President of Association of American Colleges and Universities To Give Keynote Address at Allegheny College
March 30, 2015 – Carol Geary Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, will speak on “Democracy and Opportunity: How Liberal Education Can Foster Both” at 7 p.m. on Friday, April 10 in Ford Chapel at Allegheny College. The talk, which is the keynote presentation at the National Undergraduate Conference on Voting Rights and Democratic Participation, is free and open to the public.
Conference speakers will include four additional nationally recognized scholars and activists: John Aldrich of Duke University, Anne Boxberger-Flaherty of Southern Illinois University, Joy James from Williams College and Gabriel Sanchez from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of New Mexico.
As president of the AAC&U, Carol Geary Schneider oversees the leading national organization devoted to advancing and strengthening undergraduate liberal education. The organization includes more than 1,300 member institutions, half public and half private, with members drawn from the entire higher education community, large, small, two-year, four-year, selective and open admissions.
Under her leadership, AAC&U launched Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP), a public advocacy and campus action initiative designed to engage students and the public with what really matters in a college education for the 21st century.
Additionally, under Schneider’s leadership, AAC&U has become widely recognized as a force for strengthening the quality of student learning in college for all students and especially those historically underserved in U.S. higher education.
The National Undergraduate Conference on Voting Rights and Democratic Participation is funded by the Bywater Fund for Social Justice Programming. Additional support has been provided by the Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation, the Andrew Goodman Foundation, the Raymond P. Shafer Foundation of the Crawford Heritage Community Foundation, the Demmler Fund and several departments and programs of the college.
The conference is part of Allegheny College’s Year of Voting Rights and Democratic Participation, which celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act and explores the state of civil rights, broadly defined, in our world today. More information can be found at www.allegheny.edu/200.