Julio Frenk Is Bringing His Vision of Inclusivity to UCLA

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When Julio Frenk steps into the role of chancellor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in January, after nearly nine years as president of the University of Miami, he will be the first Latino to hold the top job in the school’s 105-year history.

What guides his leadership is the concept he calls “reciprocating the generosity of strangers.” “It’s the idea of accepting people who are very different from you, who speak differently, and live differently,” Frenk, 70, says. His Jewish father fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s for Mexico, where, despite the country’s lower economic standard of living, he found people who practiced that philosophy. “It changed my father’s life and made my own possible.”

Frenk, who earned a medical degree in Mexico and has also served as dean of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, sees that mindset as critical for the two fields in which he has built a career—health care and higher education. In health care, he says, “the idea is that the entirety of society is your patient.” As Mexico’s Secretary of Health from 2000 to 2006, he developed a universal insurance program that provided access to health care for 55 million uninsured in the country. As a college administrator, he has been focused on how institutions of higher education can offer a model that serves those outside of academia as well. “What we can do internally within a university [is] to make sure we promote diversity, inclusion in every sense, equity, and the sense of belonging,” he says. “If we do that in the right way, then we are setting an example for our larger society.”