Judith Rodin - Academic Career

Academic Career

After teaching briefly at New York University, Rodin became an associate professor at Yale University, where she was to become well known among students as a popular lecturer. She held various professorial and other positions at Yale from 1972 to 1994, including Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Chair of the Department of Psychology, and Provost.

In 1994, Rodin became the first permanent female president of an Ivy League institution when she took over the leadership at her alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania. As president, Rodin guided the university through a period of unprecedented growth and development that transformed Penn’s academic core and dramatically enhanced the quality of life on campus and in the surrounding community. She encouraged revitalization in University City and West Philadelphia through public safety; the establishment of Wharton School alliances for small businesses; the development of buildings and streetscapes that turned outward to the community; and the establishment of a university-led partnership school, the Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander University of Pennsylvania Partnership School.

Under Rodin's leadership, Penn invigorated its resources, doubling its research funding and tripling both its annual fundraising and the size of its endowment. It also created Penn Medicine; attracted record numbers of undergraduate applicants, creating Penn’s most selective classes ever; and rose in the U.S. News & World Report rankings of top national research universities from 16th in 1994 to 4th in 2002. The university also established new institutes and created over a dozen groundbreaking interdisciplinary, multi-school, undergraduate and graduate degree programs while either planning or completed new buildings and major renovations in every school and center. And it significantly expanded its international programs and collaborations. Rodin even brought Bono, of the rock group U2, to address the university at the 2004 commencement.

Rodin has published more than 200 articles and chapters in academic publications and written or co-written 11 books; including, Public Discourse in America (2003).