Cheryl D. Mills
Cheryl D. Mills is Senior Vice President, General Counsel, and Secretary of New York University. She is also Acting Senior Vice President for Operations and Administration at the school.
Mills was deputy and associate counsel to President Bill Clinton during his administration, and also defended the president during the 1999 Senate impeachment trial. She was also deputy general counsel supervising the Clinton/Gore Transition Planning Foundation. Mills is a member of the board of directors of the Clinton Foundation, the SeeForever Foundation, the National Partnership for Women and Families, the Leadership Conference for Civil Rights Education Fund, the Jackie Robinson Foundation, the Center for American Progress, and Cendant Corporation.
On December 14, 1999, Mills proposed with Bill Lindsey and Terry McAuliffe that the Clinton Library be built in the Anacostia neighborhood of the District of Columbia. The proposal was sweetened by an offer of $30 million from Georgetown University, a large tract of land donated by Howard Milstein, and the prospect of revitalizing one of the district's more impoverished areas. Sometime after that meeting Bill Clinton responded, reluctantly, in the negative. "I thought I owed it to Arkansas," he said. "I wouldn't have become president without them. Furthermore, I thought it would do more good down there because it's in the middle of the country."
Mills is a past associate of Washington, DC, law firm Hogan and Hartson. She is the founder of DCWords, a nonprofit corporation dedicated to "academic enrichment and interpersonal development of underprivileged high school students of color." DCWorks merged with the SeeForever Foundation in 1999. In 1999 Mills received the Susan B. Anthony Achievement Award from President Clinton. In presenting the award, Clinton called her an "effective champion of equality in education, she has opened the doors of higher education for under-privileged youth." Between 1999 and 2001 she was senior vice president for Corporate Policy and Public Programming at Oxygen Media.
Mills is a 1987 graduate of the University of Virginia. She received her juris doctorate from the Stanford Law School.
References
- Terry McAuliffe, What A Party! My Life Among Democrats: Presidents, Candidates, Donors, Activists, Alligators and Other Wild Animals (St. Martin's Press, 2007), 201-202.
