Honorary Degree Recipients

The Honorable Craig R. Stapleton is a Senior Advisor at Stone Point Capital in Greenwich, Connecticut. He is a director of Tenax Aerospace, and a co-owner of the St. Louis Cardinals. He was President of Marsh and McLennan Real Estate Advisors of New York from 1982 until 2001.

Ambassador Stapleton was born in Kansas City, Missouri. His grandfather, Benjamin F. Stapleton served five terms as Mayor of Denver. He received his secondary school education at Phillips Exeter Academy. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Business School

During the administration of George H. W. Bush, Stapleton served on the Board of the Peace Corps. Under President George W. Bush he served as Ambassador to the Czech Republic from 2001-2003, where he received the Jan Masaryk Medal. In June 2005, he was appointed Ambassador to France, serving until January 2009. Stapleton was decorated as Commandeur of the Legion d’Honneur.

Stapleton serves on the boards of the Vaclav Havel Foundation, the United Way Tocqueville of France, the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, the World War I Commission and the Trust for the National Mall. He is a Trustee of the Fishback Foundation. He has served on the Visiting Committee for Harvard College Athletics and the Committee on University Resources and Athletics.

Celeste Schenck, President Emerita of The American University of Paris where she served from 2008 to 2022, was formerly the University’s Provost and Dean, Vice-President for Academic Innovation, as well as Professor of Comparative Literature. She received her BA summa cum laude from Princeton University and her PhD from Brown University and has published widely on international education, as well as pedagogical, curricular and leadership issues.  Author and co-editor of four books of literary criticism, she has produced collections of scholarly work on women’s autobiography, critical theory, and on the politics of development practices. For fifteen years, she edited a series in feminist criticism for Cornell University Press, Reading Women Writing. 

As Dean and Provost of AUP, Dr. Schenck presided over vast curricular transformation, such as the first major review of general education, the founding of ARC (AUP’s Academic Resource Center) and the TLC (Center for Teaching and Learning), as well as the founding of the University’s first master’s programs. As President, she worked entrepreneurially to re-found the University, aligning all university processes, programs, spaces and strategies with the needs and aspirations of the global explorers who are AUP’s target students;  building the University’s first professional leadership team; developing a “residential life” program with a business partner and then launching the University’s own housing program; leading three successive strategic planning processes; developing and funding innovative, mission-driven research centers—in environmental science, critical democracy studies, genocide studies and human rights, cultural translation, and civic media;  presiding over the development of a new global liberal arts curriculum that included pre-professional offerings in business and communications; spurring a five-year campus redevelopment plan that included the purchase of a flagship building on the Seine, the renovation of the 69, Quai d’Orsay Student Life and Learning Commons and the Monttessuy Center for the Arts; and launching and bringing to completion AUP’s first capital campaign for 26M euros, AUP Ascending, that funded all of these initiatives.

A leader in global higher education, Dr. Schenck co-founded AMICAL in 2004, a consortium of American universities across Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa, holding in common the mission of sharing resources, technologies, curricular projects and faculty and student exchanges across 29 institutions, 21 countries, and 19 languages. She has also served as past president of AAICU, the Association of American International Colleges and Universities, a president’s organization spanning 30 American-style universities across the world. In 2018, she joined the G20, a group of visionary liberal arts college presidents in the United States.  She currently serves on the boards of the American University of Kurdistan and the Council for Independent Colleges (CIC) in Washington, DC.  Dr. Schenck regularly writes and speaks on issues of global higher education, student civic engagement, and leadership.  She consults to universities with global ambitions and focus, coaches individual academic leaders, and has co-founded and will facilitate  for CIC this year a workshop for mid- to late-term presidents contemplating personal renewal and their next strategic moves.