Amy Gutmann, the president of the University of Pennsylvania, has announced the appointment of Wendell Pritchett as the 30th provost of the Ivy League institution, effective July 1. He currently serves as the Presidential Professor of Law and Education at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He served as interim dean of the law school during the 2014-15 academic year. Before joining the faculty at the law school, Dr. Pritchett was chancellor of the Camden campus of Rutgers University in New Jersey.
In accepting the appointment, Professor Pritchett said “I am deeply humbled and honored to be selected as the 30th provost of the University of Pennsylvania and I am grateful to President Gutmann for her confidence in me. As a lifelong Philadelphian, I cannot remember a time that the University of Pennsylvania was not part of my life. I learned how to be a scholar in Penn’s wonderful history department and how to be a teacher and an academic with the support of my colleagues at the law school.”
Dr. Pritchett is the author of Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews and the Changing Face of the Ghetto (University of Chicago Press, 2002) and Robert Clifton Weaver and the American City: The Life and Times of an Urban Reformer (University of Chicago Press, 2008).
Professor Pritchett is a graduate of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where he majored in political science. He earned his law degree at Yale University and holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania.
