Political scholar and Princeton professor Amy Gutmann ’71 was appointed last week to be the next provost of Princeton University.

“I have enormous respect for [Princeton’s] students, faculty members, and administrators, who are all dedicated in their own way to making a great university even greater,” Gutmann wrote in an e-mail message earlier this week. “The enterprise of working together on a common cause from different perspectives is one I find exhilarating, and eminently worthy.”

Gutmann was on the short-list of candidates for Harvard’s presidency and Princeton colleagues considered her a candidate for the top position there as well. Gutman has been at Princeton since she became an associate professor in 1976, serving as Dean of the Faculty from 1995-1997, and is the founder and current director of the university’s Center for Human Values.

Gutmann was appointed by Princeton’s new president, Dr. Shirley M. Tilghman, who praised her talents as a scholar, teacher, and administrator during an interview with The Crimson earlier this week.

“Everything she’s done at Princeton, she’s done extraordinarily well,” Tilghman said. “She is a natural leader.”

Due to the short time-frame which she had to select a new provost, Tilghman said she did not conduct an official search but instead chose Gutmann after consulting with a group of elected representatives of Princeton’s faculty, top administrators at the university, and several past presidents. Gutmann’s appointment was then confirmed at a special July 6 meeting of the Executive Committee of Princeton’s Board of Trustees.

Gutmann’s credentials are in the humanities—one reason Tilghman said she was the perfect candidate for the job.

“She is a very distinguished scholar in a field that is distinctly different from my own,” said Tilghman, who is, by profession, a molecular biologist. “She is a political philosopher and therefore brings knowledge of a part of the university with which a scientist like myself would not be familiar.”