Sandhya Iyer was appointed as Brown’s senior vice president and general counsel last month. She succeeds Eileen Goldgeier ’85, who retired over the summer after holding the position for six years.
Iyer now serves as the University’s chief legal advisor, leading a team of in-house attorneys and offering guidance on legal issues. She also joins the University's senior leadership team.
Iyer likened the position to being on a “rollercoaster.”
“Over the course of the day, you can work on employment issues or student problems or tax issues, and you never know what is going to come your way,” she explained.
Iyer’s decision to go into law was “purely serendipity,” she recalled. As an undergraduate at Yale, Iyer studied chemistry and women’s studies. There, she saw a poster encouraging students to register for the LSAT and took it as a “divinely ordained sign” to pursue a legal career.
She attended Yale Law School, where she developed an interest in civil rights and social justice.
“I really was interested in trying to use my education to figure out how to make a concrete difference in society,” Iyer said. “The law really appealed to me as a mechanism to do that.”
After graduating, Iyer worked for a non-profit organization, advocating for paid family and medical leave. She then worked in the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice before joining the Department of Education. Iyer’s work included arguing for the rights of incarcerated people, fighting police misconduct, promoting access to reproductive healthcare and preventing peer sexual harassment in higher education.
She first stepped into an in-house general counsel position at Oberlin College in 2008 before moving to Dartmouth in 2017. While at Dartmouth, Iyer said she saw “Brown making strides” as “a leader in diversity, equity and inclusion.”
“One of the things I read about before coming to Brown was Brown’s ethos of constructive irreverence, and that’s something I’ve been really captivated by,” she added.
In an article for Brown Alumni Magazine, President Christina Paxson P’19 P’MD’20 defined constructive irreverence as a “willingness to break intellectual boundaries and challenge conventional wisdom, while striving to appreciate and build on the ideas of others.”
Throughout her career, Iyer has worked as an advocate, a civil rights officer and “as someone who has been in-house counsel at three different higher education institutions,” she said.
Each one of those positions have enriched her experience which she nows brings to College Hill, she said.
Kate Butts is a senior staff writer covering University Hall. Outside of The Herald, she loves running, board games and Trader Joe's snacks.
