Corporate Leadership Today
Gaudiani serves on the Board of Directors of MBIA, Inc., the world's largest insurer of municipal bonds, where she currently chairs the Corporate Governance Committee of the Board. MBIA has been regularly noted for its excellent governance practices during her service on the Board. Claire is also active in the National Association of Corporate Directors and recently contributed the lead article, entitled “Board Communication: Houston, We Have a Problem” to the June, 2007 issue of Director’s Monthly.
She has completed Board service with The Bank of Southern Connecticut, Citizens Bank of Connnecticut, and with Southern New England Telephone Co, which was sold to SBC Communications.
Not for Profit Leadership Today
Claire currently serves on the boards of the Henry Luce Foundation and the National Council for Economic Education.
Claire has served on more than 30 not-for-profit boards in her career, including the American Council on Education, the American Association for Higher Education, the National Collegiate Athletic Association President’s Council, Public Radio International, and the Hazen Foundation. Claire also recently chaired the National Advisory Board for the Spirituality Project, a multi-year effort to examine the attitudes of American university students toward issues of meaning and purpose. The project, funded by the Templeton Foundation, is based at the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, and led by Sandy Astin, nationally known researcher who has specialized in the study of academic life for the past three decades. For more information, www.spirituality.ucla.edu.
Claire’s Current Speaking and Consulting
Claire is an experienced consultant who has worked with hundreds of for-profit, educational, and not-for-profit organizations on management issues, strategic planning, fundraising, and social responsibility issues. Recent clients have included the Ford Foundation, the Templeton Foundation, the Komen for the Cure Breast Cancer Initiative, and PNC Bank. For more information on the work of Claire and her team at Gaudiani Associates, click here.
Claire is a passionate and engaging motivational speaker. You can find examples of her work under the Video Showcase on the home page of the site. You will find some comments about Claire's speaking and consulting under the "what people are saying" section of this website. Claire often combines a keynote address with a workshop that shows participants how to apply her ideas to their work as fundraisers, wealth managers, or executives in private and public enterprises.
To view a brief video clip of Claire speaking about The Greater Good, click here.
Teaching
Claire is a natural teacher who has spent her life as an educator. She holds teaching awards from Indiana University, Purdue University, and New York University. She has always seen the classroom as a place where ideas must engage the real world. Today she teaches graduate courses on the History of American Philanthropy, Philanthropy and Globalization, and American Women’s Philanthropy while directing the graduate program at New York University’s Heyman Center for Philanthropy and Fundraising.
While president of Connecticut College, she taught strategic planning for new college presidents at the Harvard Graduate School. As a professor of foreign languages, Claire pioneered new strategies for the teaching of composition and advanced negotiations skills. Her monographs on this work are still in print:Strategies for Development of Foreign Language and Literature Departments, published by the Modern Language Association and Teaching Writing in the Foreign Language Curriculum by the Center for Applied Linguistics.
Among her proudest achievements are a series of service learning courses, combining the study of literature with community service at the undergraduate level. Her students’ diaries compare their lived experience working with poor children with the characters they encounter in readings such as The Bluest Eye and The Invisible Man (see Wisdom as Capital).
College President
Claire’s early career as a teacher/scholar of French literature, languages, and international studies took a definitive turn in 1988 when she was named president of her alma mater, Connecticut College. Her 13 year presidency was marked by institutional growth and innovation: a quintupling of the College endowment, 60 million dollars worth of new buildings, an increase in minority enrollments to 13%, all culminating in a national ranking in the top 25 liberal arts colleges driven by an innovative curriculum and increased selectivity. College captured this remarkable decade in a publication entitled A Decade of Achievement.
Her strategic leadership was recognized by the publication of a Connecticut College case study by the Harvard School of Education, her appointment as a 50th Anniversary Fulbright Fellow to Morocco, her receipt of ten honorary doctoral degrees, invitations for providing Congressional testimony on numerous occasions, and her election in 1999 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Community Developer and Engaged Citizen
During her last four years at Connecticut College, concluding in 2001, Claire also served as volunteer head of the New London Development Corporation. This citizen action group led the fight to revitalize the tax base of this small, poor, multi-racial coastal New England city. An abandoned Navy research base and a waterfront brownfield were the major economic assets. Under Claire’s leadership, NLDC attracted over 50 million dollars in state aid and a 300 million dollar private investment from Pfizer, Inc. to build their worldwide research headquarters in downtown New London. (Read more about New London in The Economist and American City & County.)
Demonstrating Claire’s commitment to social justice, NLDC also raised funds to support after school