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.

Andrea Leskes, vice president for the Office of Education and Quality Initiatives, Karen Oates, senior science scholar, and Debra Humphreys, vice president for the Office of Communications and Public Affairs, met with a staff member of the U.S. House of Representatives Science Committee on February 28th. The discussion explored future directions for National Science Foundation funding and important national priorities for the improvement of undergraduate science education.

Dr. Richard Keeling, AAC&U senior fellow for the Program for Health and Higher Education (PHHE), will deliver an address for the Scientia Lecture Series at Rice University in Houston, Texas on alcohol programs and policies in higher education on March 19th.
For more information about the PHHE, visit http://www.aacu.org/phhe/index.cfm.

David Burns, AAC&U Senior Policy Director for PHHE and the Science Education for New Civic Engagement and Responsibilities (SENCER) will deliver a keynote on "Science and Civic Engagement" on March 15th at Fairfield University in Fairfield, Connecticut. Dr. Burns also participated as a panelist at the Association of American Physics Teachers Annual Meeting in Philadelphia at the end of January, discussing "Physics, SENCER, and Civic Engagement."

AAC&U President Carol Geary Schneider participated in the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching Carnegie/Hewlett Liberal Education Program Meeting in February. President Schneider will also serve on a panel at the Sixth National Writing Across the Curriculum Conference: "Writing the Future: Leadership, Policies, and Classroom Practices" at Rice University in Houston, Texas during the first week in March.

Kathy Goodman, AAC&U communications associate, participated in "University 2002: The University in the New Millenium," in Havana, Cuba in early February. The conference is part of an on-going effort begun in 1998 when UNESCO summoned the World Conference on Higher Education to reform higher education to ensure it is equally accessible to all on the basis of merit. The conference emphasized that the core missions of higher education - to educate, to train, to undertake research and to provide services to the community - must be preserved, reinforced, and further expanded.