John DiIulio

John J. DiIulio, Jr. is the Frederic Fox Leadership Professor of Politics, Religion, and Civil Society at the University of Pennsylvania. His academic and civic interests include American government and politics; U.S. public leadership, administration, and management; religion, faith-based social service delivery programs, and nonprofit organizations; U.S. health care policy and administration; and China-U.S. relations and Sino-American educational and cultural exchange programs. A native Philadelphian and the first in his family to graduate from college, he received an M.A. and a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard, and a B.A. (economics-political science) and an M.A. (political science-public policy) from Penn. At Penn he serves as faculty director of the Fox Leadership International Program and the Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society.

Before coming to Penn, he was a Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University, where he directed the Woodrow Wilson School’s domestic policy MPA program and founded its first domestic and comparative policy research center. Before coming to Princeton, he taught at Harvard University and served as Head Resident Tutor of a Harvard undergraduate residence. Among other academic awards, he is winner of the David N. Kershaw Award of the Association of Public Policy Analysis and Management, the Leonard D. White Award in Public Administration of the American Political Science Association, and several awards for excellence in teaching including Penn’s Lindback Award, its Abrams Award, and awards from each of its two main student honor societies. His public and community service awards include the Big Brothers Big Sisters of America Achievement Award and the Gesu Spirit Award. He has been a senior fellow and a research center director at several major public policy think tanks and research intermediaries including the Brookings Institution, the Manhattan Institute, and Public/Private Ventures. At Brookings, he was the C. Douglas Dillon Senior Fellow and founding co-director of the Brookings Center for Public Management. He has served on the boards of numerous national magazines, academic journals, and national and/or local nonprofit organizations including Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, Partners for Sacred Places, and several colleges and universities. He has co-developed large-scale programs to expand community-based educational opportunities for low-income children, mentor the children of prisoners, support urban religious nonprofit organizations that deliver social services, and several others. Through Penn’s Fox Program, he has been engaged since 2006 in the ongoing recovery process in post-Katrina New Orleans. He has served on bipartisan government reform commissions.

As a White House senior staff member (Assistant to the President of the United States), he served as first Director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, and he assisted the Obama administration in reconstituting and expanding that office. His more than a dozen books and edited volumes include Bring Back the Bureaucrats: Why More Federal Workers Will Result in Better (And Smaller!) Government (Templeton Press, 2014); American Government (with James Q. Wilson and Meena Bose, Cengage, 2014), 14th Edition; Godly Republic: A Centrist Blueprint for America’s Faith-Based Future (University of California Press, 2007); Medicaid and Devolution (with Frank Thompson, Brookings, 1998); Improving Government Performance: An Owner’s Manual (with Donald F. Kettl and Gerald J. Garvey, Brookings, 1993); and Governing Prisons: A Comparative Study of Correctional Management (Free Press, 1987) He has written for many major magazines and newspapers and co-authored widely-noted reports on issues including education reform (e.g., Silent Epidemic, 2006, Achievement Trap, 2007, and others with Civic Enterprises). In 2013, he joined the Aspen Institute’s effort to mobilize 18-28 year-old citizens into year-long national and community service positions and began co-leading an in-depth study of the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. In 2014, he launched a major, multi-university effort to develop a new generation of China-U.S. educational and cultural exchange programs for young adult students and leaders in both nations. He is a Roman Catholic in the Jesuit tradition.

EDUCATION

• Harvard University, Ph.D., Political Science, 1986
• M.A., Political Science, 1982
• University of Pennsylvania, M.A., Political Science-Public Policy, 1980
• B.A., Economics and Political Science, 1980