Matt Rourke/AP Photo
Joe Biden and Penn President Amy Gutmann take part in a forum at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, April 11, 2019.
Three years ago, Joe Biden launched a center with his name on it through the University of Pennsylvania that’s just blocks from the Capitol. Since its opening, the Penn Biden Center’s office on Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C., has housed the future secretary of state, the president’s top adviser, and, not surprisingly, the future president himself. But for an organization with such high-profile alumni and staff, its mission is surprisingly unclear.
Biden’s formal association with the University of Pennsylvania began in February 2017, when the school named him a “Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor.” At the time of Biden’s appointment, a university spokesperson wouldn’t say exactly what the former vice president would be doing, telling The Daily Pennsylvanian, “Details are still being ironed out.”
In 2018, Biden announced the creation of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. The center became Biden’s “main office when he [was] in D.C.,” and Biden earned nearly a million dollars from the professorship in 2018 and 2019. But he did not teach any classes, and he only appeared on campus for a handful of events and speeches.
The center basically functioned as a foreign-policy think tank for Biden’s inner circle. It gave Penn a foothold in Washington—but as for day-to-day operations, the university was rather unspecific. Now that Biden is about to re-enter the White House, the center’s operations will nominally continue, but it’s not clear what it will do and how it will adapt to its namesake being the future president.
At the February 2018 opening of the center, Biden commended Penn’s investment, “not in me but in this facility.” And the facility has been a major selling point in providing a landing pad for Biden in the capital and for enhancing the university’s status as a player in the academic foreign-policy landscape.
But it all seemed more symbolic than substantive. Two former interns who worked at the center enjoyed a beautiful office, with a conference room’s floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Capitol. It was a “highly custom design featuring custom wood floors, millwork, glass, lighting,” according to the contractor Rand Construction.
Biden had his own office, but “he was never there,” said one intern. Penn students working there spent their days drafting memos and research for foreign-policy conferences and op-eds and assisting senior staff, many of them Obama-era foreign-policy officials, with media appearances.
The center, it would turn out, was another holding pen for officials who would land senior positions in the Biden administration, like Tony Blinken and Steve Ricchetti. Blinken was the managing director of the center from 2017 to 2019; Ricchetti briefly succeeded him in the role. They’ve gone on to top roles in the Biden administration.
If anything, the Penn Biden Center offered Biden’s confidants a comfortable perch, a salary, and a title while they waited out the Trump administration. Blinken earned a salary of $80,000 from his time at the center, which consisted, according to his executive disclosures, of “academic research and program management” and overlapped with his work for WestExec Advisors. Richetti has yet to release his disclosures.
After Biden announced his campaign in 2019, he took an unpaid leave of absence from Penn. The center has not closed, but its work is somewhat stymied without its most visible administrator. Currently, the center is run out of the department that administers study abroad and away programs called Penn Global, suggesting a future focus on the student internship program at the Biden Center. Its website lists seven employees on the center’s leadership team, including senior fellow Spencer Boyer, an Obama-era deputy assistant secretary of state, and managing director Michael Carpenter, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense.
The Biden transition team referred all questions about the center to the University of Pennsylvania’s communications team. “While President-elect Biden and other members of the staff took leaves of absence at the time of his candidacy, we are excited to move on with the next phase of the Penn Biden Center, where it will continue to operate as part of Penn Global,” a university spokesperson said in a statement. “Specific details regarding staffing and programming will be forthcoming.”
Even after Biden’s leave of absence, the center’s leadership has continued to testify to Congress as expert witnesses. Recently, fellows at the center have published foreign-policy analysis in Defense One, Foreign Affairs, and War on the Rocks.
And it seems the revolving door between the center and the administration has not closed. At the end of the year, Biden nominated a former strategic consultant to the Penn Biden Center, Colin Kahl, as a top Defense Department official.
In the video announcing the center’s creation, Biden speaks about the “young men and women who come through this program,” and how he’s “hoping that we are going to see some future secretaries of state and presidents and national-security advisers roll through this outfit.” When the center was created, the focus seemed to be on Penn students. But as Biden moved back into public life, it has taken on a new role as another stop on the Biden administration’s conveyor belt.
