James Shulman Email & Phone Number

I’ve worked with faculty and staff throughout higher education, including playing leadership roles in organizations (in philanthropy, in research, and in innovation) that work across institutional boundaries. Thirty years ago, my PhD dissertation focused on how heroes made decisions in the complex world of Renaissance epic poetry. Ever since then, my work has been framed around the interaction between the life-stories of individuals and the policies and actions of the institutions with which they are associated. I serve as the VP and COO at the ACLS – a 100 year old organization devoted to “the advancement of humanistic studies in all fields of learning in the humanities and the social sciences and the maintenance and strengthening of relations among the national societies devoted to such studies.” Before ACLS, I served as a senior fellow at the Mellon Foundation, leading research on the effects of studying the liberal arts. I also began writing a book that was published by Princeton (fall 2023), The Synthetic University How Higher Education Can Benefit from Shared Solutions and Save Itself. It's about a particular strategy of organizational change that can help to address the challenges of rising college costs.The book project grows out of 15 years of building Artstor. My colleagues and I turned an idea about building one shared digital image library into an organization that uses technology to provide a collaborative platform for research and teaching across thousands of colleges, universities, and schools. I worked with passionate dedicated people within our organization and around the world – teachers, scholars, librarians, curators, technologists, artists, and venture capitalists.Before that I had the great fortune to learn from and work with then Mellon president, Bill Bowen, on books about policy issues in higher education. I led the building of a large scale retrospective longitudinal study of the life stories of thousands of students who had attended 34 selective colleges and universities in 1951, 1976, and 1989 – and then worked on books that used these data.

Listed skills include Nonprofit Organizations, Higher Education, Software As A Service, Impact Investing, and 1 others.