Richard Ekman
President, Council of Independent Colleges
Richard Ekman has been president of the Council of Independent Colleges since 2000. He previously served as vice president for programs of Atlantic Philanthropies and, from 1991 to 1999, as secretary of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. From 1982 until 1991, he was a member of the staff of the National Endowment for the Humanities, first as director of the Division of Education Programs, and subsequently as director of the Division of Research Programs. He currently serves as a member of many boards, including those of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, the National Humanities Alliance, Project Pericles, LSU Press, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the Overseers' Committee to Visit the Harvard University Library. Additionally at Harvard he has been a member of the Villa I Tatti Council and the Graduate School Alumni Council.
His previous experience includes service as vice president and dean of Hiram College, where he was also a tenured member of the history faculty. Earlier, he served as assistant to the provost at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, and as associate director of the Department of Expository Writing at Harvard University. Dr. Ekman holds a Ph.D. from Harvard in the history of American civilization, the institution from which he also received his A.M. and A.B. (magna cum laude) degrees. He is co-author, with Richard E. Quandt, of Technology and Scholarly Communication (University of California Press, 1999).
Dr. Ekman has previously been active as a member of a variety of advisory and governing boards, serving the American Association for Higher Education, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, the Rackham Advancement Council of the University of Michigan, the Society for Values in Higher Education, the Washington Higher Education Secretariat, Georgetown Day School (Washington, DC) and Collegiate School (New York), and the Ohio Board of Regents.
