Amy Gutmann
Amy Gutmann is an American academic and diplomat who served as the United States Ambassador to Germany from 2022 to 2024. She was previously the 8th president of the University of Pennsylvania from 2004 to 2022, the longest-serving president in the history of the University of Pennsylvania. She currently serves as the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science, School of Arts and Sciences, and Professor of Communication, Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.
In 2018, Fortune magazine named Gutmann one of the "World's 50 Greatest Leaders". She previously worked at Princeton as provost and Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics. She also founded Princeton's ethics center, the University Center for Human Values. Her published works are in the fields of politics, ethics, education, and philosophy.
Early life and education
Amy Gutmann was born on November 19, 1949, in Brooklyn, New York, the only child of Kurt and Beatrice Gutmann. She was raised in Monroe, New York, a small town in the lower Hudson Valley.Her father was the youngest of five children in an Orthodox Jewish family in Feuchtwangen, Germany. He was living near Nuremberg, Germany, when Adolf Hitler ascended to power. He fled Nazi Germany in 1934 as a college student. He brought his entire family, including four siblings, to join him in Bombay, India, where he founded a metal fabricating factory. Kurt Gutmann was still living in India in 1948 when he came to New York City for vacation. While there he attended a benefit at a Manhattan hotel, Essex House, where he met Beatrice, Amy's future mother, and the two were married weeks later.
Gutmann told Adam Bryant of The New York Times in June 2011:
Gutmann graduated from Monroe-Woodbury High School in Monroe, New York. She then entered Radcliffe College of Harvard University in 1967 on a scholarship as a math major with sophomore standing. She received membership in Phi Beta Kappa and her Bachelor of Arts degree magna cum laude from Radcliffe College in 1971, followed by a Master of Science degree in political science from the London School of Economics in 1972, and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in political science from Harvard University in 1976. She was the first in her family to graduate from college.
Career
Princeton University
Gutmann taught at Princeton University from 1976 to 2004. In 1990, she became the first Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor at Princeton and the founding director of its University Center for Human Values. As provost of Princeton University from 2001 to 2004, she oversaw Princeton's plan to expand the undergraduate student body by 10 percent and recruited professor K. Anthony Appiah from Harvard.University of Pennsylvania
In her 2004 inaugural address, Gutmann launched the Penn Compact. In 2017 she renewed and updated her vision with the Penn Compact 2022, recommitting the university to these ideals and outlining the next steps: First, to increase inclusion at the university with increases in faculty and student diversity. Second, to integrate knowledge across academic disciplines with a strong emphasis on innovation: Penn was named No. 4 in Reuters' Top 100 World Innovative Universities in 2017, 2018, and 2019, and the university is consistently helping to facilitate commercialization agreements, ringing in over 650 in 2017.Another highlight in innovation is Penn's biomedical research and clinical breakthroughs, approved by the FDA to treat cancer using a patient's own immune system. The Wall Street Journal noted that "Today the university lays claim to having incubated the world's biggest cancer breakthrough." In addition, it is Penn Medicine researchers who developed the mRNA vaccine technology that is a critical component of Pfizer/BioNTech's and Moderna's COVID-19 vaccines, which are being deployed globally in the fight against COVID-19. A third priority through the Compact is to have an impact locally, nationally, and globally to bring the benefits of Penn's research, teaching, and service to individuals and communities at home and around the world. This is recently illustrated by the University's $100 million commitment to the Philadelphia School District to remediate environmental hazards—the largest private contribution to the School District in its history.
