New America Foundation Naming Anne-Marie Slaughter as President

April 3 | Updated

Anne-Marie Slaughter is leaning in. A Princeton professor and former State Department official, Ms. Slaughter said Wednesday morning that she has decided to leave academia to become the next president of the New America Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan policy institute based in Washington.

Ms. Slaughter’s oracular warnings about the difficulty of women being able to  gracefully manage a fulfilling career and family life helped prompt a national conversation on the subject. Her argument that the American workplace has done little to support women set her up as a counterpoint to Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg, whose bestselling book “Lean In” chastises women for “pulling back when we should be leaning in.” With this new job, Ms. Slaughter is waging the battle on two fronts, just as she has urged Ms. Sandberg and others to do: “I am leaning in,” she said, “but I can only do it because the job is flexible.” That means she can be home forbreakfast and dinner with her two teenaged children, she said.

Ms. Slaughter, who will remain professor emerita at Princeton, will replace Steve Coll, who was named last month as the new dean of the Columbia Journalism School.  Ms. Slaughter said she is always “telling students to follow their passion and do what they love,” and so she decided to follow her own advice and get more involved in helping shape political and social policy.

The New America Foundation, which is based in Washington, characterizes itself on its Web site as interested in “work that is responsive to the changing conditions and problems of our 21st Century information-age economy.” Ms. Slaughter is already at the center of one of those issues: The debate about the dearth of women in top leadership roles in business and government became national news last summer after Ms. Slaughter wrote an influential article in The Atlantic magazine titled “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.”

Ms. Slaughter, a professor of politics and international affairs at Prince­ton and the director of policy planning at the State Department from 2009 to 2011, detailed the problems of helping direct America’s foreign policy and her teenaged son’s homework. Her exhortations that women stop blaming themselves and focus on the society-wide failure to support working mothers set her up as the counterpoint to Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook who has urged women to “lean in” and seize opportunities to move up the ladder. In her bestselling book “Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead,” she takes a psychological approach, telling women to overcome the “internal obstacles,” or unconscious ways they may hold themselves back.