is precisely how I think about knowledge creation and production in relation to law and policy,” Brown-Nagin said. “To problem-solve, one needs a variety of cross-cutting expertise. I’m just thrilled to be a part of this community where that is the default way of working.”

Expanding educational opportunity

The GSE’s deep engagement with education policy – anchored by its influential research centers and institutes – also drew Brown-Nagin to the role.

“It’s exactly the kind of environment where I can bring together my legal training, my historical work, and my commitment to educational opportunity to help solve real-world problems,” she said.

Brown-Nagin said she also looks forward to being affiliated with Stanford Law School and the History Department.

Brown-Nagin’s own research has examined the legal and political struggles to expand educational opportunity and equity, with a focus on the civil rights era. She is the author of two books. The New Yorker cited her most recent work, Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality (Pantheon, 2022), as one of the best books of the year, and it won three major prizes, including the Order of the Coif Book Award. Brown-Nagin’s 2011 book, Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement, won the Bancroft Prize in American history, the highest academic award in the field, and five other prizes. She is also an elected member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

At Harvard, she taught courses on constitutional law, American legal history, and education law and policy.

Brown-Nagin is the daughter of a public school teacher: Her mother began her career when Brown-Nagin was in college. Brown-Nagin’s interest in law and education began at an early age, when she learned about Thurgood Marshall, the civil rights lawyer who successfully argued the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case before the United States Supreme Court.

As a student in integrated schools during the 1970s, Brown-Nagin benefited from Marshall’s litigation campaign. “It was a defining experience for me,” Brown-Nagin said. “It also left me with impressions about the still unfinished work to create opportunities for all students from all backgrounds that I very much carry with me.”

A first-generation college student at Furman University, Brown-Nagin earned a Bachelor of Arts in history summa cum laude. Her senior thesis examined how public school desegregation unfolded in South Carolina. Brown-Nagin received a law degree from Yale Law School, where she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal, and a doctorate in history from Duke University.

“Tomiko’s breadth of leadership experience and proven ability to build bridges across disciplines, schools, and institutions will be invaluable as the GSE continues to deepen partnerships across Stanford and expand its impact,” said Phil Halperin, a Stanford alum and chair of the advisory council at the GSE who served as a member of the search committee. “What also stood out is her unshakable commitment to educational excellence and opportunity, which is rooted in her own personal experience and has guided her life’s work as a scholar and leader.”

This story has been edited to reflect corrected start date.