Gutmann says she won't leave Penn

University of Pennsylvania president and former Princeton provost Amy Gutmann said Thursday that she will not leave her current position to take the helm at Harvard. She appeared on a list of candidates for that school's presidency earlier in the week.

Gutmann formally announced her decision at a meeting of Penn's Board of Trustees, confirming earlier indications she had given on the subject.

"I will say it, and I will say it for the last time: I am absolutely committed to being Penn's president, and I am not interested in any other presidency," Gutmann told the trustees, as reported in The Daily Pennsylvanian on Friday.

In early October, reporters from the Harvard Crimson spotted Gutmann in Cambridge, causing the paper to speculate that she was pursuing the Harvard presidency. But she denied any interaction with the interview committee, claiming instead that she was in town fundraising for Penn.

Harvard also considered Gutmann for its top office in 2001, when the school's presidential search committee interviewed her as one of its four leading candidates, but the school eventually tapped former Clinton treasury secretary Lawrence Summers instead. He resigned as president in March after enduring several major controversies, including fallout from his suggestion that innate differences between men and women might explain the dearth of world-class female engineers and scientists.

Harvard's list of its top 30 possible presidential choices also includes President Tilghman and former Princeton vice provost Ruth Simmons, who is currently president of Brown. Tilghman has previously denied any interest in the job.

Gutmann graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1971 and attended the London School of Economics the following year, where she earned a master's degree in political science.

After returning to Harvard for her Ph.D., which she earned in 1976, Gutmann eventually joined Princeton's faculty as a politics professor in 1990. That same year, she founded the University Center for Human Values. She went on to become the University's dean of the faculty from 1995 to 1997, academic adviser to the president from 1997 to 1998 and provost from 2001 to 2004.

Gutmann received several awards for her teaching at the University, including the Bertram Mott award in 1998 from the American Association of University Professors and the President's Distinguished Scholar's Award from the University. She was inaugurated as the eighth president of Penn in 2004.

Gutmann's public relations haven't been uniformly positive since then, however. Earlier this fall, she sparked controversy by posing in a photograph next to a Penn student who was dressed as a terrorist. The interaction happened at a Halloween party she hosts annually at her home. Gutmann later said she had not fully realized the nature of the student's costume before the picture was taken.