Teams of educators and leaders from twenty states, state systems, and consortia gathered for the third LEAP States Summit, held Sept. 13–15, 2016, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The summit invited participants to connect quality of student learning with equity in student learning outcomes and to grapple with challenges to liberal education and inclusive excellence at the systems level. AAC&U President Lynn Pasquerella delivered opening remarks offering historical perspective on education as a public good and emphasizing the importance of developing educational systems that advance the pursuit of that good. Resources from the summit are available here, and more information on the LEAP States Initiative is available here.

AAC&U’s 2017 Annual Meeting—“Building Public Trust in the Promise of Liberal Education and Inclusive Excellence”—will be held January 25–28 in San Francisco, California. The opening plenary will be an open discussion moderated by AAC&U President Lynn Pasquerella on the challenges and realities of advocating for liberal education and inclusive excellence in our current political, economic, and social environment. Speaking at the opening plenary are Sara Goldrick-Rab, author of Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream; Michael Roth, author of Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters; Jeff Selingo, author of There is Life After College: What Parents and Students Should Know About Navigating School to Prepare for the Jobs of Tomorrow; and Beverly Daniel Tatum, author of “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?" and Other Conversations About Race. At the final plenary on Saturday, Jelani Cobb of the New Yorker will speak on “The Half-Life of Freedom: Race and Justice in America Today.” The ACAD Luncheon speaker will be Jaime Casap, Chief Education Evangelist at Google, Inc., on “Iteration and Innovation in Education.” The Annual Meeting will also feature a premeeting symposium on Wednesday, January 25, “Student Activism and Liberal Education: Faculty Engagement in Turbulent Times,” and the Eighth Annual Forum on Digital Learning and ePortfolios on Saturday, January 28. Register for the Annual Meeting here.

Ten colleges and universities have been named as the first class of Excellence in Assessment designees. The Excellence in Assessment (EIA) program, cosponsored by AAC&U, recognizes institutions’ commitment to the comprehensive assessment of student learning outcomes as a means to drive internal improvement and advance student success. The EIA program highlights institutions successfully integrating assessment practices across campus, providing evidence of student learning outcomes, and using assessment results to guide institutional decision-making and improve student performance. The ten institutions in the inaugural class are Cameron University, Capella University, the Community College of Baltimore County, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, Kansas State University, Mills College, Mount St. Joseph University, the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Zayed University. AAC&U has joined with the Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA), a public college and university transparency initiative led by the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLU) and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU), in partnership with the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA), to sponsor the EIA. For more on assessment, see AAC&U’s VALUE Rubrics and other assessment resources.

Becoming a Student-Ready College: A New Culture of Leadership for Student Success, published by Jossey-Bass in partnership with AAC&U, is now available for purchase. By prompting readers to ask what their institutions can do to support incoming students, the book shifts the conversation about student success from a focus on student preparedness to a focus on institutional preparedness. The book’s coauthors include AAC&U Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Student Success Tia Brown McNair and AAC&U Senior Scholar Susan Albertine, writing with Michelle Asha Cooper of the Institute for Higher Education Policy, Nicole McDonald of Lumina Foundation, and Thomas Major Jr. of Lumina Foundation.

AAC&U invites you to join with colleagues at the “Global Learning and the College Curriculum: Nurturing Student Efficacy in a Global World” conference on October 6–8 in Denver, Colorado, to learn how educators are placing real-world problem solving at the center of the undergraduate curriculum. Many of the challenges facing our nation and the world in the twenty-first century are global in nature, and students need to be prepared to solve these problems with an ethical global mindset. Conference participants will discuss how global learning can be mapped equitably across the institution to chart a new course for inclusive curricular change. Learn more about this conference and register by September 7 for the best conference rates.

With Teagle Foundation support, AAC&U announces the launch of a new initiative, Purposeful Pathways: Faculty Planning for Curricular Coherence. Part of AAC&U’s LEAP national initiative, this six-month planning project will lay the foundation for ambitious faculty-led curricular changes leading to improved student learning and success in earning degrees. The project held a launch meeting July 21–22 in Washington, DC, and is led by AAC&U Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Student Success Tia Brown McNair with participation from the Community College of Philadelphia (PA); University of Houston-Downtown (TX); University of Nevada, Las Vegas (NV); and Winston-Salem State University (NC). For more information, see the project web page or the press release.

AAC&U President Lynn Pasquerella has written an Op–Ed, published by Inside Higher Ed, in which she responds to Donald Trump’s proposal for the future of higher education. Pasquerella states, “In order to restore public trust in higher education and destabilize the cultural attitudes at the basis of Trump’s policy proposal, we need to demonstrate in a more compelling way to those outside of the academy, Democrats and Republicans alike, the extent to which we actually are teaching students twenty-first-century skills, preparing them to solve our most pressing global, national, and local problems within the context of the workforce, not apart from it. Our shared commitments to equity, democratic and economic vitality, and inclusive excellence demand nothing less.” Read the Op–Ed online, and learn more about AAC&U’s commitment to undergraduate liberal education.