AAC&U officers and staff regularly travel throughout the country, and occasionally the world, to speak and consult at AAC&U member schools through seminars, institutes, and workshops as well as in more informal gatherings. AAC&U staff also regularly speak on the value of liberal education at various media and public affairs events. These meetings are an opportunity for the membership to influence the direction of AAC&U's initiatives. We look forward to seeing you the next time we are on your campus.

Staff members from two AAC&U offices participated in the American Council on Education's conference "Educating All of One Nation" last month.

Caryn McTighe Musil, vice president for Diversity, Equity, and Global Initiatives (DEGI), and Michelle Asha Cooper, also of AAC&U's DEGI office, along with representatives from Radford University, moderated a session titled "From Student Learning to Institutional Transformation." The session highlighed new models from AAC&U's work with hundreds of colleges and universities over the past seven years for diversifying undergraduate curriculum. It also included a discussion of national trends identified in AAC&U's research on the relationship of diversity to student learning and efforts to incorporate experiential and service learning components into diversity courses and developments in teaching.

At the same ACE conference, Alma R. Clayton-Pedersen, vice president of AAC&U's Office of Education and Institutional Renewal, was a respondent on a plenary session titled "Higher Education: Erasing the Digital Divide." She also conducted a session titled "Using Technology to Address Racial Intolerance and Promote Diversity on Campus," which featured a multimedia problem-solving tool for improving the ability of students, faculty, and staff to deal with acts of intolerance on their campuses. The Diversity Opportunity Tool (DOT) allows users to view a brief video that depicts a typical incident of intolerance. Users then select from a number of possible responses, triggering the computer to play a vignette of likely outcomes.

DEGI staff members Daniel Teraguchi, Maria Figueroa, and Amanda Lepof also traveled to Cincinnati, Ohio, to participate.

Carol Geary Schneider, AAC&U president, will deliver the keynote address, "General Education and American Creativity," at the University System of Maryland's 2001 General Education and Chairperson's Conference. Dr. Schneider will also serve on a panel discussion on general education at the conference, titled "Transformation and Transition: New Directions in Higher Education," to be held November 5th and 6th in College Park, Maryland.
President Schneider delivered the address at Millikin University's fall convocation in Decatur, Illinois, at the end of October. She spent the following day consulting with faculty, department chairs, and deans about the Millikin Program of Student Learning.

Earlier in October, Schneider traveled to New York to participate in the first steering committee meeting for the National History Project, which is being launched by the National Council on Education and the Disciplines. This project will work to develop a commitment among high school and college faculty to participate in a professional community united around commonly shared intellectual and educational issues similar to the National Writing Project. The National Council on Education and the Disciplines is directed by Dr. Robert Orill at the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. Dr. Schneider's participation in the council's new project reflects cooperation between AAC&U's Greater Expectations Initiative and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation's work on learning in the disciplines, which focuses on strengthening the quality and continuity of learning in the later years of high school and the early years of college.

Debra Humphreys, vice president for Communications and Public Affairs, spoke on "The Impact of Diversity on Student Learning: Progress Made and Paths to Follow" to faculty and campus leaders at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell on October 30, 2001. Humphreys was also a guest on the PBS's This is America and participated on a segment entitled "Education in America." The episode, which airs November 10 and 11 on WHUT/PBS and November 14 and 16 on the Renaissance Network, was devoted to issues such as the role of the federal government in education, the importance of continuity from kindergarten through college, and testing.

As part of AAC&U's continuing involvement in the Tri-National Seminars sponsored by the Ford Foundation, Daniel Teraguchi, program and research associate in the Office of Diversity, Equity, & Global Initiatives, will attend Tufts University's 10th Annual Meeting for Japanese Literary Studies: Japan from Somewhere Else. This conference, scheduled for November 9-11, will explore the global connection between Japanese Literature and Japanese-American Literature.