Guest Speaker - Condoleezza Rice

The Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy and Professor of Political Science

The Hoover Institution, Stanford University

Condoleezza Rice is the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution and professor of Political Science at Stanford University.

From January 2005-2009, she served as the 66th Secretary of State of the United States. As Secretary of State, she focused on engaging America’s many partners around the world to build and sustain democratic, well-governed states that will respond to the needs of their people. She worked with the men and women of the Department of State to advance transformational diplomacy, an effort to implement new diplomatic foundations aimed at securing a future of freedom for all people.

Prior to serving as America’s chief diplomat, she served as President George W. Bush’s Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (National Security Advisor) from January 2001-2005.

From 1993-1999, she served as Stanford University’s Provost, during which she was the institution's chief budget and academic officer. As Provost, she was responsible for a $1.5 billion annual budget and the academic program involving 1,400 faculty members and 14,000 students.

Prior to becoming Provost, she was a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution from 1991-1993. She returned to the Hoover Institution (1999-2001) after serving as Provost, and while serving as a foreign policy advisor to then-Governor George W. Bush’s presidential campaign.

As professor of political science, Professor Rice has been on the Stanford faculty since 1981 and has won two of the highest teaching honors -- the 1984 Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching and the 1993 School of Humanities and Sciences Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching.

From 1989 through March 1991, the period of German reunification and the final days of the Soviet Union, she served on President George H.W. Bush’s National Security Council staff as Director, and then Senior Director of Soviet and East European Affairs, and Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. In 1986, while an international affairs fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, she served as Special Assistant to the Director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In 1997, she served on the Federal Advisory Committee on Gender -- Integrated Training in the Military.

She has authored and co-authored several books to include: Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (1995) with Philip Zelikow, The Gorbachev Era (1986) with Alexander Dallin, and Uncertain Allegiance: The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army (1984).

She has served as a member of the boards of directors for the Chevron Corporation, the Charles Schwab Corporation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the University of Notre Dame, the International Advisory Council of J.P. Morgan and the San Francisco Symphony Board of Governors. She was a Founding Board member of the Center for a New Generation, an educational support fund for schools in East Palo Alto and East Menlo Park, California and was Vice President of the Boys and Girls Club of the Peninsula. In addition, her past board service has encompassed such organizations as Transamerica Corporation, Hewlett Packard, the Carnegie Corporation, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, The Rand Corporation, the National Council for Soviet and East European Studies, the Mid-Peninsula Urban Coalition and KQED, public broadcasting for San Francisco.

She currently serves on the board of C3, an energy software firm, Makena Capital, a private equity firm, as well as the Aspen Institute, the Commonwealth Club, and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Born November 14, 1954, in Birmingham, Alabama, she earned her bachelor's degree in political science, cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Denver in 1974; her master's from the University of Notre Dame in 1975; and her Ph.D. from the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver in 1981.

She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been awarded honorary doctorates from Morehouse College in 1991, the University of Alabama in 1994, the University of Notre Dame in 1995, the National Defense University in 2002, the Mississippi College School of Law in 2003, the University of Louisville and Michigan State University in 2004, Boston College in 2006, and Air University in 2008.