After guiding the College Board through more than a decade of transition, President Donald M. Stewart has announced that he will resign from the post next year.
Mr. Stewart plans to remain in the position until September 1999, when he will become a visiting scholar at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where he now teaches part time.
At Harvard, the former president of Spelman College in Atlanta will teach courses on higher education and public policy, while conducting research and writing on related issues.
“The College Board will celebrate its centennial in 2000. I think it is a marvelous time ... to turn it over to new leadership for the new millennium,” Mr. Stewart, 60, said in an interview last week. “I still have some good years left to develop new skills, become a good teacher, and do some writing.”
During his tenure at the New York City-based College Board, which administers the SAT, the board revamped its widely used SAT college-entrance exam, adjusted, or “recentered,” the scoring of the test, expanded the Advanced Placement program to more than half the nation’s high schools, and pushed initiatives to better prepare minority students for college.
Closer to Schools
“His 12 years were ones of great challenge and change,” Joyce Smith, the president of the Alexandria, Va.-based National Association for College Admission Counseling, the group representing high school counselors and college-admission officers, said last week. “Don has overseen a lot of transition, and it’s not always been easy.”
Others stressed the ties Mr. Stewart forged between higher and precollegiate education.
“I would single out his efforts in bringing the higher education community closer to the K-12 sector and building lines of communication between them,” said Stanley O. Ikenberry, the president of the American Council on Education, a Washington group representing higher education associations and institutions.
“He’s been able to chart a relatively smooth course ... and see many of the contentious issues as they relate to testing in the broader public-policy context,” Mr. Ikenberry added.
