<

University of Pennsylvania

Toggle Navigation Toggle Search

Penn President Amy Gutmann is a national advocate for affordable education, an architect of the Penn Compact 2020, 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.

PennCOMPACT2020

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 2020.

Amy Gutmann

Impact

Building on the University’s long history of civic-mindedness, the Penn Compact 2020 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.

Visit site

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.

Visit site

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.

Visit site

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.

Visit site

Penn Compact Impact in the News

Andrew Yang injected Silicon Valley’s favorite economic idea into the Democratic debate. Silicon Valley isn’t so happy about that
BuzzFeed.com | 10/17/2019 Amy Castro Baker of the School of Social Policy & Practice said universal basic income is looking increasingly possible now that it’s been embraced by the tech world. However, she cautioned, “if we move forward, but without the science of knowing how to best implement, we could create other forms of inequality.”
Poll: Most Americans say they trust Supreme Court
TheHill.com | 10/16/2019 A new survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that 68% of U.S. adults have faith in the Supreme Court, and 70% said the court has “about the right amount of power.” However, 57% of respondents said it can get too “mixed up in politics.”
FDA: Deliveries of scarce childhood cancer drug due to resume later in October, but shortages may continue for months
Forbes | 10/16/2019 Peter Adamson of the Perelman School of Medicine authored a letter proposing a “call to action” to make sure childhood-cancer drug shortages don’t reoccur.
As Democrats spar over guaranteed jobs, universal basic income and $15 minimum wage, which would best help Americans?
MarketWatch | 10/17/2019 Ioana Marinescu of the School of Social Policy & Practice said that, in an ideal world, universal basic income would better improve the lives of Americans than a $15 hourly wage. The former is “a more ambitious plan, for sure, and therefore the rub is the cost,” she said.
In the News Archives