Fundraising and scholarships
As president, Gutmann oversaw Penn's largest fundraising campaign ever, Power of Penn, which concluded in 2021 with a total of $5.4 billion and included priorities such as a "Penn First Plus" initiative, targeted to support first-generation, low-income students. She previously led the Making History campaign, launched in 2007, which raised a record $4.3 billion, exceeding its goal by more than $800 million. It achieved its $3.5-billion target 16 months ahead of its December 31, 2012, conclusion. It was an unusually broad-based campaign, attracting gifts from nearly 327,000 donors. Gutmann is the only Penn president to lead two fundraising campaigns, and since 2004 she has helped raise over $10 billion for Penn.Gutmann has been a leading national advocate for financial aid based on the need to promote socioeconomic diversity in higher education. Gutmann made Penn one of the handful of universities in the country that substitute grants for loans for any undergraduate student with financial need. In September 2009, for the first time in Penn's history, all undergraduates eligible for financial aid received grants rather than loans in their aid packages. Students from typical families with income less than $40,000 pay no tuition, fees, room, or board. Students from typical families with incomes less than $90,000 pay no tuition and fees. In 2017, one out of eight incoming Penn students were the first in their families to attend college, up from one out of 20 in 2004. She and her husband Michael Doyle have also funded an endowed undergraduate scholarship and an undergraduate research fund at Penn. In 2017, they committed an additional more than $1 million for scholarships, supporting multiple students and matching funds for other donors. In 2020, Gutmann and Doyle donated $2 million to Penn's nursing school to establish leadership scholarships for undergraduates and graduates who are passionate about making lasting impact in underserved urban and rural communities.
In 2014, Gutmann announced Penn Compact 2020 initiatives to create up to 50 new endowed professorships utilizing matching donor funds, and to raise an additional $240 million for undergraduate financial aid on top of the $360 million raised for undergraduate aid during the Making History campaign. Additionally, Gutmann announced unique and unprecedented awards for undergraduate students "with the most promising plans to improve local, national, or global conditions in the year after their graduation".
In March 2015, Gutmann announced the selection of five students as winners of Penn's inaugural President's Engagement Prize. The largest of their kind in higher education, the President's Engagement Prizes provide up to $150,000 annually for graduating seniors to design and implement impactful local, national, and global engagement projects. In its coverage of the first awards, The Philadelphia Inquirer stated, "Penn grads win chance to change the world." In October 2015, she announced Penn's President's Innovation Prize, a corollary to the Engagement Prize that is focused on commercial ventures; the first winners were announced in April 2016. Shadrack Frimpong, a 2015 alumnus, used his President's Engagement Prize to start a school for girls, many of whom did not have access to education. Frimpong returned to Penn in 2018 to complete a degree in non-profit leadership and management at Penn to continue his work.
Campus development
Since arriving at Penn, Gutmann has also spearheaded a major campus development plan, Penn Connects, that includes that Penn purchased from the US Postal Service along the Schuylkill River, which opened as Penn Park in September 2011. Penn Connects is designed to boost the economic, educational and social capacity of Philadelphia and to create seamless gateways between West Philadelphia and Center City across the Schuylkill River.Penn began an expansion east of the Schuylkill River with the purchase of the DuPont Marshall Laboratory in September 2010. Gutmann said that the Marshall Lab property has "infinite possibilities" as a place to nurture startups and "technology transfer", where faculty with "great discoveries can attract venture capital" and bring ideas to market.
In Fall 2016, Penn opened its Pennovation Center, the anchor of a 23-acre site that the university has dubbed Pennovation Works, on a Grays Ferry site along the south bank of the Schuylkill which was once home to the DuPont Co.'s Marshall Labs. The $35-million project is about 1 1/2 miles from the center of Penn's West Philadelphia campus. A large, red-letter sign reads "Pennovation" over the three-story, 58,000-square foot facility. Pennovation includes an addition that resembles a crystal formation, representing the "crystallization of ideas", and architecture critic Inga Saffron says that its unique design "announces the future", rather than harkening back to the past. Johnson & Johnson announced in July 2018 that Pennovation Works would house J&J's first US-based JPOD, a networking hub that seeks to connect J&J researchers and the local life sciences community. With the announcement, J&J joined the ranks of global telecom giant Qualcomm and chocolate maker Hershey's, which also selected Pennovation Works to open Philadelphia operations.