Current Position and Past Experience
Carol Schneider has served as the president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) since 1998. Schneider is one of the leaders of the Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) initiative, a campus action and public advocacy campaign design to engage students and the public with what really matters in college.
Prior to her appointments at AAC&U, Dr. Schneider spent ten years at the University of Chicago, where she directed the Midwest Faculty Seminar–a scholarly and educational collaboration between the University of Chicago and fifty Midwest colleges. She was a founding director of The University of Chicago Institutes on Teaching and Learning and also helped establish the Chicago Teaching Program, a pioneering effort to deepen graduate students' preparation for college teaching. She has taught at Boston University, Chicago State University, The University of Chicago, and DePaul University. In 1982, she was named a Mina Shaughnessy Fellow of the U.S. Department of Education and she has been a distinguished Visiting Scholar at The American University in Cairo, 1997 and a Getty Center Visiting Scholar for the Seminar on Public Culture in 1998.
Education, Honors and Achievements
Dr. Schneider is a magna cum laude graduate and past member of the Board of Trustees of Mount Holyoke College where she received the bachelor's degree in history and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She studied at the University of London's Institute for Historical Research and earned the Ph.D. in early modern history from Harvard University, where she held a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, a Harvard Prize Fellowship, and a Kent Fellowship from the Danforth Foundation. She also has received eleven honorary degrees, was the 2011 recipient of the ACPA's Contribution to Higher Education Award and the 2013 recipient of the NAC&U Ernest L. Boyer Award, and was honored in 2013 as one of Diverse Magazine’s “25 Leading Women in Higher Education.”
