William Craig Rice

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William Craig Rice born in 1955 in Washington, DC. He took his bachelor’s degree in literature at the University of Virginia and doctorate at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he won the Hopwood Writing Award and the Brubacher Prize in the History of Education. His publications include: Public Discourse & Academic Inquiry, a study in the sociology of knowledge; Characteristics of Exemplary Schools; an special edited volume of Harvard Review commemorating Seamus Heaney’s Nobel Prize; and more than fifty articles, reviews, essays, stories, and poems in such periodicals as The New Criterion, Policy Review, Sewanee, The Washington Post, and The Common Review: The Magazine of the Great Books Foundation. He has also worked as a mechanic for Alfa Romeo, warden at the Adirondack Mountain Reserve, and manager of an antiques shop.

After his studies at the University of Virginia, he taught at the Webb School in Bell Buckle, Tennessee, at Temple University, and at the University of Pennsylvania, then attended the Horace H. Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan. From 1992 to 2001, he taught expository writing on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, where he also edited non-fiction for the Harvard Review. While at Harvard he became involved in education reform as a consultant to the Massachusetts Board of Education, helping reshape the Commonwealth’s curriculum frameworks and assessment in English Language Arts. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies and the American Enterprise Institute, an Ella Baker Fellow at Antioch New England Graduate School, a consultant to the John Templeton Foundation, and from 2001-2004 a staff member at the American Academy for Liberal Education, where he created new K-12 programs. He has been a consultant to the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence, which offers an alternative route into the K-12 classroom for liberal arts college graduates and career-switching professionals, and to Achieve, which has launched the American Diploma Project to raise academic expectations in American high schools.

In 2004 he was appointed President of Shimer College, one of four accredited Great Books colleges in the United States, where he also serves as Professor of English, Education, and Humanities.