At an evening gala on Nov. 12, the Anti-Defamation League honored Penn President Amy Gutmann and the University of Pennsylvania with the Americanism Award for the 2014 partnership between ADL and the University.

“I could not be prouder in receiving the ADL’s Americanism Award,” said Gutmann. “America at its best is what the ADL wants to achieve and what we want to achieve at the University of Pennsylvania.

“At Penn, we know that diversity and excellence go together—indeed, diversity and eminence go together. And we have set out to prove that by becoming a more and more diverse community at the level of our students, our faculty, and our staff.”

On April 17, 2014, as part of its partnership with the ADL, Gutmann and Penn hosted Echoes and Reflections, a multimedia Holocaust resource training workshop for Philadelphia schoolteachers and Penn students. The workshop incorporated testimonies from the USC Shoah Foundation Archive of Visual History housed at Penn, and Gutmann spoke to the group about Penn’s shared dedication to Holocaust education.

In May, the Penn community joined in the ADL’s 2014 WALK Against Hate in downtown Philadelphia, raising funds to support ADL’s programs on anti-bias, anti-bullying, and anti-hate speech education.

And in September, Penn students participated in an ADL A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE® Institute workshop focused on challenging stereotypes on college campuses.

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Andrea Mitchell, NBC News Chief Foreign Affairs correspondent and host of MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” delivered special tribute remarks. Nancy Baron-Baer, ADL Philadelphia regional director, and Andy Goldman, ADL regional board chair, presented the award.

David L. Cohen, chair of Penn's Board of Trustees and executive vice president of the Comcast Corporation, and Daniel Hilferty, president and CEO of Independence Blue Cross co-chaired the ADL Americanism Award dinner honoring Gutmann. Penn Masala, a University A Capella group specializing in South Asian music, performed at the event.

Access and inclusion are tenets of Gutmann’s Penn Compact 2020. She has championed the all-grant, no-loan program at Penn, which was launched in 2007. Since then, the program has provided access to a Penn education for thousands of students.