Bolten ’76 to teach in Wilson School

Former White House chief of staff Josh Bolten ’76 will become a member of the Wilson School faculty in the upcoming academic year, the University announced Tuesday morning.

Bolten, who served under former U.S. president George W. Bush from April 2006 until the end of Bush’s term in January 2009, will teach an undergraduate seminar this fall and two graduate seminars next spring.

Bolten said in an interview with The Daily Princetonian that after his time in the Bush administration, he knew he did not want to “jump back into” full-time employment.

“I wanted to base myself either at a think tank, a law firm or a university,” he said. “A university was my first choice, just because universities have such a nice environment and it’s good to be around the vibrancy and the enthusiasm that you have in universities. So of all the universities, my first choice was my alma mater.”

Bolten added that he never considered working at another school after it became clear to him that Princeton was interested in his services. He said that soon after he left the White House, President Tilghman, who is traveling and could not be reached for comment, contacted him about his plans for the future.

Bolten said that after he and Tilghman had lunch in February, she put him in contact with Professor Mark Watson, who was the interim dean of the Wilson School at the time. Bolten said he soon agreed to come to Princeton after speaking with Watson.

Current Wilson School Dean Christina Paxson said the decision to bring Bolten to the University was made before she began her tenure as dean on July 1. “I learned about it probably the week before I started,” she explained.

Bolten said it is unclear whether he will live in Princeton come September, but he did say that he would spend at least three days per week on campus. “My commitment and my interest is in being around the campus and being part of campus life,” he said. “It’s not in coming in to teach a class and escaping. That’s not the Princeton way.”

In the fall, Bolten will be the instructor for WWS 481: Charting the Nation’s Fiscal Future. Bolten said this topic was an “obvious choice” for him, as he was the director of the Office of Management and Budget from 2003 to 2006.

What classes Bolten will teach in the spring term have yet to be determined, though he said the courses would likely focus on two of his subjects of expertise: international trade and international financial regulation.

“International trade was my career for many years during the ’80s and early ’90s,” he explained, adding that he thinks international financial regulation “is going to become, already is, and will remain for some time, a very important economic subject.”

Nathan Scovronick, the director of the Wilson School’s undergraduate program, noted in an e-mail that Bolten’s fall class was listed on SCORE during the standard enrollment period in the spring. All 15 spots in the class have been filled.

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

Bolten said he thinks his experiences in Washington make him a good fit for the Wilson School, and Paxson expressed a similar sentiment.

“I think what he is going to bring is a wealth of experience in a wide variety of areas in public service,” she said. “I’ve done a lot with health issues, and I’m excited to have someone who has worked on global health issues.”

Indeed, Bolten helped establish Bush’s global AIDS and malaria programs and is a member of the board of the ONE Campaign, a nonprofit geared toward fighting poverty and disease around the world.

Though Bolten acknowledged he has little teaching experience — he taught for one term at Yale Law School in 1993, focusing on international trade — he said he is confident that his government experience prepared him well for his visiting professorship.

“A lot of the work I did as a government staffer was, particularly earlier on in my career, the process of helping to educate political principals about subject matters that I was expert in,” he said.

Noting that he found the Wilson School’s goal of ushering students into government careers to be admirable, Bolten said he hopes to be able “to encourage a new generation of Wilson School graduates” using his “couple of decades of government experience and the stimulation and rewards I got from that.”

While he was an undergraduate at Princeton, Bolten was chair of the Honor Committee, president of his sophomore class and president of Ivy Club. After graduating, Bolten attended Stanford Law School and then went on to work at the U.S. District Court in San Francisco as a law clerk before going into private practice. Soon after, he got a job as a State Department attorney.

Beginning in 1985, Bolten worked for the Senate Finance Committee as a chief international trade staffer. In the administration of former U.S. president George H.W. Bush, he worked as general counsel to the U.S. trade representative.

After his first stint in the executive branch, Bolten went to London to work for Goldman Sachs before returning to serve as policy director for George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign. Bolten later became the president’s deputy chief of staff for policy.