New Princeton President Names Provost

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.”

Gutmann, who earned her Bachelors degree from Radcliffe in 1971 and later a Ph.D in political science from Harvard, has focused mostly on such subjects as democracy, education, ethics and the value of human life. She is the author of several books dealing with these topics, including Democratic Education, Democracy and Disagreement—which she co-wrote with Harvard Associate Provost Dennis F. Thompson—and Color Conscioius: The Political Morality of Race—with Harvard’s Carswell Professor of Afro-American Studies and of Philosophy, K. Anthony Appiah.

Gutmann also boasts an extremely successful career as teacher and mentor, for which she was honored with the President’s Distinguished Teaching Award, the highest honor that a Princeton professor can receive.

Lisa Lazarus, a rising senior who served last year on Princeton’s presidential search committee and was once a student in Gutmann’s classroom, said that Gutmann’s talent for teaching may be one of her greatest assets as she takes over the position of Princeton’s chief academic officer.

“She is a phenomenal professor, which is a capacity in which many students have gotten to know her,” Lazarus said. “She’s an engaging person who poses interesting questions and will readily debate with students.”

Gutmann acknowledges the enormous impact that the provost has on the lives of students at Princeton, and says she looks forward to the challenge.

“The provost is the point person for making sure that all the initiatives are taken that are necessary to enable Princeton students to have the best experience they can possibly have,” Gutmann said.

“A few of the challenges that I hope we live up to over the next five years are making a Princeton education truly and entirely affordable to all students regardless of family income, creating even closer and more rewarding student-professor interactions than ever, and offering a wider range of living and social options than are now available to students, making the campus even more lovely and user-friendly than ever before,” she said.

Gutmann also said she hopes to be as accessible as an administrator as she was as a professor—she will continue to hold office hours, to “break bread” with students, and will teach one or two classes if her schedule permits.

When Gutmann officially takes office on September 1, 2001, she and Tilghman will become only the second female president-provost team to ever lead an ivy league institution. Brown University’s President Ruth J. Simmons and Provost Kathryn T. Spoehr became the first when Simmons began her tenure as president last month.

“I can say that many students, including me, are glad to see an increased diversity among the university’s administration,” said Joseph S. Kochan, president of Princeton’s Undergraduate Student Government.

Indeed, many hail the selection of a female president and a female provost to lead Princeton as an important step in the history of a university that has not always had the strongest reputation for inclusiveness.

One of the universities social clubs was only forced to admit women after facing the threat of a discrimination lawsuit.

For Gutmann, increasing diversity within all aspects of the university is one of the most important tasks currently facing Princeton.

“Princeton is extremely well placed to show that excellence can increase enormously when we make higher education more innovative—open to new and creative academic initiatives—and also more accessible than ever to the widest range of students, faculty members, and employees—regardless of their income and wealth, religion, ethnicity, skin color, or any feature other than their ability to contribute to higher education,” she said.

And Gutmann herself may be the perfect candidate to help Princeton’s new president lead the university on this new mission.

“I think she’s going to be extraordinarily effective at maintaining the traditions that we hold dear here,” Tilghman said of Gutmann, “but she will also be an important voice in guiding Princeton into the future.”

—Staff writer Kate L. Rakoczy can be reached at rakoczy@fas.harvard.edu.