John Sexton (SD)

As a college student, John Sexton barely scraped together a 2.1 GPA. Today, he is the pioneering president of New York University, setting it on an ambitious path to become the U.S.'s leading global university. The son of an alcoholic -- by age ten, he was searching for his lawyer-father in the gutters of Brooklyn -- Sexton was an academic late bloomer. He spent 15 years as the volunteer coach of a high school girls' debate team, taking them to two national championships, and only then did he enter law school, graduating at age 37 from Harvard. From that moment, his rise was meteoric. He landed a coveted clerkship with the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Warren Burger, and, less than ten years out of law school, he was picked as Dean of the New York University Law School. Under Sexton's leadership, NYU became one of the nation's premier law schools and Sexton himself pioneered a new form of global law study. In 2002, he became NYU's president, and also served on the Board of Governors for the New York Federal Reserve. At NYU, he has challenged conventional university notions of tenure to attract leading academic stars to full-time undergraduate teaching. His fascination with globalization has inspired him to create an NYU campus in Abu Dhabi, slated to open in 2010. His philosophy of education is that the academic quest must include answering the question: "Am I living a useful life?"