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 has held since 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.

Humphreys 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 many books, monographs, and quarterlies, and multiple Web sites. Under her leadership, AAC&U has dramatically increased its publications sales and coverage of its issues in various print and electronic media outlets.   Since 2001 when she became Vice President, AAC&U's institutional members has also grown to more than 1250 members. Humphreys regularly serves as AAC&U's official spokesperson. In that role, she has appeared on Fox News, NBC Nightly News, the PBS program, To the Contrary, and has had op-eds published in USA Today and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

She is currently leading national and state-level advocacy efforts related to issues of student success and the quality of student learning in higher education. As part of AAC&U's campaign, Liberal Education and America’s Promise: Excellence for Everyone as a Nation Goes to College, 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. Humphreys also is helping to coordinate the policy strand of AAC&U's Lumina Foundation supported initiatives, Quality Collaboratives, working in nine states to advance transfer and assessment policies that better account for students' demonstrated accomplishment of learning.

Prior to her current responsibilities, Dr. Humphreys worked extensively in a leadership role on AAC&U’s national initiative, Greater Expectations: The Commitment to Quality 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 LEAP initiative and its various projects and leadership groups, including the Presidents' Trust and the LEAP National Leadership Council.

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. She also 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.

Before coming to AAC&U in 1992, she taught 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 speaks widely to educators, business leaders, and policymakers about quality issues in higher education and about the importance of liberal and higher education to the future of America's economic health and democratic vitality. She also serves often as a communications and educational consultant to colleges and universities with a special interest in board communications, internal campus communications, including communicating with students, and for faculty and curriculum development. She has conducted faculty workshops on teaching and learning issues and especially on the process of general education reform and developing diversity courses and requirements. She serves on the editorial advisory board of University Business, Change Magazine, and About Campus. 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.

Selected publications include “What’s Wrong with the Completion Agenda—and What We Can Do About It.” forthcoming in Liberal Education (Winter, 2012); "Liberal Education and the Policy Landscape," co-authored with Carol Geary Schneider in Transforming Undergraduate Education, edited by Donald W. Harward and published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2011; ""College Outcomes for Work, Life, and Citizenship: Can We Really Do It All?" in Liberal Education (Winter, 2009); "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.