Don Randel, who recently retired as president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will visit the University of Virginia to give a talk on “How Universities Work,” at 5 p.m., Nov. 1 in the auditorium of the Mary and David Harrison Institute and Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library.

Free and open to the public, the lecture on the conditions and prospects of higher education is part of the U.Va. Institute of the Humanities & Global Cultures’ ongoing series on “The Future of the University.”

In addition to leading the Mellon Foundation, Randel was previously provost of Cornell University and president of the University of Chicago.

Alongside his many positions of academic leadership, he has long been internationally recognized as a distinguished musicologist and a specialist in music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. He is editor of the Journal of the American Musicological Society and “The Harvard Dictionary of Music.”

“Is the university a business? Of course it is,” Randel has written. “But it is crucially important to understand what kind of a business it is, for its underlying logic and values are fundamentally different from those of other businesses, a fact that is woefully lost on some would-be reformers.”