Professor Woolley was tapped in 2017 to start a new School of Public and Global Affairs. The mission of the new School is to expand the boundaries of knowledge in public affairs, enhance the public's understanding of policy choices, and to elevate those in public service, providing a first-class education and an intellectually vibrant environment to students who wish to advance or start careers in public affairs. The School will be distinguished by (1) project-based learning in (2) multi-national classes led by (3) accomplished practitioners (4) focusing on issues of both local and global importance.

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Woolley was in 2012 selected to serve as Provost of Fairleigh Dickinson University’s picturesque New Jersey campus known as the Florham Campus.  As provost, his primary responsibility was to enable excellent faculty and students to pursue their intellectual inquiries and creative endeavors on the beautiful grounds of what was once the estate of Florence Vanderbilt and Hamilton Twombly.

 

Built in the Gilded Age by McKim, Meade, and White, the estate is now home to thousands of students, faculty, and alumni, and includes colleges of arts and sciences and of business, as well as the prestigious Literary Review, a nationally acclaimed graduate writing program, the School of Pharmacy, the FDU Press, the fabulous festival of words and music known as WAMfest, and the prodigious producers of public opinion research, PublicMind.

 

Dr. Woolley also served as the university’s Senior Vice-Provost for Government and Community Affairs and now serves as Vice-President for Strategic Initiatives.

 

Peter is Professor of Comparative Politics, a co-founder and, for many years, executive director of the university’s independent survey research group, PublicMind.

 

His research in public opinion and his political commentary have been cited in news outlets from the Sydney Morning Herald to the Washington Post and the Trenton Times, from NJN to CNN, and in newspapers from Alaska’s Ketchikan Daily News to the Miami Herald.

 

Woolley took over the direction of PublicMind in 2001 and nurtured it from an obscure upstart in polling to a nationally cited source of public opinion on campaigns and elections as well as a variety of national issues such as automobile safety, eminent domain, gambling, the impact of candidates’ gender on voters, and even the impact on New Jersey by the TV shows, The Sopranos and Jersey Shore. He has been the principal investigator in hundreds of projects.

 

He was awarded a Ph.D. by the University of Pittsburgh in 1987. He studied at the Sorbonne and at the University of Bordeaux and later in Japan as a member of a Fulbright/Hays Group Project.   He was an Advanced Research Scholar at the US Naval War College (1994-95) and won the Edward Miller History Prize from the US Naval War College in 1997. Woolley authored of two books on U.S.-Japan defense relations, Japan’s Navy: Politics and Paradox and Geography and Japan’s Strategic Choices.

 

Peter is co-editor of American Politics: Core Argument/Current Controversy (Prentice-Hall), and contributed the chapter on New Jersey for Larry Sabato’s book on the 2006 midterm elections, The Sixth Year Itch. He is a contributor to such periodicals as The Polling Report, Survey Practice, Fordham Law Review Res Gestae, Strategic Review, The Naval War College Review, The Journal of Conflict Studies, The Journal of East and West Studies, Asian Survey, The Common Review and his personal favorite, The Journal of Irreproducible Results.

 

He chaired the Department of Social Sciences and History in FDU's Becton College of Arts and Sciences, and had the opportunity to rebuild the multi-disciplinary group of historians, anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists, making a series of hires over four years which successfully transformed it into one of the most vigorous in the university.

 

He is a Fellow of the American Council on Education and in 2001-2002 served at Lafayette College where he interned with the president and provost, and studied the competition between public and private universities, as well as the effects, both felicitous and infelicitous, of government intervention in education markets.

 

At FDU he has won the Distinguished Faculty Award for Research and Scholarship as well as the Distinguished Faculty Award for Service.