Sources and Experts

Debra Humphreys

	Debra Humphreys

Debra Humphreys received her BA from Williams College and her PhD in English from Rutgers University. Dr. Humphreys is currently the Vice President for Communications and Public Affairs at the Association of American Colleges and Universities—a position she assumed in January 2001. Prior to that, she served as Director of Programs in the Office of Diversity, Equity and Global Initiatives at AAC&U where she directed programs on women's issues and diversity in higher education. She also served as Executive Editor of AAC&U's quarterly publication, On Campus with Women, and Editor of the quarterly, Diversity Digest.

She currently oversees public affairs programs and outreach, media relations and the development of all of AAC&U's publications, marketing efforts, and Web resources. In this role, she has supervised the publication of several books, monographs, and quarterlies, overseen a reorganization of the department, and implemented a redesign of AAC&U's Web site and a new overall design for AAC&U print publications.  

She is currently leading a national advocacy campaign, Liberal Education and America’s Promise: Excellence for Everyone as a nation Goes to College.  Through this effort, she is helping to build communications capacity on the part of college and university leaders and faculty members and educate the public about the value of an engaged liberal education to prepare for the changing global economy.

In addition, Dr. Humphreys worked extensively with the staff members coordinating AAC&U’s national initiative, Greater Expectations: The Commitment to Quality as a Nation Goes to College, and helped to edit and publicize its publication, Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College. Through AAC&U's current strategic planning initiatives, she is also leading efforts to increase AAC&U's public visibility and influence among a variety of constituents both within and outside of higher education, most directly through AAC&U’s Presidents’ Campaign for the Advancement of Liberal Learning.

Before assuming her current position at AAC&U, she served as Project Director of two of AAC&U's national diversity initiatives, Racial Legacies and Learning: An American Dialogue and Diversity Works. Racial Legacies was a project designed to foster learning and dialogue about America's racial legacies and involved more than 80 colleges and universities all working to develop innovative campus diversity learning programs and campus-community partnerships.

Dr. Humphreys also served as Associate Director of AAC&U's other national initiative, American Commitment: Diversity, Democracy and Liberal Learning which involved more than 100 institutions working to transform their general education curricula to address issues of American diversity and democracy. She is the author of the project’s report, General Education and American Commitments: A National Report on Diversity Courses and Requirements.

Before coming to AAC&U in 1992, she had experience teaching Women's Studies and English at Rutgers University, Towson State University, and at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County. She also served as Program Associate at the National Women's Studies Association.

Dr. Humphreys has been an educational consultant at numerous colleges and universities with a special interest in faculty and curriculum development and has conducted faculty workshops on teaching and learning issues and especially on the process of developing diversity courses and requirements. She serves on the editorial advisory board of University Business. In addition to her expertise on general education and campus diversity issues, she has written, taught, and published on African American women's literature, immigrant women's literature, and women and American film history.

Her most recent publications include "Interdisciplinarity, Diversity, and the Future of Liberal Education," in Innovations in Interdisciplinary Teaching, edited by Carolyn Haynes and published by ACE/Oryx Press in 2002, and “Public and Private Universities,” in Four-Year Colleges 2004, forthcoming from Peterson’s/Thomson.