FREDERICK LAWRENCE…new president of Brandeis University. NEW YORK—The board of directors of Brandeis University has tapped the dean of George Washington University’s law school as its next president.

Frederick Lawrence, who has been the dean at George Washington Law since 2005, will succeed Jehuda Reinharz, who announced last fall that he would be leaving Brandeis after 16 years guiding the suburban Boston university.

Lawrence, an expert in hate crimes law who received his law degree from Yale, served on the Boston University faculty for 17 years before moving on to GW, and was BU’s associate dean of students from 1996 to 1999. He turned 55 on July 12.

In tapping Lawrence as president, a position he will assume in January, the Brandeis board has selected a figure bent on preserving the school’s Jewish identity.

“There are two main pieces of the Brandeis story and mission that speak to me, my career and my life,” Lawrence told JTA. “One, the remarkable opportunity to build a research college, which is a very unusual position for a small liberal arts college. The other piece of it was the opportunity to have a strong nonsectarian school that has deep roots in the Jewish community.”

Brandeis’ ethnic character has been a matter of ferment since the school was founded in 1948 by a small group of Jewish intellectual elites in response to Jewish quotas at Ivy League colleges.

The university rankled many prominent Jewish thinkers early on by holding its first commencement on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath. The debate over its Jewish character reached a boiling point during the late 1980s when Brandeis—then led by Evelyn Handler—engaged in an open campaign to downplay its Jewish identity in a bid to draw more non-Jewish students.

Reinharz, who will become the head of the Mandel Foundation, is credited with rebuilding the Jewish identity of Brandeis, turning the school into the country’s pre-eminent nondenominational center for Jewish study and research. .