Jerry G. Gaff (1993)

Jerry G. Gaff is Senior Scholar at the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), where he has directed national projects to strengthen undergraduate general education programs, to establish programs that support the professional development of faculty, and most recently to develop new models for the graduate preparation of future faculty members. He also is the founding director of AAC&U’s Network for Academic Renewal. During the 1960s, while a teacher at Raymond College, an innovative college at the University of the Pacific, he wrote and edited The Cluster College (1970), the first systematic analysis and assessment of interdisciplinary experimental colleges. During the 1970s he helped to define the new terms of faculty development to include growth as a teacher and as a member of the academic community with his Toward Faculty Renewal (1975). Through directing the Project on Institutional Renewal Through the Improvement of Teaching, writing, speaking, and consulting, he helped to establish centers for faculty development or teaching excellence at dozens of institutions. During the 1980s he worked on curriculum issues and assisted scores of institutions to strengthen their core curricula. He published General Education Today (1983), New Life for the College Curriculum (1991), and Strong Foundations: Twelve Principles of Effective General Education Programs (1994). Beginning in 1993, he has directed the Preparing Future Faculty program, which has awarded grants to research universities and disciplinary societies to develop model programs that prepare graduate students for research, teaching, and service roles in a diversity of colleges and universities. Among his 21 books, he co-edited the Handbook of the Undergraduate Curriculum: A Comprehensive Guide to Purposes, Structures, Practices, and Change(1997), which brought national attention to the mainstreaming of interdisciplinary general education and its connections to other innovations