Condoleezza Rice — 2018 Hubert H. Humphrey Award Recipient

The American Political Science Association (APSA) will present the Hubert H. Humphrey Award to Dr. Condoleezza Rice at the 2018 APSA Annual Meeting & Exhibition, the world’s largest gathering of political scientists and source for emerging scholarship in the discipline. The $1,000 award recognizes notable public service by a political scientist.

The Award Committee is pleased to announce that that Condoleezza Rice is the recipient of the 2018 Hubert H. Humphrey Award. Dr. Rice’s career exemplifies the contributions that political scientists can make to public as well as academic life.

Born in then-segregated Birmingham, Alabama in 1954, Rice received a B.A. in political science from the University of Denver, an M.A. in political science from Notre Dame University, and a PhD in political science from the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies with a dissertation on military policy and politics in communist Czechoslovakia.

Dr. Rice began her academic career in 1981 as an assistant professor at Stanford University. Between 1989 and 1991, she served as director and then senior director of Soviet and East European Affairs on the National Security Council under National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft before returning to Stanford. Just two years later, she was appointed as the first female and African-American provost in the university’s history, and the youngest as well.

In December 2000, Rice left Stanford to serve as National Security Advisor to newly elected president George W. Bush, a position she occupied from January 2001 until being confirmed as Secretary of State in January 2005. She left office in 2009 and returned to Stanford as a political science professor and senior fellow on public policy at the Hoover Institution.

Despite spending many years in government and academic administration, Rice somehow found time to write or edit eight books, most recently Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom (2017) and, with Amy Zegart, Political Risk: How Businesses and Government Can Anticipate Global Insecurity (2018).