Condoleezza Rice is currently the Denning Professor in Global Business and the Economy at the Graduate School of Business; the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution; and a professor of political science at Stanford University. She is also a founding partner of RiceHadleyGates.
From January 2005 to 2009, Rice served as the 66th secretary of state of the United States, the second woman and first African American woman to hold the post. Rice also served as President George W. Bush’s assistant for national security affairs (national security adviser) from January 2001 to 2005, the first woman to hold the position.
Rice served as Stanford University’s provost from 1993 to 1999, during which time she was the university’s chief budget and academic officer. As provost, she was responsible for a $1.5 billion annual budget and an academic program involving 1,400 faculty members and 14,000 students. In 1997, she also served on the Federal Advisory Committee on Gender—Integrated Training in the Military.
From 1989 through March 1991, Rice served on President George H.W. Bush’s National Security Council staff, serving as director; as senior director of Soviet and East European affairs; and as special assistant to the president for national security affairs. In 1986, while an international affairs fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, Rice also served as special assistant to the director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
As a professor of political science, 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.
Rice’s most recent publication is No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington (2011). She has authored and coauthored numerous books, including the best-selling Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family (2010); 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).
In 1991, Rice cofounded the Center for a New Generation (CNG), an innovative, after-school academic enrichment program for students in East Palo Alto and East Menlo Park, California. In 1996, CNG merged with the Boys and Girls Club of the Peninsula (an affiliate club of the Boys and Girls Club of America), with which she remains actively involved.
Rice currently serves on the board of KiOR, a renewable fuels company, C3, an energy software company, and Makena Capital, a private endowment firm. In addition, she is a member of the boards of the George W. Bush Institute, the Commonwealth Club, the Aspen Institute, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. Rice has also served on various other boards, including the Chevron Corporation; the Charles Schwab Corporation; the Transamerica Corporation; the Hewlett-Packard Company; the University of Notre Dame; and the San Francisco Symphony Board of Governors.
Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Rice earned her bachelor’s degree in political science, cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Denver; her master’s from the University of Notre Dame; and her PhD from the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver.
Rice is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been awarded ten honorary doctorates. She currently resides in Stanford, California.
