“At Penn, they wouldn’t have appointed her had they not wanted someone who cared about arts and sciences,” Thompson said. “Penn has pretty strong professional schools and some very good arts and sciences departments. But their weakness, compared to other Ivy League schools, is that the arts and sciences faculty could be strengthened.”
Thompson described Gutmann as a “born teacher” as well as an accomplished administrator.
“She’s known for deliberative democracy—something we’ve both written about,” he said. “She actually practices it.”
Gutmann said in an interview that she hopes to take advantage of Penn’s “cohesive” campus—with all of its graduate schools proximate to the arts and sciences—to further strengthen ties between the schools.
“Penn has great strength in interdisciplinary teaching and research, and its potential there is even greater,” she said.
Thompson also said that Gutmann was likely to exercise her bully pulpit, focusing on issues of egalitarianism in education. She’d add the voice of a humanist to a dialogue dominated by economics, he added, alluding to the professions of Yale and Harvard’s presidents.
Gutmann said that financial aid—for both undergraduate and graduate students—is another top priority. And she said working successfully with Philadelphia would one of the major challenges she will face.
Gutmann said that she, like her predecessor, would continue to fundraise extensively for the university, which lags behind rivals in the size of its endowment.
The chance to preside over a university with a full complement of professional schools, which Penn has but Princeton does not, helped lure her to Philadelphia, she said.
When Gutmann stepped down from her position as Princeton’s dean of the faculty in 1997, she cited a desire to return to teaching. But she said yesterday that the opportunity to be a top university administrator was too great to pass up.
“I missed [teaching and research] then acutely because I felt that I had left behind several courses and books that were still very high priority for me,” she said. “I miss it now—that’s just to say that you can’t do everything you want to do at once. The challenge of being provost and now the challenge of being president are just so exciting that it suppresses some of the other longing that I have to do things.”
After graduating from Radcliffe College in 1971, Gutmann took a teaching job at Princeton, where she has remained. In 1990, she founded Princeton’s University Center for Human Values, which developed into one of the country’s leading ethics centers.
A leading scholar in political science, she is also Rockefeller university professor of politics.
She served as Princeton’s dean of the faculty from 1995 to 1997 and served for another year as academic advisor to the president.
—Catherine E. Shoichet contributed to the reporting of this story.
—Staff writer Stephen M. Marks can be reached at marks@fas.harvard.edu.