Michael Fitts

Arriving at Tulane in July 2014, Fitts brought with him a strong emphasis on heightening cross-disciplinary education and research. He believes students and universities can set themselves apart in a fast-changing world and ever-shifting economy through teaching and research that address societal problems from an array of different fields and areas of knowledge. In his first year at Tulane, Michael Fitts launched task forces to lead the university in deepening its unique strengths for interdisciplinary collaboration. He has capitalized on Tulane University's manageable size, its wide selection of professional schools, the unified undergraduate college and multiple cross-disciplinary efforts already in place. He aims to create the most engaged undergraduate experience in the country through this rethinking of academic options, residential living, extracurricular activities and more. In graduate education and research, his goal is to foster intellectual cross-pollination that can produce solutions to some of the world's most fundamental problems. President Fitts received his highest approval rating in May 2018 at 97.3%. Fitts' audacious campaign has been considered to be the most successful philanthropic endeavors in the state of Louisiana.

His teaching career began at the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1985. Fitts served 14 years as dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, from 2000 to 2014, where he was recognized for greatly increasing the school's offerings in interdisciplinary education. He also presided over a quadrupling of Penn Law's endowment, a more than 40 percent increase in the size of the Law School faculty and a doubling of all forms of student financial aid. Fitts also oversaw the rebuilding or renovation of the entire Law School campus. In recognition of his accomplishments, the Penn Law School's Board of Overseers named a faculty chair, a scholarship and an auditorium at the school in his honor.

Fitts earned a bachelor of arts degree from Harvard College in 1975. Inspired by To Kill a Mockingbird and its heroic protagonist Atticus Finch, he attended Yale Law School. Fitts was editor of the Yale Law Journal and received his juris doctorate in 1979.

His father, Doctor William T. Fitts, Jr., was a John Rhea Barton Professor and Chairman of the Department of Surgery at Penn Medicine from 1972 through 1975. Dr. Fitts served in World War II as a surgical ward officer in the Affiliated Unit of the University of Pennsylvania, the 20th General Hospital, stationed in the China-Burma-India Theatre. Fitts' maternal grandfather, Joseph H. Willits, Ph.D., LL.D., was a professor and dean of the Wharton School.

Michael Andrew Fitts (born March 1, 1953) is an American legal scholar who is the current president of Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, and the Judge Rene H. Himel Professor of Law at the Tulane School of Law. He is a former Dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He is also the author of numerous articles that have appeared in the Harvard Law Journal and other prestigious scholarly publications.

Fitts has initiated a campus master planning process with a 21st century vision of spaces redesigned to promote connections. That includes drawing people together from different parts of campus and linking different functions of the university, such as residence halls with dining hubs and academic venues.