President's Speeches and Interviews

My talk will have two parts, the first is a frank estimate of the annual state of our particular university as against our goals, projections, and historical performances; in part two, I like to think, a little differently each year, about what I like to call our "AUP exceptionalism"...

But while economics may favor the trend, Celeste Schenck, president of the American University of Paris, thinks a larger force is at work. She attributed the increased American interest in international schooling to modern-day intercultural connectedness...

May I begin by saying how proud I am to have as Chair of our Board an AUP alumna, especially one who so embodies what it means to have emerged seasoned from the formative crucible of this University...

Celeste Schenck, the President of The American University of Paris, tells her students: "When you are so much of the world, you have a responsibility for the world...

Celeste Schenck, the President of The American University of Paris, tells her students: "When you are so much of the world, you have a responsibility for the world...

During a broadcast on August 16, 2011 entitled “Le temps des Femmes,” France Culture journalist Sylvie Andreu interviewed 25 exceptional women: artists, writers, politicians, academics… and amongst them, Celeste Schenck, President of AUP.

Women and men of the class of 2011, these are both remarkable and daunting times in which to come of age. Global economic uncertainty, not to say crisis, has clouded since 2008 the vista of even those young people lucky enough to be graduating from college, education in hand...

Today, we call the Girl Scouts “the premier leadership development organization for girls” with over 3.5 million members worldwide. In my day, some fifty years ago, half a lifetime ago for the Girl Scouts, when I was a proud Brownie and then a Scout in the early 60s, we didn’t talk so much about leadership, much less women’s leadership...

The danger of going last at a conference as rich as this Second International Conference on Higher Education is that everything has already been said; having been given the “last word,” I have assigned to myself the responsibility of bringing the themes we have sounded to a satisfying close...

Two and a half years ago, just as the impact of the financial crisis was beginning to be felt by leaders of American higher education, I attended a conference of 500 presidents of independent universities and colleges in the US...

Members of the Class of 2010, I salute you on this day of your graduation. In a few short moments, you will walk this stage from left to right, taking in hand the diplomas you have so richly earned...

Although I did not have the honor of knowing Dr. Lloyd DeLamater personally, as so many of you in this sanctuary have, I have been connected to him spiritually for many years. He stands at one end of the half century in which our college, then our university, has flourished, as I stand at the other, receiving from him the baton we both have held so dear...

I am delighted to be surrounded today by such impressive researchers and policy makers, especially since I am more of a practitioner than a scholar in the matter of women’s leadership. I come from the field of the university presidency, a fraught field indeed, to share with you some observations based on empirical practice and experience of women leaders and managers in higher educatio...

In this, my own first year as president of The American University of Paris, I have learned that becoming a leader is something like fixing an airplane while you are flying it. It is the hardest work I have ever done. But I have also learned that there is nothing on this earth that I would rather be doing...

In the next five years, [...] I fully expect AUP to be a recognized and renowned “world university” with an international faculty and student body, a cross-cultural, comparative and contemporary curriculum that is marked by innovative interdisciplinarity, with an elegant campus in and of the city of Paris...

I see AUP becoming most fully itself with a curriculum built around the cross cultural and the comparative, providing an education of the highest rigor to future global citizens.  In the years ahead, I hope to preside over an AUP that is better resourced, that has a renovated, expanded campus in the 7th, and that has become internationally known...

What, ultimately, will separate good universities from great ones in our present global era? It is not, I believe, the criteria of the rankings, all those things we call “inputs,” not the facilities, not the number of books in the library, not the size of the endowment, not even the number of publications of their faculties, but their capacity to develop the world citizenship of their students...