Life After Radcliffe

At the London School of Economics she earned a master's in political science, before returning to Harvard to earn a doctorate. She met her future husband, Michael W. Doyle '70, when they were both in graduate school. They were married soon after she received her doctorate in 1976.

She immediately took a teaching job at Princeton, where she began as an assistant professor, eventually gaining tenure a decade later in 1981. That same year, she published Democratic Education, a work that many of her colleagues single out as her most important contribution to academia.

Frederick Schauer, Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at the Kennedy School of Government (KSG), describes the book as a deeply "philosophical work about education, opening up the question of education as a central topic of philosophy and democracy."

In it, she describes who should control education in a democracy, and wrestles with the issues from book burning to teachers' unions to public support for private schools and affirmative action in college admissions. At the time, The New York Times hailed the book for its "specifically political theory of education."

"She is a superb and justifiable prominent scholar," Schauer says.

In 1990, Gutmann approached Princeton President Howard T. Shapiro with a proposal for a ground-breaking University Center for Human Values. Founded with a grant from Laurence E. Rockefeller, the center was designed to study broad interdisciplinary ideas of ethics, human rights and life.

''There's no obvious place in any single department to look at how specialized knowledge fits into the broader spectrum of the meaning and value of human life and human society,'' Gutmann said at the time.

The center has grown quickly: it now is home to five full-time professors and 24 associate professors, and has expanded its course offerings from one freshman seminar in 1990 to a dozen classes this year.

Colleagues hail it as one of the most successful ethics centers in the country, and say that a decade of overseeing its operation has given Gutmann valuable administrative experience.

"She's been running a major research facility for almost a decade," says Wilkins, who calls Gutmann a mentor and role model for his own ethics work at HLS. "She's someone with tremendous ideas about higher education."

Wilkins says the center's interdisciplinary approach has given Gutmann the ability "to think broadly about the mission of the university."

"She's constantly thinking and looking at contemporary problems and how to bring the university to bear on those issues," he says.

A Dean to Call Her Own

In 1995, a Princeton search committee unanimously recommended Gutmann to serve as Dean of the Faculty.