Wendell Pritchett
Wendell Pritchett is Presidential Professor of Law and Education at Penn and a Research Associate at the Center for Minority Serving Institutions. A Penn Law professor from 2001-09, Pritchett served as Interim Dean of the law school from July 1, 2014 to June 30, 2015. From 2009-2014, Pritchett served as Chancellor of Rutgers-Camden, and in 2008 he served as Deputy Chief of Staff and Director of Policy for Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, who also appointed him to the School Reform Commission, where he served from 2011-14. He has written two books, and his research examines the development of post-war urban policy, in particular urban renewal, housing finance, and housing discrimination. Pritchett has specialized in real estate and housing law, representing nonprofit organizations involved in the development of affordable housing.
Pritchett, who holds a Ph.D. in history from Penn and is an award-winning urban historian, earned his law degree at Yale. He has held numerous leadership positions in nonprofit and government service, in addition to pursuing a distinguished academic career.
Before coming to Penn, he spent five years as assistant professor of history at Baruch College of the City University of New York. In 2007, he chaired the Urban Policy Task Force for then-Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Earlier in his career, Pritchett served as director of district offices for U.S. Rep. Thomas Foglietta and as an attorney representing non-profit organizations in the development of affordable housing.
As Rutgers-Camden chancellor, Pritchett had direct responsibility for the daily administration of a campus that enrolls more than 6,300 students in 39 undergraduate programs and 28 graduate programs at the master’s and doctoral levels. The southernmost of three regional campuses that comprise Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Rutgers–Camden is located across 40 acres in the Camden Waterfront District. The chancellor is the chief executive officer of the Rutgers–Camden campus, overseeing 1,100 employees and an annual budget of more than $165 million. The chancellor reports to the Rutgers President and is a member of the President’s cabinet and a key member of the university’s executive team. As chancellor, Pritchett played a leadership role in the revitalization of Camden and served as an important partner with other institutions and businesses in promoting the economic, social, and cultural development of the fastest-growing region in New Jersey. During his term, the campus increased enrollment by more than twenty percent, created the Office of Civic Engagement and implemented college access programs across the region, constructed a 350 bed housing facility, doubled research funding, and increased the size of the standing faculty by more than fifty.
During the past 20 years, Pritchett has played a leadership role in numerous nonprofit organizations. He was board chair of Community Legal Services of Philadelphia during 2005-08. He also served as president of the Philadelphia Housing Development Corporation, chair of the Redevelopment Authority of Philadelphia, member of the Pennsylvania State Planning Board, and member of the Cooper University Health Care Board of Trustees. In October 2012, he was elected to a two-year term as president of the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities, a national consortium of higher education institutions. He is a co-chair of the World Class Greater Philadelphia Initiative of the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia.
As a scholar, Pritchett has written two books and numerous articles on urban history and policy, particularly in the areas of housing, race relations, land use and economic development. His first book,Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews and the Changing Face of the Ghetto(University of Chicago Press, 2002), explores race relations and public policy in 20th-century Brooklyn. His most recent book, Robert Clifton Weaver and the American City: The Life and Times of an Urban Reformer(University of Chicago Press, 2008), is a biography of the first African-American cabinet secretary, a leading thinker and practitioner of 20th-century urban development. Pritchett’s 2008 article “Which Urban Crisis? Regionalism, Race and Urban Policy, 1960-1974” won the Urban History Association Best Article Award.
