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Metropolitan Museum of Art Names New President: Daniel Weiss

Daniel H. Weiss, who has been president of Haverford College since 2013, will succeed Emily K. Rafferty at the Met Museum.Credit...Richard Perry/The New York Times

The presidency of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a fund-raising and administrative position that does not require a background in art. But in choosing Daniel H. Weiss to help lead the nation’s largest art museum, the Met has decided to combine both business acumen and scholarly credentials.

Its board voted on Tuesday to elect Mr. Weiss, a medievalist with an M.B.A. who since 2013 has been president of Haverford College in Pennsylvania, as its next president and chief operating officer. In his new job he will oversee day-to-day operations, an endowment of about $3 billion, a staff of about 1,500 and an annual operating budget of more than $300 million.

In contrast, the endowment of Haverford, one of the country’s most prestigious liberal arts colleges, was $491 million for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2014, and its annual budget was just over $83 million.

Mr. Weiss succeeds Emily K. Rafferty, who is retiring after 10 years of helping lead the museum and almost four decades as one of its fund-raising champions.

The museum, which will turn 150 years old in 2020, has become one of the most highly attended in the world, with 6.2 million visitors last year. But it faces new challenges in a technologically connected world in which competition for cultural attention is becoming more fierce and complicated. The museum is in the midst of a yearslong program under its director, Thomas P. Campbell, to expand its online presence and to incorporate technology and other innovations into the galleries to make the imposing museum more welcoming to visitors at all levels of art appreciation.

In an interview, Mr. Weiss, 57, said the job offer by the Met, which he has visited and loved since he was a teenager, “really came out of the blue.” And though he had not intended to leave academia after a little less than two years at the helm of Haverford, “it became clear to me that this was a once in a lifetime opportunity.”

“The Met is a place that strives in everything it does to set a world standard, including its administration,” he added.

Ms. Rafferty, who is retiring in the spring, rose through the ranks of the museum’s development office and her two recent predecessors, David E. McKinney and William H. Luers, came to the museum from the worlds of business and diplomacy; Mr. McKinney had had a career at IBM and Mr. Luers had been the American ambassador to Venezuela and Czechoslovakia.

Mr. Campbell said that Mr. Weiss’s years as an art historian — he earned his doctorate in Western medieval and Byzantine art from Johns Hopkins University, where he later taught for a decade — were “not a requirement, but they give him a special sensibility for the position.”

The Met will soon take over the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Marcel Breuer building as additional exhibition space and plans to redesign the wing for Modern and contemporary art, a space long considered inadequate and ill conceived. Mr. Campbell said the museum recently completed a five-year strategic plan focusing on its collection, scholarship, audience development and “institutional excellence.”

“So Dan is coming in at a very exciting moment,” he added.

Like his recent predecessors, Mr. Weiss, who begins the job this summer, will report to the Met’s director. But Mr. Campbell said that the fund-raising duties of the presidency — Ms. Rafferty’s forte — would be spread out; the museum is searching for a senior vice president for advancement who would take on the chief burden of fund-raising, to “free Dan up to an extent” to focus more on the museum’s internal functioning and how it positions itself in New York and internationally.

“What the selection committee saw in him was an individual who was deeply thoughtful and very effective in evolving institutions he’s worked with in very positive ways,” said Mr. Campbell, who added that he was “looking for a thought partner.”

Mr. Weiss, who was born in Newark and raised on Long Island, began his career in museums at a fairly humble level: as a museum shops manager at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. Before earning his doctorate, he earned an M.B.A. from the Yale School of Management in 1985 and worked for the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton in New York. From 2005-13 he was president of Lafayette College in Easton, Pa., where he increased the size of the permanent faculty by more than 10 percent. Among his scholarly publications is the 1998 book “Art and Crusade in the Age of Saint Louis,” which examines the art patronage of Louis IX.

Mr. Weiss said he viewed the Met — which has emerged from some rocky years during the recession and is now on a solid footing with its endowment — as an institution whose main challenge was to attract an even broader and more diverse audience. It needs “to be welcoming to everyone who has an interest in art,” he said, “not just scholars.”

Of the museum’s financial ability to do that and to take on huge projects like the Breuer building and the wing redesign, he added: “The resources are vast, but so are the expenses. Nothing is broken, nothing is wrong, but there’s always the opportunity to do better.”

A correction was made on 
March 10, 2015

An earlier version of this article misstated the number of employees that Daniel H. Weiss will oversee as the new president at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While the Met has about 2,200 full-time and part-time employees, he will oversee about 1,500, not the full staff.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Met Museum Names President. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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