Who is Jeffery Sean Lehman?

New Delhi: Jeffery Sean Lehman is extremely busy these days as he has enormous task in hand these days. He works day and night to complete his job. His job is really huge as he has to announce the successor of N.Naranyana Murthy,the founder chairman of Infosys Technologies Limited. In fact, he is heading the search committee that is to find the replacement of Murthy.

Lehman is an American scholar, lawyer and academic administrator. He is the chancellor and founding dean of the School of Transnational Law at Peking University, in south China's Shenzhen city. He is best known for serving as the 11th president of Cornell University from 2003 until 2005. A native of Bronxville, New York, Lehman is a member of the Cornell class of 1977, the first alumnus of that institution to serve as its president. 

While a student at Cornell , Lehman was active in the Alpha Phi Omega fraternity and co-wrote the book 1000 Ways to Win Monopoly Games on the way to earning his undergraduate degree in mathematics . He went on to receive a J.D. and a M.P.P. from the University of Michigan. After receiving his law degree, he served as law clerk for Chief Judge Frank M. Coffin of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and later clerked for Associate Justice John Paul Stevens of the U.S. Supreme Court .

After practicing law in Washington, D.C. , Lehman returned to the University of Michigan in 1987 to serve on the faculty of the law school. He also served as a visiting professor at Yale Law School and the University of Paris . Named Dean of Michigan Law in 1994, he, along with then University President Lee Bollinger , received national attention in the 2003 Supreme Court case of Grutter v. Bollinger , in which the University largely succeeded in defending the law school's affirmative action admissions policies. 

He was named the 11th president of Cornell University on December 14, 2002 and assumed the duties of that office on July 1, 2003. As president of Cornell, he oversaw effective large-scale fundraising efforts. In 2004, Cornell ranked third in the nation in university fundraising (behind only Harvard and Stanford ), raising over US$375 million that year alone. Lehman was also known for prominently promoting his "three themes": "life in the age of the genome," "wisdom in the age of digital information" and "sustainability in the age of development."

These themes arose from intensive engagement with faculty, students and Cornellians during his first year, a process that won him great respect across campus. Lehman pioneered the concept of a "transnational"university, by opening a medical campus in Doha, Qatar and cooperative education and research arrangements with universities in China, India and Singapore.

During his tenure, Cornell and Lehman were criticized for plans to build a parking lot in " Redbud Woods," drawing particular fire from Cornell and Ithaca environmentalists .

Lehman was a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. from 2005 to 2008. Lehman has also assumed a role as a director of Indian IT firm, Infosys Technologies Limited , whose then-chairman, N. R. Narayana Murthy , had been appointed to the Cornell Board of Trustees during Lehman's tenure as President.
 

In 2008 Lehman was named the chancellor and founding dean of the School of Transnational Law at PekingUniversity 's Shenzhen campus. The school is modeled on the American style of law school, and it is intended that graduates will be eligible to sit for the New York bar exam.