37 Facts About Amy Gutmann

Amy Gutmann is an American academic and diplomat who served as the United States Ambassador to Germany from 2022 to 2024.

Amy Gutmann was previously the 8th president of the University of Pennsylvania from 2004 to 2022, the longest-serving president in the history of the University of Pennsylvania.

Amy Gutmann currently serves as the Christopher H Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science, School of Arts and Sciences, and Professor of Communication, Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

Amy Gutmann previously worked at Princeton as provost and Laurance S Rockefeller University Professor of Politics.

Amy Gutmann founded Princeton's ethics center, the University Center for Human Values.

Amy Gutmann's published works are in the fields of politics, ethics, education, and philosophy.

Amy Gutmann was born on November 19,1949, in Brooklyn, New York, the only child of Kurt and Beatrice Gutmann.

Amy Gutmann was raised in Monroe, New York, a small town in the lower Hudson Valley.

Amy Gutmann's father was the youngest of five children in an Orthodox Jewish family in Feuchtwangen, Germany.

Amy Gutmann was living near Nuremberg, Germany, when Adolf Hitler ascended to power.

Amy Gutmann fled Nazi Germany in 1934 as a college student.

Amy Gutmann brought his entire family, including four siblings, to join him in Bombay, India, where he founded a metal fabricating factory.

Kurt Amy Gutmann was still living in India in 1948 when he came to New York City for vacation.

Amy Gutmann told Adam Bryant of The New York Times in June 2011:.

Amy Gutmann saw what was coming with Hitler and he took all of his family and left for India.

Amy Gutmann graduated from Monroe-Woodbury High School in Monroe, New York.

Amy Gutmann then entered Radcliffe College of Harvard University in 1967 on a scholarship as a math major with sophomore standing.

Amy Gutmann was the first in her family to graduate from college.

Amy Gutmann previously led the Making History campaign, launched in 2007, which raised a record $4.3 billion, exceeding its goal by more than $800 million.

Amy Gutmann is the only Penn president to lead two fundraising campaigns, and since 2004 she has helped raise over $10 billion for Penn.

Amy Gutmann has been a leading national advocate for financial aid based on the need to promote socioeconomic diversity in higher education.

Amy Gutmann made Penn one of the handful of universities in the country that substitute grants for loans for any undergraduate student with financial need.

In 2014, Amy Gutmann announced Penn Compact 2020 initiatives to create up to 50 new endowed professorships utilizing matching donor funds, and to raise an additional $240 million for undergraduate financial aid on top of the $360 million raised for undergraduate aid during the Making History campaign.

Additionally, Amy Gutmann announced unique and unprecedented awards for undergraduate students "with the most promising plans to improve local, national, or global conditions in the year after their graduation".

In March 2015, Amy Gutmann announced the selection of five students as winners of Penn's inaugural President's Engagement Prize.

Since arriving at Penn, Amy Gutmann has spearheaded a major campus development plan, Penn Connects, that includes 24 acres that Penn purchased from the US Postal Service along the Schuylkill River, which opened as Penn Park in September 2011.

On May 8,2012, Penn announced that Amy Gutmann's contract had been renewed through 2019.

Amy Gutmann's nomination expired at the end of the year and was returned to President Biden on January 3,2022.

Amy Gutmann resigned her post in July 2024 and returned to the faculty at Penn.

Amy Gutmann's second major contribution to political philosophy is a theory of deliberative democracy that she developed in collaboration with Harvard political scientist Dennis Thompson.

In Identity in Democracy, Amy Gutmann argues that identity groups as such are neither friends nor enemies of democratic justice.

In May 2012, Amy Gutmann published her 16th book, The Spirit of Compromise: Why Governing Demands It and Campaigning Undermines It, with co-author Dennis Thompson of Harvard.

From 2005 to 2009, Amy Gutmann served on the National Security Higher Education Advisory Board, a committee that advises the FBI on national security issues relating to academia.

From 2007 to 2019 Amy Gutmann served on the board of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

Amy Gutmann was a member of the Knight Commission on Trust, Media and Democracy from 2017 to 2019.

From 2006 to 2022, Amy Gutmann served on the board of The Vanguard Group, and was a member of the board of directors of the Berggruen Institute from 2014 to 2022.

Amy Gutmann is married to Michael Doyle, professor of law and international affairs at Columbia University.