DAVID MAXWELL
Biographical Summary
David Maxwell, Ph.D., has been president of Drake University since May of 1999. He was director of the National Foreign Language Center in Washington DC from 1993 to 1999, after serving as president of Whitman College from 1989 to 1993. Dr. Maxwell was at Tufts University from 1971 to 1989 as a faculty member in Russian language and literature, and served as Dean of Undergraduate Studies from 1981-89.
Born in New York City, Dr. Maxwell earned his bachelor’s degree in Russian area studies from Grinnell College in 1966. He received his master’s and doctorate degrees in Slavic languages and literatures from Brown University, in 1968 and 1974, respectively.
At Brown, Dr. Maxwell was a Brown University Fellow and subsequently a National Defense Education Act Fellow. He was a Fulbright Fellow, and at Tufts received the Lillian Leibner Award for distinguished teaching and advising. At Tufts he also twice received the Senior Class Citation for Distinguished Service. In 1991 the Brown University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences gave him the Distinguished Alumnus Citation.
Currently, President Maxwell serves on the Community Board of the Wells Fargo Bank, Iowa the Steering Committee of the Capital Crossroads initiative and is a member of the Greater Des Moines Committee. He is a past member of the Greater Des Moines Partnership, past President of the Des Moines Higher Education Collaborative, past chair of the Iowa Association of Independent Colleges & Universities, and of the Missouri Valley Conference. On the national level, he is a member of the Executive Committee of the Business/Higher Education Forum, and past chair of The New American Colleges and Universities, a national consortium of 22 selective, independent institutions dedicated to the purposeful integration of liberal education, professional studies and civic engagement. Dr. Maxwell sits on the Board of Directors of both the American Council on Education and the Association of American Colleges & Universities, and is a member of the Higher Education Working Group on Global Issues of the Council on Foreign Relations. In addition, he serves on the editorial board of Peer Review, as well as the Commission on Effective Leadership of the American Council on Education.
Dr. Maxwell is married to Madeleine Mali Maxwell, formerly a creative director. They are the parents of Justin,who is the Director of User Experience at Smile.com, in Sun Valley, and Stephen, a Physicist at the National Institute for Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, MD.
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