NYU President Emeritus Honored as Science “Trailblazer”
Education, humility, laughter, faith, and baseball are just some of the guiding principles in the life of scholar and leader John E. Sexton.
Published May 4, 2026
By Nick Fetty
An already accomplished legal scholar and education leader, John E. Sexton, PhD, has yet another award for his trophy case.
The New York Academy of Sciences honored Prof. Sexton with its 2026 Trailblazer Award during the second annual Spring Soirée, hosted on April 21st at the University Club in New York City. Linda G. Mills, PhD, current President of NYU, took to the stage to introduce Prof. Sexton and the award. NYU was an Academic Patron-level sponsor for the event.
“There are leaders who steer institutions, and then there are those who chart entirely new paths. Tonight, as we honor my dear friend and colleague John Sexton, we celebrate someone who didn’t just follow the trajectory of higher education, he redrew the map,” Prof. Mills said. “John has left an indelible mark on every corner of our beloved New York University.”
Sanctitas, Scientia, Sanitas
Prof. Sexton then took to the stage to accept the award. He recalled a commencement address he gave to his high school alma mater more than six decades ago. The address was about the Latin motto of the now-defunct Brooklyn Preparatory School in Crown Heights: Sanctitas, Scientia, Sanitas. He translated this to “Take care of the mind, the body, and the soul.”
“In those days we believed in a common. We believed in institutions. We believed in leaders. And we believed that it was worth sacrificing for that commonweal,” said Prof. Sexton. “We live in times when all of those things that we took for granted back when I gave those speeches, are under attack. [These are no longer] axioms of our society.”
During his five-year stint as Chair of the Academy’s Board of Governors, he said it was the intelligent and passionate individuals who made the extraordinary happen. He called the Academy’s current leadership, President Nicholas Dirks and Board Chair Peter Salovey, PhD, a “one-two punch.”
Prof. Sexton is just the second person to receive this honor after the inaugural award was bestowed upon AI pioneer Yann LeCun during the 2025 Spring Soirée.
A Legal Scholar and Academic Administrator
Early in his career, Prof. Sexton served as a professor of religion at Saint Francis College in Brooklyn, which included chairing the department for six years. After completing his PhD in the History of American Religion from Fordham University, and a JD magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, he served as a Law Clerk to Chief Justice Warren Burger of the United States Supreme Court.
Much of his professional career has straddled law scholarship and academic administration. He joined the faculty of NYU’s Law School in 1981 and ascended to the rank of Dean in 1988. Prof. Sexton became the 15th president of NYU in 2002 and served in that role until 2015. He also served as Chair of the Academy’s Board of Governors between 2007 and 2011.
Baseball and Religion
Prof. Sexton remains committed to his Catholic faith, even though his late wife and children were raised Jewish. He is also a baseball fan and a devotee of the Yankees, though he was a Dodgers fan prior to the team leaving Brooklyn for Los Angeles in 1957. He combined his love of the game with his theological scholarship in an NYU course he taught called “Baseball as a Road to God.” He borrowed this title for a book he published in 2014.
“The real idea of the course,” he told The New York Times in 2012, “is to develop heightened sensitivity and a noticing capacity. So baseball’s not ‘the’ road to God. For most of us, it isn’t ‘a’ road to God. But it’s a way to notice, to cause us to live more slowly and to watch more keenly and thereby to discover the specialness of our life and our being, and, for some of us, something more than our being.”
Prof. Sexton’s humility came through throughout the night at the Soirée. In his closing remarks, he joked that he receiving such an honor was like the classic Sesame Street segment One of These Things (Is Not Like the Others).
“It’s kind of fun not being the one that belongs with the others because I get to watch you people do miraculous things,” Prof. Sexton concluded. “There’s never been a time when thought has been more under challenge. And there’s never been a time when gathering as a community of thought has been more important.”
