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University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann has been nominated to ascend to the role of U.S. Ambassador to Germany, President Joe Biden announced Friday.
News that the 15-year Penn president would be tapped to take over international relations with the largest European country — a seat that’s been filled for the last year by acting ambassador Robin Quinville — was first reported last week by a journalist with Der Spiegel.
Gutmann’s father, Kurt Gutmann, was a college student in Germany at the start of the Holocaust. He suffered discrimination and boycotts of his family’s store because he was Jewish, before he managed to escape Nazi Germany in 1934.
Her father died in 1966, but Gutmann, a native of Brooklyn, N.Y., has said she still feels a strong connection to him — and his perseverance. She brought one of the world’s largest Holocaust archives to Penn in 2012.
“It’s true that his whole family would have disappeared from the face of the earth had it not been for what he did,” she told the Daily Pennsylvanian the following year.
When President Joe Biden was elected, Gutmann’s colleagues and close friends suspected she would soon make the pilgrimage to Washington, D.C. The 46th president has plenty of ties to Penn — he was a professor, and he funded the university’s Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement.
Biden also maintains a friendship with Gutmann, and she has hosted him at Penn for several forums and discussions over the years, including conversations on cancer research and the opioid epidemic.
After he clinched the leader of the free world gig in November, rumors swirled on the West Philly campus that Gutmann might be tapped for a national role, possibly as Biden’s education secretary.
She didn’t get that job. Instead, as ambassador, Gutmann will oversee relations between the United States and Germany, managing American representatives and foreign services officers operating there.
Gutmann’s legacy at Penn is… complicated.
Since she took over the helm of the university, first-generation college student Gutmann affirmed Penn’s status as a sanctuary campus and criticized former President Donald Trump’s proposed ban on Muslim immigration.
But she’s taken heat, too — from multiple angles. After a white police officer killed Black teenager Michael Brown, Gutmann participated in a die-in with Penn students, which “outraged” members of the university police force.
The highest-paid Ivy League president, Gutmann opted not to take a pay cut during the pandemic, unlike her peers at other Ivy League schools.
Protesters have shown up at her UPenn residents on more than one occasion: In 2014, to demand the school contribute more money to the School District of Philadelphia, and again this year, when the Penn Museum revealed it kept for years the remains from children killed in the 1985 MOVE bombing.
Gutmann isn’t the first local official that Scranton native Biden has brought with him to the national stage. He picked former Pennsylvania Health Commissioner Rachel Levine to serve as assistant secretary of health earlier this year — and she became the first openly trans federal official confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
If Gutmann’s confirmed, it’ll likely kick off a nationwide search for her replacement at Penn.
Before Gutmann got the job, the last Penn president was Judith Rodin, a Philly native and philanthropist. She held the position for 10 years.
