Amy Gutmann

He fled Nazi Germany in 1934 as a college student.

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

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

While there he attended a benefit at a Manhattan hotel, Essex House, where he met Beatrice, Amy's future mother, and the two were married weeks later.

Amy Gutmann (born November 19, 1949) is an American academic and diplomat who has served as the United States Ambassador to Germany since 2022.

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

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

Her father was the youngest of five children in an Orthodox Jewish family in Feuchtwangen, Germany.

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

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

She received membership in Phi Beta Kappa and her Bachelor of Arts degree magna cum laude from Radcliffe College in 1971, followed by a Master of Science degree in political science from the London School of Economics in 1972, and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in political science from Harvard University in 1976.

She was the first in her family to graduate from college.

Gutmann taught at Princeton University from 1976 to 2004.

In 1990, she became the first Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor at Princeton and the founding director of its University Center for Human Values.

As provost of Princeton University from 2001 to 2004, she oversaw Princeton's plan to expand the undergraduate student body by 10 percent and recruited professor K. Anthony Appiah from Harvard.

She was previously the president of the University of Pennsylvania from 2004 to 2022, the longest-serving president in the history of the University of Pennsylvania.

In her 2004 inaugural address, Gutmann launched the Penn Compact.

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

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

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

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

In September 2009, for the first time in Penn's history, all undergraduates eligible for financial aid received grants rather than loans in their aid packages.

Students from typical families with income less than $40,000 pay no tuition, fees, room, or board.

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

"The biggest influences on me for leading preceded my ever even thinking of myself as a leader—particularly my father's experience leaving Nazi Germany. Because I would not even exist if it weren't for his combination of courage and farsightedness. He saw what was coming with Hitler and he took all of his family and left for India. That took a lot of courage. That is always something in the back of my mind."

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

It achieved its $3.5-billion target 16 months ahead of its December 31, 2012, conclusion.

It was an unusually broad-based campaign, attracting gifts from nearly 327,000 donors.

In 2017 she renewed and updated her vision with the Penn Compact 2022, recommitting the university to these ideals and outlining the next steps: First, to increase inclusion at the university with increases in faculty and student diversity.

Second, to integrate knowledge across academic disciplines with a strong emphasis on innovation: Penn was named No. 4 in Reuters' Top 100 World Innovative Universities in 2017, 2018, and 2019, and the university is consistently helping to facilitate commercialization agreements, ringing in over 650 in 2017 (up from fewer than 50 just a decade prior).

Another highlight in innovation is Penn's biomedical research and clinical breakthroughs, approved by the FDA to treat cancer using a patient's own immune system.

The Wall Street Journal noted that "Today the university [Penn] lays claim to having incubated the world's biggest cancer breakthrough."

In addition, it is Penn Medicine researchers who developed the mRNA vaccine technology that is a critical component of Pfizer/BioNTech's and Moderna's COVID-19 vaccines, which are being deployed globally in the fight against COVID-19.

A third priority through the Compact is to have an impact locally, nationally, and globally to bring the benefits of Penn's research, teaching, and service to individuals and communities at home and around the world.

This is recently illustrated by the University's $100 million commitment to the Philadelphia School District to remediate environmental hazards—the largest private contribution to the School District in its history.

As president, Gutmann oversaw Penn's largest fundraising campaign ever, Power of Penn, which concluded in 2021 with a total of $5.4 billion and included priorities such as a "Penn First Plus" initiative, targeted to support first-generation, low-income students.

In 2018, Fortune magazine named Gutmann one of the "World's 50 Greatest Leaders".

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

She also founded Princeton's ethics center, the University Center for Human Values.

Her published works are in the fields of politics, ethics, education, and philosophy.