Wendell Pritchett

Wendell E. Pritchett is an American lawyer, legal scholar, professor, and university administrator. He served as Chancellor of Rutgers University–Camden, and as Interim Dean and Presidential Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and serves as Provost of the University of Pennsylvania.

Pritchett's father, also named Wendell Pritchett, was a classical pianist and public school teacher, and his mother Carolyn was a high school English teacher. Pritchett grew up in Society Hill, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to which his family moved in 1967, and attended Friends Select School. He and his wife Anne Kringel, a native of Milwaukee, have two daughters. Kringel was the director of the legal research and writing program at the University of Pennsylvania Law School for 20 years.

Education

He earned a B.A. in Political Science from Brown University in 1986. Pritchett earned a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1991, and became a member of the Pennsylvania Bar that year. From 1991 to 1992, he worked at the law firm Wolf, Block, Schorr & Solis-Cohen.He earned a Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997.

Career

For five years, from 1997 to 2002, Pritchett was an assistant professor of history at Baruch College of the City University of New York.

Pritchett was a University of Pennsylvania Law School professor from 2001 to 2009, and is the Presidential Professor of Law and Education at the school.

Pritchett served as Chancellor of Rutgers University–Camden, and Professor of Law and History, from 2009-14, with a salary in 2013 of $310,000. In 2012, he was elected president of the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities.

From 2014-2015, he served as Interim Dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and as a Presidential Professor.

In 2017, Pritchett was named Provost at the University of Pennsylvania.

Pritchett has written two books and many articles on urban history and policy, especially in the areas of housing, race relations, land use, and economic development. His first book was Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews and the Changing Face of the Ghetto (University of Chicago Press, 2002). His second book was Robert Clifton Weaver and the American City: The Life and Times of an Urban Reformer (University of Chicago Press, 2008).