John J. DiIulio, Jr. - Professor Ph.D., Harvard University

John J. DiIulio, Jr. is Frederic Fox Leadership Professor of Politics, Religion, and Civil Society, and Professor of Political Science, at Penn.

He directs Penn’s Robert A. Fox Leadership Program (Fox) and Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society (PRRUCS), and serves as chairman of the Penn Chaplain’s Office Advisory Board; as a board member of Penn Hillel; as a faculty advisor to Penn’s undergraduate interfaith group, PRISM; as a member of Penn’s Fels Institute of Government Academic Policy Committee; and as advisor to Penn doctoral candidates in several fields including political science, social work, education, and city planning.   

A Philadelphia native and the first member of his family to attend college, he received a B.A. in Economics and an M.A. in Political Science at Penn, and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Political Science at Harvard University.  He taught at Harvard and spent thirteen years as Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University, directing its first domestic policy research center and the largest Masters in Public Affairs concentration within Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

At the Brookings Institution, he was the C. Douglas Dillon Nonresident Senior Fellow in Governance Studies and directed the Brookings Center for Public Management.  He has also directed programs at Public/Private Ventures and the Manhattan Institute.

Over the last quarter-century, he has published over a dozen books plus hundreds of scholarly and popular articles and reports on American politics, health care policy, crime policy, religious nonprofits, and many other topics; served as an editor of several academic and journalistic publications; won several major academic, teaching, honor society, honorary degree, and civic achievement awards; chaired his academic association’s standing committee on professional ethics; and helped produce television documentaries including “God and the Inner City,” which aired on Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) stations.

A few of his most recent publications include Godly Republic: A Centrist Blueprint for America’s Faith-Based Future (University of California Press, 2007); American Government: Institutions and Policies (with James Q. Wilson, Houghton Mifflin, 11th edition, 2008); “Mayberry Machiavellis After All?: Why Judging George W. Bush Is Never as Easy as It Seems,” in Robert Taranto et al., eds., Judging Bush (Stanford University Press, forthcoming September 2009); and “More Religion, Less Crime?: Science, Felonies, and the Three Faith Factors,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Volume 5, forthcoming 2009.  His regular teaching includes introductory lecture courses on American politics, social science, and leadership in democracies, and seminars on U.S. church-state relations and U.S. public administration.

Outside academic life, he has advised presidential candidates in both parties and served as first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives; served on several bipartisan government reform bodies; and served on the boards of numerous national and local nonprofit organizations.

In Philadelphia and in other cities across the country, he has created programs to mentor the children of prisoners; promote literacy in low-income communities; reduce homicides in high-crime police districts; save inner-city Catholic schools that serve low-income children without regard to religion; and others.

With Penn’s Fox Program, he has been deeply involved in the ongoing human, physical, and financial recovery process in post-Katrina New Orleans.

As a proud son of Penn, he professes what its founder, Benjamin Franklin, favored as the motto for the Library Company of Philadelphia: “To pour forth benefits for the common good is divine;” and, as a Catholic Christian in the Jesuit tradition, he professes as a sacred civic credo what Saint Ignatius of Loyola taught: “Love ought to show itself in deeds more than in words.”

Selected Publications
• What's God Got to Do With the American Experiment? (Brookings, 2000). [co-edited with E.J. Dionne, Jr.]