Biography
Dr. Amy Gutmann
President and Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science in the School of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Communication in the Annenberg School of Communication
University of Pennsylvania
After becoming the 8th President of the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Amy Gutmann quickly established herself as a national leader in the effort to facilitate greater access to higher education, making Penn the largest university to establish a no-loan guarantee that has become a national model, and significantly expanding the number of low-income students attending the University. She pushed Penn to the forefront in civic engagement, exemplified by the creation of Penn Park, a 24-acre urban oasis connecting the campus to Center City Philadelphia.
Under her leadership, the University has passed its $3.5 billion fundraising goal more than a year early, and has dramatically broken down barriers across academic disciplines, invigorating the intellectual climate for both faculty and students.
Gutmann is the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science in the School of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Communication in the Annenberg School for Communication at Penn, with secondary faculty appointments in Philosophy in the School of Arts and Sciences and the Graduate School of Education. She has published widely on the value of education and deliberation in democracy, on the importance of access to higher education and health care, on "the good, the bad and the ugly" of identity politics, and on the essential role of ethics—especially professional and political ethics—in public affairs.
She continues to be an active scholar as Penn's President, most recently publishing her sixteenth book, The Spirit of Compromise: Why Governing Demands It and Campaigning Undermines It (with Dennis Thompson) in May 2012.
Appointed in 2009 by President Barack Obama, Gutmann chairs the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. She also serves on the National Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences, and on the Boards of the National Constitution Center, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Vanguard Group. Gutmann has won the Harvard University Centennial Medal (2003), the Carnegie Corporation Academic Leadership Award (2009), and was named by Newsweek one of the "150 Women Who Shake the World" (2011). She is an elected member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Education, and is W.E.B. DuBois Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. She served as President of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy. Gutmann is a founding member of the Global Colloquium of the University Presidents, which advises the Secretary General of the U.N. on a range of issues, including the social responsibility of universities. In May 2012, she received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Columbia University.
In her inaugural address, Gutmann launched the Penn Compact, her vision for making Penn a global leader in teaching, research, and professional practice, as well as a dynamic agent of social, economic, and civic progress. Guided by the Compact, Penn has increased access for the most talented students regardless of socioeconomic background, recruited and retained eminent faculty who integrate knowledge across multiple disciplines, and made Penn a more powerful transformational force locally, nationally, and globally. In 2009, Penn was named No. 1 as a "good neighbor" among American colleges and universities for its model partnership programs with the community.
As CEO of Philadelphia's largest private employer and one of the Commonwealth's most powerful economic engines, with a total economic impact of $14 billion annually in Pennsylvania, Gutmann is a leader in civic and business affairs. Penn's campus master plan, "Penn Connects," has added nearly 4 million square feet of space to campus since 2006 and increased open space on campus by 25 percent with the opening of Shoemaker Green. Penn Park received the Design Champion Award in 2012, with Design Philadelphia calling it an "urban sanctuary" in Philadelphia.
Penn also has created a state-of-the-art medical complex that fully integrates translational research with patient care with the opening of the Ruth and Raymond Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine (2008), the Roberts Proton Therapy Center (2009) and the Translational Research Center (2011). Current campus development highlights include the Krishna P. Singh Nanotechnology Center (scheduled for completion in 2013), Golkin Hall (2012), Shoemaker Green (2012), and the acquisition of 23 acres on the South Bank of the Schuylkill River to be developed by the University.
Prior to her appointment as Penn's President, Gutmann served as Provost at Princeton University, where she also was the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics. She was the founding Director of the University Center for Human Values, an eminent multi-disciplinary center that supports teaching, scholarship and public discussion of ethics and human values. She served as Princeton's Dean of the Faculty from 1995-97 and as Academic Advisor to the President from 1997-98. In 2000, she was awarded the President's Distinguished Teaching Award by Princeton University.
Gutmann graduated magna cum laude from Harvard-Radcliffe College. She earned her master's degree in Political Science from the London School of Economics and her doctorate in Political Science from Harvard University. She is married to Michael W. Doyle, the Harold Brown Professor of Law and International Affairs at Columbia University. Their daughter, Abigail Gutmann Doyle, is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Princeton University. Their son-in-law, Jakub Jurek, is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Princeton University.
Revised March 2013
