The Fox Leadership Professors and the Start of the Program
Frederick Fox Chair: Dr. DiIulioA Penn alumnus who has been professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton is now the Frederick Fox Leadership Professor of Politics, Religion and Civil Society, holding the chair named for donor Robert Fox's father. He will also serve as Director of the Fox Leadership Program, the umbrella for the series of activities that began this fall with the Lessons in Leadership seminars (see below) and with planning of an orientation component to start next fall. Dr. DiIulio, who was the keynote speaker in last year's Steinberg Symposium, Beyond Ideology: Discovering Hope for America's Cities in Leadership, Management and Faith, took both his bachelor's and master's degrees here in 1980, moving to Harvard for a second master's degree in 1984 and a Ph.D. in 1986. He joined the Princeton faculty immediately after taking the Ph.D. As a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, he founded and directed the Jeremiah Project, a faith-based program for inner-city youth and young adults which put special emphasis on achieving literacy, avoiding violence and finding jobs. He has also been senior counsel to Public/Private Ventures, and was the founding director of the Center for Public Management at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. His work is said to have influenced the 1994 crime bill, which provided hundreds of millions of dollars for prison construction, and he was among the designers of the federal prison systems' drug treatment programs. Among the dozen books he has written, edited or co-edited are Body Count: Moral Poverty...and How to Win America's War Against Crime and Drugs (Simon & Schuster, 1996); Improving Government Performance: An Owner's Manual (Brookings Institution, 1993); American Government: Institutions and Policies (Houghton-Mifflin, 1998) and Medicaid and Devolution: A View from the States (Brookings Institution, 1998). He has also written op-eds for The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and other major newspapers, and articles for popular magazines including The New Republic, The National Review, and Commentary. He is a contributing editor at The Weekly Standard. Dr. DiIulio has chaired the American Political Science Association's standing committee on professional ethics. His honors include the David N. Kershaw Award of the Association of Public Policy Analysis and Management and the Leonard D. White Award of the American Political Science Association. Robert Fox Chair: Dr. SeligmanThe new Robert A. Fox Leadership Professor of Psychology is a world-renowned authority on depression and abnormal psychology whose best-selling works have been translated into a dozen languages. Among his 15 books are Learned Optimism (Knopf, 1990), What You Can Change and What You Can't (Knopf, 1993), and The Optimistic Child (Houghton Mifflin, 1995). Dr. Seligman moves to the Fox chair from an earlier appointment as the Bob and Arlene Kogod Term Professor. A 1964 Princeton alumnus who took his Ph.D. at Penn, Dr. Seligman taught at Cornell and the University of London before returning to the University in 1972 as associate professor. Promoted to full professor in 1976, he headed the Psychology Department's clinical training program from 1980 through 1994. He is the network director of the Positive Psychology Network and Scientific Director of the Telos Project of the Mayerson Foundation, as well as scientific director of Foresight, Inc., a testing company which predicts success in various walks of life. He is the recipient of two Distinguished Scientific Contribution awards from the American Psychological Association (APA), the Laurel Award of the American Association for Applied Psychology and Prevention, and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Society for Research in Psychopathology. He holds an honorary Ph.D. from Uppsala, Sweden, and Doctor of Humane Letters from the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology. From the American Psychology Society he has received both the William James Fellow Award, for contribution to basic science, and the James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award, for the application of psychological knowledge. Named by the APA in 1992 as one of the top ten contemporary psychologists in the world, Dr. Seligman was elected to the organization's presidency four years later by the largest vote in modern history, and he devoted his term in that office to efforts to "join practice and science together so both might flourish"--a goal he says has dominated his own life as a psychologist. His major initiatives for the APA concerned the prevention of ethnopolitical warfare and the study of positive psychology. His research on preventing depression received the MERIT Award of the National Institute of Mental Health in 1991. He was named a Distinguished Practitioner by the National Academies of Practice, and in 1995 received the Pennsylvania Psychological Association's award for Distinguished Contributions to Science and Practice. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages and have been best sellers both in America and abroad. In addition to publishing some 150 scholarly articles he has written extensively for the lay reader on education, violence and therapy; served as a spokesman for the science and practice of psychology on numerous radio and television shows, lectured around the world to educators, industry, parents and mental health professionals. Dr. Seligman served as the leading consultant to Consumer Reports for their pioneering article, which documented the effectiveness of long-term psychotherapy. Lessons in Leadership: The Program's "Lessons in Leadership" series, which brings leading College alumni back to campus for interactive sessions with students, began this fall with seminars led by Andrea Mitchell, CW '67, chief foreign affairs correspondent for NBC, and by Mr. Fox. Upcoming seminar leaders are Mitchell Blutt, C'78, M'82, WG'87, executive partner of Chase Capital Partners, one of the world's largest private equity firms; Craig Kanarick, C'89, EAS'89, chief scientist for the digital communications company Razorfish; and Richard H. Sabot, C'66, co-founder and executive vice president of Tripod, A Lycos Company, as well as economic advisor to several nations. A Home for Leadership: Last week Penn's real
estate director, Tom Lussenhop, announced in The Daily Pennsylvanian
the purchase of a property that has been proposed as the home of the
Fox Leadership Program (below). At least one other SAS program, now being
designed, would likely share the three-story, freestanding house, the Dean's
office said.
Almanac, Vol. 46, No. 8, October 19, 1999 |