James Shulman is vice president and Chief Operating Officer at the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). He has worked in higher education and philanthropy since receiving his PhD in 1993. Until May 2016, he served as Artstor's founding President. [1] During his nine years at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation before joining Artstor, he participated in the construction of large databases, wrote about educational policy issues and the missions of not-for-profit institutions, and worked in a range of research, administrative, and investment capacities. [2] From 2016 to 2018, he served as a Senior Fellow in residence at Mellon.
Shulman originally joined the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 1994 as a member of the research staff and subsequently served as Financial and Administrative Officer. He oversaw the building of the college and Beyond database with 34 participating colleges and universities, survey teams at Mathematica Policy Research and NORC, and Foundation colleagues. [3] Drawing upon the database, he collaborated with William G. Bowen and Derek Bok on The Shape of the River: Long-term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions (Princeton University Press, 1998). [4] He also wrote (with William Bowen) The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values (Princeton University Press, 2001). [5]
From 1997 to 2002, Shulman assisted in the management of the Foundation's endowment. He also worked with the Financial Vice President with the Foundation's internal budgeting. For the first half of 2000, Shulman managed these functions while the Financial Vice President was on sabbatical.
Shulman received his BA and Ph.D. from Yale University in Renaissance Studies. His dissertation, which examined how heroes made decisions in the complex world of Renaissance epic poetry, received the John Addison Porter Prize in 1993 and forms the basis of The Pale Cast of Thought: Hesitation and Decision in the Renaissance Epic (University of Delaware Press, 1998). [6] He also has written the introduction to Robert K. Merton's The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A Study in Historical Semantics and the Sociology of Science (Princeton University Press, 2003). [7]
Shulman serves on the board of The Renaissance Society of America and The Spence School. From 2006 to 2015, he served on the board of Smith College, where he sat on the Campus Life and Investment Committees. He chaired an ad hoc committee on admissions and financial aid issues and served as chair of Academic Affairs. [8]
Princeton University is a private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution. The institution moved to Newark in 1747, and then to the current site nine years later. It officially became a university in 1896 and was subsequently renamed Princeton University.
Serendipity is an unplanned fortunate discovery. Serendipity is a common occurrence throughout the history of product invention and scientific discovery.
Shirley Marie Tilghman, is a Canadian scholar in molecular biology and an academic administrator. She is now a professor of molecular biology and public policy and president emerita of Princeton University. In 2002, Discover magazine recognized her as one of the 50 most important women in science.
Neil Leon Rudenstine is an American scholar, educator, and administrator. He served as president of Harvard University from 1991 to 2001.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation of New York City in the United States, simply known as Mellon Foundation, is a private foundation with five core areas of interest, and endowed with wealth accumulated by Andrew Mellon of the Mellon family of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It is the product of the 1969 merger of the Avalon Foundation and the Old Dominion Foundation. These foundations had been set up separately by Ailsa Mellon Bruce and Paul Mellon, the children of Andrew Mellon.
Don Michael Randel is an American musicologist, specializing in the music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance in Spain and France. He is currently the Chair of the Board of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a trustee of the Carnegie Corporation, and a member of the Encyclopædia Britannica editorial board, and has previously served as the fifth president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, twelfth president of the University of Chicago, Provost of Cornell University, and Dean of Cornell's College of Arts and Sciences. He has served as editor of the third and fourth editions of the Harvard Dictionary of Music, the Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music, and the Harvard Concise Dictionary of Music and Musicians. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2002.
William Gordon Bowen was an American academic who served as the president emeritus of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, serving as its president from 1988 to 2006. From 1972 until 1988, he was the president of Princeton University. Bowen founded the digital library, JSTOR.
Artstor is a nonprofit organization that builds and distributes the Digital Library, an online resource of more than 2.5 million images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and sciences, and Shared Shelf, a Web-based cataloging and image management software service that allows institutions to catalog, edit, store, and share local collections.
Paul Mellon was an American philanthropist and an owner/breeder of thoroughbred racehorses. He is one of only five people ever designated an "Exemplar of Racing" by the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame. He was co-heir to one of America's greatest business fortunes, derived from the Mellon Bank created by his grandfather Thomas Mellon, his father Andrew W. Mellon, and his father's brother Richard B. Mellon. In 1957, when Fortune prepared its first list of the wealthiest Americans, it estimated that Paul Mellon, his sister Ailsa Mellon-Bruce, and his cousins Sarah Mellon and Richard King Mellon, were all among the richest eight people in the United States, with fortunes of between 400 and 700 million dollars each.
Harriet Anne Zuckerman is an American sociologist and professor emerita of Columbia University.
Thomas J. Sugrue is an American historian of the 20th-century United States currently serving as a professor at New York University. From 1991 to 2015, he was the David Boies Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and founding director of the Penn Social Science and Policy Forum. His areas of expertise include American urban history, American political history, housing and the history of race relations. He has published extensively on the history of liberalism and conservatism, on housing and real estate, on poverty and public policy, on civil rights, and on the history of affirmative action.
The Mellon family is a wealthy and influential American family from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The family includes Andrew Mellon, one of the longest-serving U.S. Treasury Secretaries, along with prominent members in the judicial, banking, financial, business, and political professions, as well as famous banker R.B. Mellon, and his son R.K. Mellon, visionary who provided funding and leadership for the first Pittsburgh Renaissance.
Morton Owen Schapiro is an American economist who served as the 16th president of Northwestern University from 2009 to 2022.
Stephen Charles Ainlay is a former president of Union College. He became the 18th president of the institution in June 2006, succeeding interim president James Underwood, who succeeded Roger Hull after Hull retired in June 2005. He was succeeded by David R. Harris on July 1, 2018. He was known as a vast risk-avoider.
Ira H. Fuchs is an internationally known authority on technology innovation in higher education and is a co-founder of BITNET, an important precursor of the Internet. He was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2017. Since 2012 he has been President of BITNET, LLC a consulting firm specializing in online learning and other applications of technology in higher education.
Carolyn Makinson CBE is former executive director of International Rescue Committee UK (IRC-UK), and senior vice-president-Europe, IRC, positions she held from September 2010 to June 2014. Prior to these positions, she was executive director of the Women's Refugee Commission. She grew up in Derbyshire, England, and has lived at various times in London, Brussels, Cairo, and several places in the US. She now lives in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY, with her husband, Terry Walker.
Danielle Susan Allen is the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University. She is also the former Director of the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.
Jerome Bernard Karabel is an American sociologist, political and social commentator, and Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. He has written extensively on American institutions of higher education and on various aspects of social policy and history in the United States, often from a comparative perspective.
George Sumner Bridges is an American sociologist and academic administrator who served as the president of The Evergreen State College from October 2015 through Spring 2021.
Patricia Fortini Brown is Professor Emerita of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University.