AAC&U announced that it is joining with more than 70 diverse organizations and individuals as partners in the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation (TRHT) initiative, launched in January 2016. The enterprise was launched to help communities embrace racial healing and uproot conscious and unconscious beliefs in the hierarchy of human value. AAC&U President Lynn Pasquerella will serve on the Racial Healing and Relationship Building Design Team, and AAC&U Vice President Tia Brown McNair will serve on the Separation Design Team as part of this coalition. See related AAC&U resources on diversity, equity, and inclusive excellence, including a video of Lynn Pasquerella’s recent interview on Difficult Dialogues.   

An upcoming free webinar, “Unpacking Fisher II and Its Possible Implications for Institutions,” will be held on Thursday, July 14 at 12:00 p.m. EDT. Sponsored by the College Board’s Access and Diversity Collaborative, the webinar will include discussion of the elements of the US Supreme Court decision in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, which upheld the University of Texas’s race-conscious admissions program. To learn more about the case, read the 2014 briefing document, “The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal's Second Ruling in Fisher v. University of Texas: The Decision and Its Implications,” prepared by the College Board and Education Counsel LLC on behalf of the Access and Diversity Collaborative (of which AAC&U is a sponsoring organization). See also AAC&U President Emerita Carol Geary Schneider’s statement on the case, issued on June 23 in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision.

Launching her tenure as AAC&U’s 14th President, Pasquerella issued a message to AAC&U members noting that our community “must enlarge the national conversation about access [to higher education and] … embrace the many ways in which liberal learning and inclusive excellence enrich us all.” She notes further how much the diversity of AAC&U’s membership strengthens the association and that “what unites us across this diversity is our shared commitment to AAC&U’s mission of making liberal education and inclusive excellence the foundation for institutional purpose and educational practice.” Read the full message to members and more information about President Lynn Pasquerella.

In a recent article for Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, AAC&U Research Analyst and Program Manager Rebecca Dolinsky writes about the need for “campus cultures built on safety and support” for LGBTQ students in the wake of the recent tragedy at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando. Reflecting on the current context for LGBTQ rights in the United States, where “rhetoric and legislation … have been both inclusive and exclusive of LGBTQ people,” she calls campuses to “engage diverse student groups at the intellectual and emotional levels” by attending to inclusion in their public messaging, in the curriculum, and in the cocurriculum. Read the full article here, and visit AAC&U’s website to read President Carol Geary Schneider’s statement on the Orlando tragedy.

AAC&U’s President-Elect Lynn Pasquerella will be completing her tenure at AAC&U member institution Mount Holyoke College in mid-June and taking the helm of AAC&U July 1^st.  On June 1^st, she co-led the LEAP Presidents’ Trust annual spring convening.  This was the first of many planned dialogues the new president will be having with AAC&U’s membership.  Pasquerella will also get a chance to meet and discuss membership priorities with campus teams attending several of AAC&U’s summer institutes in June and July.  Under her leadership, Mount Holyoke College became a pace-setter for integrative liberal learning—including designs to help all students connect their college studies with purposeful pathways to long-term professional success. See: http://www.aacu.org/campus-model/mapping-path-curriculum-career-lynk-initiative-mount-holyoke-college.

Prior to her retirement on June 30, 2016, AAC&U President Carol Geary Schneider traveled extensively, working with faculty and academic leaders from many institutions on how to advance inclusive excellence and help diverse students successfully achieve the essential learning aims and outcomes of a liberal education. On April 8-9, Schneider gave a speech at the Inaugural Symposium introducing Grant Cornwell as the new President of Rollins College. On April 13, Schneider traveled to DePaul University, where her presentation focused on “LEAP: A Twenty-First-Century-Strategy for Quality Learning, Demonstrated Achievement, and Long-Term Student Success.” On April 16, Schneider addressed the 2016 Higher Learning Commission on “Liberal Education and the New Frontiers for Quality Assurance.” On May 4, she attended a meeting with the Council of Regional Accrediting Commissions, addressing “The Quality Learning Imperative: Preparing Students for Work, Civil Society, and Life.” On May 18, Schneider traveled to the University of Michigan for “The Future of Diversity Research—A Diversity Scholars Network Conference.” Her presentation in Michigan focused on making excellence inclusive and preparing students to create solutions for the future. On June 4, she delivered the plenary address at AAC&U’s Institute on General Education and Assessment in Boston. On June 6, Schneider traveled to New Haven, Connecticut to speak at an international symposium, held by Yale-NUS College, on globalizing the liberal arts. On June 10, Schneider addressed liberal learning and democracy at MetroCITI’s Conference on Liberal Education in Urban Universities, held in New York City. On June 23, Schneider will travel to the Stella and Charles Guttman Community College in New York City to deliver remarks at the institution’s commencement and receive their Presidential Medal. See these and other presentations and writings from Schneider at www.aacu.org/about/cgs_perspectives.

AAC&U President Carol Geary Schneider released a statement mourning “this weekend’s murderous attack on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people at Pulse in Orlando.” She notes that the AAC&U community “grieve[s] for the tragic loss of so many lives and extend[s] our sympathy to all who are suffering from this act of carnage.” Noting that “we all are harmed by this horrific act of violence against LGBT individuals and their humanity, by this retreat to a culture of gun violence against members of our communities, and by this damaging assault on the core principles of a just and sustainable democracy,” she called on the community and our nation’s leaders to “respond to this sobering moment by recommitting to those core principles, for our nation and for the world.” See the full statement.