Futuring Diversity 2005
The Nancy Cantor Distinguished Lecture on Intellectual Diversity
Speaker: Richard C. Atkinson
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Richard C. Atkinson served from 1995–2003 as the 17th president of the University of California system. His eight-year tenure was marked by innovative approaches to admissions and outreach, which expanded access to UC universities for an increasingly diverse population; research initiatives to accelerate UC’s contributions to the state’s economy; and a challenge to the country’s most widely used admissions examination—the SAT 1—that paved the way to major changes in the way millions of America’s youth will be tested for college admissions.
Before becoming president of the UC System, Dr. Atkinson served for 15 years as chancellor of UC-San Diego, where he led that campus’ emergence as one of the leading research universities in the nation. He is a former director of the National Science Foundation, a past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a former faculty member at Stanford University, where his research in the field of cognitive science and psychology concerned problems of memory and cognition.
He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, the National Academy of Education, and the American Philosophical Society. And Dr. Atkinson has also received an unusual honor for a college president: a mountain in Antarctica was named in his honor.