Back at Penn, former president Amy Gutmann reflects on ambassadorship and where she is now: ‘I feel very free’

Amy Gutmann, the University of Pennsylvania’s longest-serving president before she stepped down in 2022, is back on the West Philadelphia campus after nearly 2½ years as the U.S. ambassador to Germany.

A political scientist who has written on “the spirit of compromise,” Gutmann, 74, has a joint appointment as a distinguished professor of political science and a professor of communication.

“I feel very free,” Gutmann said of her new life, post-college presidency and ambassadorship.

» READ MORE: Confirmed as the next U.S. ambassador to Germany, Amy Gutmann reflects on nearly 18 years as Penn’s president

In her 18 years of leading Penn, she raised more than $10 billion, oversaw construction of many new buildings, prioritized student aid, and led the school through a recession and pandemic.

Her name is already on a student residence hall and a professorship, and on Friday, Penn will officially christen Amy Gutmann Hall, a new data science building where professors will work together across disciplines on projects, such as ethical uses of artificial intelligence. During her tenure, Gutmann pioneered the hiring of professors who work across disciplines and have joint appointments.

From her office at the Annenberg School for Communication this month, Gutmann shared what it was like to return to Germany — the country her father fled when the Nazis took over and where she, nearly 90 years later, launched a “stand up and speak out” campaign in support of democracy and against all forms of hatred. She also shared what’s on her plate at Penn now, including the possibility of writing a family memoir, and her thoughts about the Ivy League university’s direction following a tumultuous year that saw the resignation of its president and board chair.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

My first full day there I met Vice President [Kamala] Harris on the tarmac. She arrived for her first Munich security conference. And we had a set of confidential … meetings with [German] Chancellor [Olaf] Scholz. … And I learned before those meetings from classified briefings that Putin was poised to launch a full-scale reinvasion of Ukraine. And what we communicated to the Germans was “You need to be with us. It’s going to happen. You need to be prepared.”

My highest priorities included ending Nord Stream II pipeline [a natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany that the U.S. feared would increase Europe’s energy dependence on Russia], modernizing their military, and upping their contribution to our mutual NATO defense.

So a week later, a full-scale invasion, troops, tanks, missiles, and three days after that, Scholz announces in a historic speech … “Nord Stream II is over. We are going to modernize our military. We are going to spend … $100 billion euros on military modernization, and we’re going to meet our 2% NATO commitment.”

What I learned very quickly is that diplomacy is every bit as important as I ever thought it would be and then some, because there’s no way that Germany would have been prepared without our diplomacy.

There’s a lot, and like doesn’t capture it.

The job was in some ways a mission of my lifetime to pay tribute to my father, who escaped Nazi Germany. I grew up boycotting Germany because of the Holocaust and the fact that Germany was the country under Hitler that perpetrated the Holocaust, so we wouldn’t buy anything German.

What I most valued about doing the job was that I could show that there was — and there is — good beyond evil, to put it simply, that we can do the most good today by working closely with one of our strongest allies in the world, Germany, as a reunited democratic country. They need us, and we need them.

The most emotional, joyful — but with tears running down my eyes and my daughter’s eyes — moment was going back to my father’s hometown [Feuchtwangen] … and being invited by the mayor.

He said, “There’s an exhibit in our museum, which was created on the site to memorialize the synagogue of the town that was destroyed by the Nazis. There’s an exhibit in that museum of [Gutmann’s] family.”

So we went back three times. The second time … we laid memorial stones for my father and each of the members of his family in front of their house where they also had a general store in the middle of town. … It was just such an emotional moment. We had two musicians, one who played and the other who sang ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow.’

And there I was, back. And the store, which had been taken over by the Nazis, is now owned and operated by wonderful people, and it’s an independent bookstore.

[The museum exhibit] also includes me now, which is an out-of-body experience.

Every day of my time there, I thought about my father.

The hardest part was getting used to all the security that I had. I had a security detail of 14 people, six of whom at any given time were with me no matter where I was outside of my residence.

I love to bicycle. … They were in front of me [on bikes], they were in back of me. [Then she noticed a car thought it wanted to pass them.] So I say to the head of my security detail, “Let the car go.” And he says, “That’s our car.”

Yeah, in different ways. I remember on Easter weekend I got a call from our defense attache: “We’ve got to get in touch with the Germans. We need x.” There’s no downtime.

And then there was a lot of entertaining, too.

Three Thanksgiving dinners a year. And it was the hottest ticket in Germany, basically, because the Germans love to learn about U.S. traditions. We had Amish turkeys flown in. We had Christmas, Hanukkah, and Iftar receptions, all of which were multireligious. All of these had a purpose, which was to further the understanding between us.

A lot of members of Congress came and visited, and we had those around the table, Republicans and Democrats alike.

Michael [Doyle], my husband [a professor at Columbia University], had moved heaven and earth to be with me. And he was with me for 2½ years, most of the time in Berlin. … It’s my turn to be with him.

» READ MORE: Penn president and husband donate $2 million for nursing scholars program at the university

It’s wonderful. I have a sabbatical this year and I’m thinking about doing some research on a book project that is just in the very, very earliest stages.

I have so many friends, people who were colleagues, who worked for me, who now are friends. They were friends then, but you can’t do as expansive of a friendship when you’re president.

I feel very free, too. So I don’t believe in Janis Joplin’s “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.” Freedom is really, really real.

I can’t describe it, except to say that if you have for as many decades as I have had to have a phone right next to you, so if someone needed you this moment, you’re available.

Obviously, if something happened in my family, I would want to be available, but it’s not that there are thousands of people who need to contact me in an emergency.

No.

I did it for 18 years. I felt it was the right time for me to move on. [Interim president J.] Larry Jameson is doing a great job. He is a colleague and a friend. I hired him many, many years ago. He is the right person for the right time here.

I have confidence that Penn is strong and will weather the crises. I think it is weathering the crises.

» READ MORE: J. Larry Jameson to remain interim Penn president through 2026 academic year

Some people ask confidentially on occasion, but I don’t offer unless asked.

We’ve had conversations.

I was so busy I could not watch it. When Oct. 7 happened, it was the most gut-wrenching thing to happen to the Jewish people since the Holocaust. I’m Jewish. I’m also U.S. ambassador to the country that perpetrated and executed the Holocaust.

That was full-time. That took up my consciousness. And when I heard about what was happening on university campuses, it was another kind of gut punch.

But there’s nothing I could do about that, and there was a lot I could do between U.S. and Germany.

I was so far away from everything that was happening that it would be counterproductive for me to engage in that.

» READ MORE: Penn president Liz Magill has resigned following backlash over her testimony about antisemitism

It’s important to say it, but there will be a lot of gray areas, and it will be really important to navigate those. There are going to be as many hard cases as there are easy cases, and that’s judgment. I think Larry has good judgment. There’s no substitute for good judgment.

» READ MORE: Penn says it will no longer respond publicly to world events, unless they directly affect the university

I am thinking about doing research on something I’ve never done before, which is a memoir of my father’s fleeing from Nazi Germany and my returning, the trajectory …

Yeah. It’s kind of rejecting and reclaiming roots. But it’s also a story about my mother and how my parents met. He was invited to a dance at a hotel in New York, and an attractive young woman came up to him. He was an eligible bachelor, and she said, “I’m a society reporter. Could I interview you?”

He said, “Sure.” And he asked her to dance, and then he asked her out, and she said, “I will be happy to go out with you, but I have to tell you … I’m not a society reporter. I was just pretending … to get into this dance.”

They were married a few weeks later. She went back with him to Bombay, India. I was conceived in India and born in the United States.