Staff Bios
Executive Director Frederic J. Fransen, PhD
Frederic Fransen has worked in the area of higher education philanthropy for more than ten years. From 1996 until 2006, Fred was variously a program officer, fellow, and senior fellow at Liberty Fund, Inc., a private operating foundation. With Liberty Fund, he organized more than 120 high-level colloquia topics related to the free society, becoming acquainted with more than 1,000 world-class scholars in the areas of comparative American history, classical liberal political thought, economics, literature, philosophy, and many other fields. From 2001 to 2006, he also served as director of grants for the Pierre F. and Enid Goodrich Foundation, where he analyzed, evaluated, and managed a grant program involving more than two dozen higher education organizations, along with numerous additional projects. From 1988 to 1991, he worked in Brussels, Belgium as a researcher studying European Community and NATO security policy.
In 2006, Fred was hired by the Philanthropy Roundtable to initiate a new breakthrough group in higher education philanthropy. In that capacity he organized several important gatherings of donors to discuss and organize their higher education philanthropy. He also became involved in a project of several key donors to develop a new non-profit organization to assist philanthropists interested in developing higher-education-giving programs marked by greater accountability and adherence to their philanthropic visions and concerns. These discussions led to the launch of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education.
Fred has a Ph.D. in Social Thought from the University of Chicago and has written on topics ranging from the origins of the European Community and the interplay between literature and politics to bioethics, markets, and the future of health care policy in China.
Full size photo of Frederic J. Fransen suitable for print media available here.
