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Penn President Amy Gutmann is a national advocate for affordable education, an architect of the Penn Compact 2022, and co-author of Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven but Nobody Wants to Die.

The Penn Compact “expresses our boldest aspirations for higher education—a compact based on our shared understanding that ‘Divided we fail. United we flourish.’”
Amy Gutmann

Dr. Gutmann works with the deans of Penn’s 12 schools and senior administrators across the University to establish and advance Penn’s highest strategic priorities.

PennCOMPACT2022

IMPACT

Engagement with communities here at home, across our country, and throughout our world—civic engagement, for short—is at the heart of the Penn Compact 2022.

Amy Gutmann

Impact

Building on the University’s long history of civic-mindedness, the Penn Compact 2022 seeks to bring Penn knowledge and practice to bear on key local, national, and global issues in order to help more people lead healthy, prosperous lives.

To illuminate the prominent place that civic engagement holds at Penn, Dr. Gutmann established the President's Engagement Prizes, which provide unparalleled support for prizewinning seniors as they design and undertake public service projects after graduation. The prize also reinforces Dr. Gutmann’s unwavering belief that a university is, as Penn’s founder Ben Franklin believed, “first and foremost, a social undertaking to create a social good.”

At the local level, Penn's top priorities include direct support of schools such as Penn Alexander, which was one of just 279 public schools nationwide to be named a U.S. Blue Ribbon School for its success in closing the achievement gap. The Penn Connects 2.0 Campus Plan includes improvement of facilities and growth of green spaces on Penn’s contiguous university and medical campuses.

Major investments in the Perelman School of Medicine and UPenn Health System infrastructure—which together form a $6 billion enterprise—include the Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine; the Roberts Proton Center, the largest such facility in the world; and the Smilow Center for Translational Research. These and other recent campus projects have added more than 2 million square feet of renovated and new space at a cost of nearly $1.5 billion. The momentum continues with the New Patient Pavilion breaking ground in 2017.

In these facilities and locations throughout the community, Penn Medicine improves health through a variety of programs and activities. In 2015, these initiatives benefitted our community with $253 million in physician training support, unfunded care to Medicaid patients, and related research support.

A university is, first and foremost, a social undertaking to create a social good.

Amy Gutmann

At the national and global levels, Penn’s engagement initiatives operate on multiple fronts, with a special focus on advancing knowledge-based public policy. Inter-school programs that expand this signature Penn strength include the Christopher H. Browne Center for International Politics, which focuses on issues of international relations, international security, and international political economy; and the Penn-Wharton Public Policy Initiative, which fosters better-informed policy-making on issues related to business and the economy

These programs are among Penn’s 176 research and policy centers whose mission it is, in whole or in part, to promote discovery and knowledge creation of global importance. Perry World House, the campus hub for international programs and activities, unifies these powerful synergies and maximizes their impact.

While Perry World House welcomes world leaders and scholars to Penn’s campus, nearly 2,000 faculty and 2,500 students go out into the world each year to teach, research, study, and serve. And the Penn Wharton China Center, which opened in 2015 in Beijing, helps to strengthen the University’s vital involvement in an increasingly connected global environment.

Signature Initiatives

Global Connections

As a leading global university, Penn encourages its faculty and students to both go out into the world and welcome the world to them. The University has invested in state-of-the-art facilities to advance this engagement, including the Penn-Wharton China Center, located in Beijing’s World Financial Center, and Perry World House, a global policy research center at the center of Penn’s campus.

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Penn Connects 2.0

Penn Connects 2.0 is the University’s master plan to create an innovative and beautiful urban campus with vibrant living and learning spaces that make a positive impact on the local community. Building on Dr. Gutmann’s original campus plan, which added five million square feet of new and renovated space and increased open space by 25 percent, Penn Connects 2.0 reinforces the University’s sustainability objectives as outlined in its Climate Action Plan 2.0.

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President’s Engagement Prizes

Competitively awarded on an annual basis, the President’s Engagement Prizes empower Penn seniors to design and undertake local, national, or global engagement projects over the course of their first post-graduation year. Each Prize recipient receives $50,000 for living expenses and as much as $100,000 for project implementation expenses, making these prizes the largest of their kind in higher education.

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Inter-school Public Policy Programs

Penn faculty and students advance knowledge-based public policy through focused inter-school programs such as the Penn Wharton Public Policy Initiative, which fosters informed policymaking on issues related to business and the economy, and the Christopher H. Browne Center for International Politics, which promotes interdisciplinary research and teaching on issues of international relations, international security, and international political economy.

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Penn Compact Impact in the News

High ground, high prices
CNN | 2021-03-03 Benjamin Keys of the Wharton School spoke about climate gentrification, in which higher-ground neighborhoods will become more desirable due to rising sea levels. “You don’t need to see bars opening up with bartenders wearing suspenders and handlebar mustaches to be seeing gentrification,” he said.
The reckoning with Dr. Seuss’ racist imagery has been years in the making
NBC News | 2021-03-03 Ebony Elizabeth Thomas of the Graduate School of Education spoke about a decision by Dr. Seuss Enterprises to stop publishing six of the late author’s books which contain racist imagery. “We know now that there are anti-Asian stereotypes in ‘And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street.’ ‘The Cat in the Hat’ is minstrelsy,’” she said. “When we know better, we can do better.”
Stockton’s basic-income experiment pays off
The Atlantic | 2021-03-03 Research by Amy Castro Baker of the School of Social Policy & Practice found that guaranteed income did not dissuade recipients from working, instead enabling stability and helping people get out of the cycle of poverty.
Privacy or planet—The tough choice of doing away with paper receipts
Los Angeles Times | 2021-03-02 John Zhang of the Wharton School said that for businesses, digital receipts are “a cheap way to get your email address and to build their database to track your shopping habits. As a result, firms can do all kinds of targeted promotions on the cheap, and you will receive all kinds of junk emails.”
In the News Archives