2021 Association of American Colleges and Universities Annual Meeting

The 2021 AAC&U Annual Meeting will be an entirely virtual event. While we had hoped to be able to hold the meeting in Seattle as initially planned, it has become clear that the ongoing global health crisis will not be sufficiently resolved by January to ensure the health and safety of meeting participants, our staff, and the public.

In addition to the full program, the virtual meeting experience will be designed to provide opportunities for the engagement that the AAC&U community has come to expect from our annual meetings. We look forward to seeing you online in January!

In this moment of unprecedented transformation and uncertainty, and in the broader context of an urgent need to educate students for democracy, can higher education harness the resilience, creativity, and innovation that have been unleashed by the COVID-19 crisis and emerge from it strengthened? Will the inevitable restructuring and reorganization intentionally prioritize quality, equity, and inclusion?

In response to the initial outbreak of COVID-19, colleges and universities took extraordinary measures to ensure the safety and well-being of their students, their faculty and staff, and their communities. The crisis gave fresh urgency to conversations about equity and student success and about best practices in teaching, learning, and assessment. It reset assumptions about what faculty and students can achieve and about the pace of change. And, perhaps most consequential, it sparked a reimagining of what high-quality learning can look like—augmented by technology, situated within global issues, attentive to students’ well-being, flexible. Yet the pandemic also revealed persistent racial, social, and economic inequities that can no longer be ignored or easily dismissed, and the sudden pivot online raised searching questions about both the cost and the value of college learning.

The 2021 annual meeting will bring together campus leaders at all levels and from institutions of all types to explore the most pressing questions now facing higher education, to share effective educational practices and explore new financial models, and to work out together what undergraduate education will look like in a post-pandemic future.