Faculty & Staff >> Biography

After becoming the 8th President of the University of Pennsylvania in 2004, Dr. Amy Gutmann established herself as a national leader in the effort to facilitate greater access to higher education, developing a no-loan guarantee that has become a national model, and significantly expanding the number of low-income students who attend.

Gutmann has dramatically expanded Penn's contribution to employment, innovation, and economic development in the city and state and pushed Penn to the forefront in civic engagement, exemplified by the creation of Penn Park, a 24-acre urban oasis connecting the campus to the city.

Under Gutmann's leadership, the University 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.

She has published widely on the value of education and deliberation in democracy, on the importance of access to higher education and health care, 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, publishing her sixteenth book, The Spirit of Compromise: Why Governing Demands It and Campaigning Undermines It (with Dennis Thompson) in May 2012.

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. 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 a W.E.B. DuBois Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. In May 2012, she received an honorary Doctor of Laws from Columbia University.

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 the Boards of the National Constitution Center, the Carnegie Corporation and the Vanguard Group.

Dr. Gutmann graduated magna cum laude from Harvard-Radcliffe College, earned her master’s degree in Political Science from the London School of Economics, and her doctorate in Political Science from Harvard.