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Gutmann deliberates new role as provost
Ruth Stevens
"Deliberation is a way of pooling understanding," said Gutmann (pronounced guht-man), who became Princeton's second-ranking officer on Sept. 1. "I think leadership works best when it's a collaborative effort. The problems facing universities today are so complex and so large, it would be arrogant for any single person to think that she knew it all without entering into deliberations with other people." President Tilghman announced Gutmann's appointment in early July after it was approved by the executive committee of the Board of Trustees. Gutmann joined the University's politics faculty 25 years ago upon completing a B.A. at Harvard-Radcliffe College, an M.Sc. at the London School of Economics and a Ph.D. at Harvard University. Today one of the world's leading democratic theorists, she is the author of "Democratic Education" (Princeton University Press, 1999) and "Democracy and Disagreement" with Dennis Thompson (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), which provide frameworks for understanding how democratic societies can help secure mutual respect among citizens. Gutmann says she is the kind of person who learns by talking to others. "That's very much part of my style," she says. "I think of the provost's office as a team -- as a collaborative effort among the people who are in the provost's office and with everybody else in the University who has some expertise or concern about a particular issue." This is not Gutmann's first stint as an administrator at Princeton. When the University's Center for Human Values was founded in 1990, she was selected as its first director and was named the Laurance Rockefeller University Professor of Politics. She also served the University as dean of the faculty from 1995 to 1997 and as academic adviser to the president in 1997-98. She has been a member of the Priorities Committee and the Course of Study Committee, has chaired the board of the Whig-Cliosophic Society, and has been director of graduate studies for the politics department. In addition, she has served as a member of search committees for the deans of admission and the graduate school, and of many other committees. As dean of the faculty, she staffed the Committee on Appointments and Advancements, which oversees all faculty appointments and promotions. In announcing her appointment, Tilghman called Gutmann "a person of great intelligence, very high standards, and deep concern for the well-being of others." She said, "My goal was to appoint a provost who would bring exceptional credentials as a teacher and scholar, particularly in the humanities or social sciences; who has a broad and deep understanding of this University; who has demonstrated skills as a senior administrator; and who would share my excitement about the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead for Princeton. Amy Gutmann brings all these qualities and more. She is a scholarly leader in her field and a gifted teacher. She has strong interdisciplinary interests, as reflected in the center she has directed so ably. As dean, she was very effective in attracting excellent faculty to Princeton. She has experience with and cares about all areas of the University." Gutmann hopes that her knowledge of the University will be a great asset as she takes on the provost's duties, which include administering the overall academic program, working closely with faculty and other administrators on staffing matters, providing general oversight for many of the University's support and administrative operations, and developing short-term and long-term recommendations regarding resource allocation, including chairing the Priorities Committee, the faculty-student-staff committee that makes recommendations each year to the president regarding the following year's operating budget. "I bring an appreciation of the University -- what its great strengths are -- and a dedication to helping Princeton move forward from a very strong base," she says. "When I think about why I am excited about the job, it's because being provost allows one to help the whole University. I'm at heart somebody who really cares about higher education in general and Princeton University in particular." Gutmann considers one her biggest accomplishments during her Princeton career the rise of the multidisciplinary Center for Human Values, which was created to support teaching, scholarship and public discussion of ethics and human values. "The center is a collaborative effort on the part of many faculty members and the administration and a wonderful donor, Laurance Rockefeller," she says. "I was an enabler with the help of many, many other people of creating something from scratch that is now seen as a major ethics center in the world." She also is extremely proud of the success of her students. Gutmann has taught political philosophy, democratic theory, the history of political thought and practical ethics, and, in 2000, she won the President's Distinguished Teaching Award. "I just love teaching," she says. She expects to continue to work with her graduate students in the next year, but will take a break from teaching undergraduates to concentrate on her new position. She hopes to lead a freshman seminar sometime in the near future. Preparing for a new positionDuring the summer, Gutmann spent a considerable amount of time sitting in on meetings with Tilghman and others at the University to begin gearing up for her new role. "I've been absorbing a lot," she says. Although specific initiatives will require more time to develop, Gutmann says these meetings have reinforced a strong sense of broad priorities. "I have broad principled aims, which I share with the president," she says. "I couldn't do this job if we didn't share the same sort of principled vision of the University. I think of Princeton as being in incredibly good shape. But if we're ever complacent about that, it would start deteriorating." The goals she shares with Tilghman include "creating more accessibility, and greater innovation in our teaching and our knowledge creation," she says. "By accessibility, I mean both the ability of as many well qualified students as possible to thrive at Princeton, and I also mean more openness to the world in everything we do, whether it be faculty hiring, staff hiring or the dissemination of knowledge," she continues. "We really have a social responsibility in our teaching and scholarship to communicate with the whole world and also to bring in the world. So we need to be very worldly and cosmopolitan in that sense. I think we should become and are becoming a more cosmopolitan university." At the top of the agenda is dealing with the addition of 500 undergraduates that will come once the sixth residential college is built. "We are going to be working assiduously at how best to meet this welcome challenge of making Princeton accessible to 500 more students, which will add up to a very large number of Princeton graduates who otherwise wouldn't have existed," she says. "That implicates everything -- our faculty, our physical plant, our admissions. So many things are connected to that -- recruiting great faculty is always a challenge and this environment is much more competitive than it's ever been before." Gutmann also spent much of the summer revising a book manuscript that she wrote last year while she was on sabbatical. The topic is identity groups in democracies -- how individuals even in a democracy, which emphasizes individual freedom, identify with groups in order to have influence and to express and develop their sense of self in conjunction with other people. The manuscript is the sixth book Gutmann has written. Her others include: "Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race" with Anthony Appiah (Princeton University Press, 1996), which won awards from the American Political Science Association, the North American Society for Social Philosophy and the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in North America; "Liberal Equality" (Cambridge University Press, 1980); and "Ethics and Politics" with Dennis Thompson (Nelson-Hall, 1984), which was designed for an innovative course at Princeton in ethics and public policy and is now assigned in practical ethics courses across the country. She has edited seven other books and published more than 70 articles. Gutmann says ethics will influence her actions as provost -- but not necessarily because of her scholarship in the field. "Ethics is a pre-condition for everything that we do, that is everything we do needs to be informed by our ethics. So I hope it will inform me as it's informed me my whole life in the way I treat people and the way I represent the institution," she says. "Princeton is a university of great integrity, and to be an institution of great integrity you to have to have people who have integrity on behalf of the institution. I hope that I will represent the institution in this way, but I'm sure you don't have to be an expert in ethics to do so." Gutmann says she is looking forward to her new job with
much anticipation: "It's an honor to be able to be provost
at Princeton at this time. I'm very excited by it. I think
the opportunity is great, and I just hope I live up to the
responsibility." |
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