New York University said on Wednesday that it would no longer lend money to top employees to buy vacation homes and would grant faculty members more participation in school decisions, part of a slate of changes designed to lower tensions between the university’s leaders and its rank-and-file professors. The university also announced that its president, John Sexton, who has been the subject of five no-confidence votes by the faculty this year, would step down once his term ends in 2016.

The changes, which emerged from a series of meetings that a group of trustees held with faculty and staff members, administrators and students, are the first concessions by the trustees since the faculty rebellion began in March with a no-confidence vote in the College of Arts and Science, N.Y.U.’s largest school. Until now, N.Y.U.’s board had defended its loans for second homes and insisted that they were, like loans for primary residences, an indispensable tool for retaining top talent.

“This is a matter of extreme importance to us,” Martin Lipton, the chairman of the board of trustees, said. “No university can prosper if there’s disruption, if there’s unhappiness in the family.”

N.Y.U.’s mortgages became a point of contention as details emerged about their sizes and terms, beginning with loans of several hundred thousand dollars that were forgiven for Jacob Lew, a former executive vice president who became President Obama’s treasury secretary this year. The university also extended multimillion-dollar loans for luxury properties to some administrators and star professors, in some cases at rates nearing zero percent or partially forgiven. And in a practice that experts called unheard-of in higher education, some of those loans were for homes in resort destinations like the Hamptons, or in the case of Mr. Sexton himself, Fire Island.